Parenting & Family Quote by John Templeton

Templeton is doing a neat bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he flatters modern expertise while quietly demoting it. By opening with “Three of my children are medical doctors,” he borrows institutional credibility, then uses it to argue for the limits of institutions. The “hundred times” line is deliberate exaggeration - not to mock medicine, but to acknowledge its breathtaking wins in a way that disarms defensiveness. Yes, science has sprinted. And yet: “but.”

That pivot is the quote’s engine. Templeton isn’t anti-doctor; he’s anti-totalizing certainty. The body is measurable, improvable, teachable. The soul - a word he chooses precisely because it’s unfashionable in clinical settings - is framed as stubbornly resistant to progress narratives. He’s poking at a cultural assumption that knowledge always accumulates, that newer automatically means wiser. His grandfather, presumably with fewer degrees and more church, didn’t have antibiotics or imaging. But he may have had a vocabulary for meaning, mortality, guilt, awe, and purpose that doesn’t show up on a chart.

Context matters: Templeton made a fortune in finance and later became a prominent patron of religion-and-science dialogue (the Templeton Prize practically exists inside this sentence). He’s positioning spirituality as a domain where humility is rational, not quaint. Subtext: a society that can keep bodies alive longer still struggles to tell people what living is for. The line lands because it’s not nostalgic. It’s a challenge to progress worship - delivered through the most contemporary proof he can cite: his own successful, highly educated family.