War & Peace Quote by John Templeton

Templeton’s line lands like a tidy spreadsheet of human progress: medicine compounds knowledge, religion compounds repetition. Coming from a businessman-philanthropist who made a career out of measuring returns, it’s an argument built to feel self-evident. One profession can point to a grandfather’s battlefield kit and say, “We don’t do that anymore.” The other, he implies, still sells roughly the same comfort in new packaging. The comparison flatters modernity’s favorite story about itself: that science iterates, while faith maintains.

The subtext is less about ministers than about authority. Templeton is auditing who deserves our trust. Doctors submit to verification, revised protocols, and humiliating data. Clergy, in his framing, are protected by tradition: their product is continuity, not correction. That makes religion look not merely old-fashioned but structurally insulated from feedback, the one thing markets and labs punish. It’s a critique designed to resonate with readers who equate moral seriousness with being up-to-date.

Context matters: Templeton spent a lifetime funding both financial innovation and scientific inquiry, yet also bankrolled religious and “big questions” initiatives. So the barb isn’t pure secular dunking; it’s a pressure test. He’s challenging religion to justify itself in a world where prestige increasingly belongs to disciplines that can demonstrate improvement. The quote works because it turns nostalgia (my grandfather) into an evidentiary standard, and forces the listener to ask: if your core message never changes, is that eternal truth - or simply intellectual inertia?