Faith, wrote Mark Twain, is believing something you know ain’t true. The annual Templeton Prize aims to dispel that stereotype by exploring the compatibility of science and faith. It is awarded by the Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organisation established by a financier, for “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension”. The latest recipient of this munificent award, worth £1,000,000, is Lord Rees of Ludlow, the Astronomer Royal and a former President of the Royal Society.
Therein lies controversy. Lord Rees, an atheist, has received much criticism from fellow scientists for accepting the prize. But in truth the award is an appropriate and deserved recognition of work that illuminates the mysteries of the Universe.
The award is not a celebration of dogma or an affirmation of obscurantism. Lord Rees’s work is of the highest intellectual calibre on subjects that expand scholarly inquiry while also enhancing public understanding of science. Scientific discovery is not specific to a particular culture; it is universal. But scientists inevitably are drawn from particular communities and speak to them.
Lord Rees is a notable but far from unique example. He refers to himself as a tribal Christian. He values the customs of the Church of England and wishes to preserve its traditions, while holding no religious beliefs himself. That position corresponds to the views of many people who would never reject the findings of science on the ground that they are contradicted by holy writ.
Lord Rees’s work in cosmology is born of reason, evidence and informed speculation, not ideology. Whether, for example, this Universe is part of a “multiverse” that is subject to different physical constants may turn out to be an empirical question. And its implications stretch the mind of anyone who considers it, regardless of religious belief.
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It is appropriate to honour as well as appreciate a body of work that attempts to make sense of ultimate questions of the nature of the Universe, observed and unobserved. And it would be doctrinaire and against the scientific ethos to insist that this line of inquiry must, as a matter of course, be incompatible with religious explanations.
Moreover, the award to Lord Rees marks how far the relations between the spiritual and the scientific have advanced intellectually in the age of reason. One of the great naturalists of the 19th century, Philip Gosse, attempted the same course in a notorious book called Omphalos, which sought to reconcile the fossil record with a literal understanding of the Book of Genesis. The fossils, argued Gosse, were placed in the rocks by God to test the faith of believers.
There have since been many similar, if rarely so feeble, attempts to salvage prior beliefs from the advance of scientific knowledge. It should be a matter for relief that the search for a greater understanding of the nexus between reason and faith now alights on the work of Lord Rees. This is real science that pays no obeisance to supposedly revealed truths. And the Templeton Prize, which is explicitly critical of such pseudoscientific gibberish as intelligent design (a souped-up variant of creationism), properly recognises the difference.
Perhaps the search for spirit is chimera, and that matter is all there is. But the question remains nonetheless. Lord Rees’s work does no more than inform that question, but that is an achievement that few others can boast.