Arete Big Questions Accelerator

The John Templeton Foundation has transformed the research landscape for Big Questions about fundamental topics including human purpose and ultimate reality, generating research projects that otherwise would never have been pursued, and creating new trajectories of inquiry. We are requesting funding to build on these foundations, to test the hypothesis that multidisciplinary research on Big Questions might be accelerated, with goals for complex and ambitious research achieved more quickly, more effectively and more successfully. This would be generated by an unprecedented collaboration between The John Templeton Foundation and Arete at the University of Chicago to launch an experiment consisting first of optimizing a core team of research strategists with capacity to implement a sequence of intentional strategies and organizational tools that refine and accelerate the processes of research development, and second, establishing a two-tiered funding program for research acceleration comprised of a Seed Fund and a Project Fund. Research projects supported through the Big Questions Accelerator will coalesce into three distinct but interrelated pathways to discovery, all which align directly with the guiding principles of the John Templeton Foundation, but expressed most concretely in Sir John’s vision of Humility-in-Theology. The discovery pathways are: Complexity and Emergence; Information; and, Intellect, Cognition, and Consciousness. Each pathway is organized to address 4 concrete Big Questions articulated to elucidate aspects of Humility-in-Theology. The goals for this highly systematized design for accelerating Big Questions research – optimizing a core team; identifying processes for research acceleration; strategically investing in promising ideas and investigators – will likely generate a replicable process for research acceleration that will advance discovery on Big Questions, in addition to accelerating research findings.