c. 2006 Religion News Service
John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist and astronomer whose work has helped scientists and theologians find common understanding about the nature of life and the universe, was named the winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize on March 15.
The prize — officially called the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities — was founded in 1972 by philanthropist and global financier Sir John Templeton and is perhaps the most prestigious award in the field of religion.
At $1.4 million, the award is the largest annual monetary prize given to an individual.
Barrow, 53, a professor at the University of Cambridge, has been acclaimed for reaching a wide audience not only through books and lectures but also through the theater. “The hallmark of his work is a deep engagement with those aspects of the structure of the universe and its laws that make life possible and which shape the views that we take of that universe when we examine it,” Thomas Torrance, the 1978 Templeton laureate, said in nominating Barrow for the prize. “The vast elaboration of that simple idea has led to a huge expansion of the breadth and depth of the dialogue between science and religion.”
In a prepared written statement, Barrow said in part: “Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with still about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful universe with order that can be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs about the nature of God.”
He is a member of the United reformed Church in Great Britain.
One of the cornerstones of Barrow’s thinking is that science has proven time and again that humanity always possesses “an interim picture of the universe” and that, as he said in his prepared remarks, “how parochial (are) our attempts to find or deny the links between scientific and religious approaches to the nature of the universe.”
Barrow said religion’s concern with questions of infinity and ethics have much to inform scientists. By the same token, he praised science’s insights and methods that allow one idea to lay the foundation for another.
Albert Einstein’s theories, he said in the interview, “superseded Sir Isaac Newton’s theories but did not eliminate them. The old theory is contained within the new theory.” He said this insight would help religion realize that “pictures of reality are always approximations.
