Science & Tech Quote by John Templeton

Templeton dresses humility in the respectable suit of progress. By comparing future judgment of us to our condescension toward scientists of the 18th century, he borrows the moral authority of hindsight: of course they were wrong back then; of course we are wrong now. The move is clever because it feels modest while smuggling in a mandate to rethink today’s orthodoxies, especially the ones that present themselves as settled, “scientific,” or permanently rational.

The intent isn’t to dunk on modern knowledge; it’s to normalize the idea that today’s confidence will age poorly. Coming from a businessman-philanthropist who bankrolled big questions about religion and science, the line reads like a preemptive permission slip: if you’re exploring the unfashionable edges of belief, consciousness, or cosmology, you’re not being anti-modern; you’re being early. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to intellectual complacency, aimed less at lab coats than at institutions that treat consensus as a destination instead of a snapshot.

There’s also a soft rhetorical trap here. “Our descendants” is an unarguable audience, an imagined tribunal that can’t talk back. Invoking their pity turns speculation into a moral pressure: disagree with me and you’re defending the quaint errors that tomorrow will mock. It’s a line built for funders and founders alike - people who bet on the next paradigm and want history on their side before history arrives.