$1-Million Templeton Prize Goes to British Priest
The Rev. Canon Arthur Peacocke, a British physical biochemist and Anglican priest whose pioneering research into DNA and other scientific issues led him to call for a new theology for a technological age, has won the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
The $1-million prize, announced Thursday in New York, is among the most lucrative in the world. It was created in 1972 by Sir John Templeton, a global investor who has long been fascinated by the intersection of science and religion.
Its previous recipients include Mother Teresa, evangelist Billy Graham and Australian mathematical physicist Paul Davies. Prince Philip of England will present the award to Peacocke during a private ceremony May 9 at Buckingham Palace.
Peacocke, 76, said Thursday that winning the prize was “an exhilarating and a humbling experience.” He said he was aware that his dual calling may seem contradictory: He was first a scientist who described himself as a “mild agnostic” and then, in 1971, was ordained a priest in the Church of England.
“The search for intelligibility that characterizes science and the search for meaning that characterizes religion are two necessary intertwined strands of the human enterprise and are not opposed,” he said. “They are essential to each other, complementary yet distinct and strongly interacting--indeed just like the two helical strands of DNA itself.”
Peacocke is the only Oxford University theology faculty member to hold doctorates in science and divinity. He founded the United Kingdom Science and Religion Forum in 1972.
In 1952 when the DNA structure was announced, Peacocke was a Rockefeller Fellow in Natural Science working at the Virus Laboratory at UC Berkeley. He and his colleagues were able to show that the chains in DNA were not branched, as once thought, but maintain their characteristic double helix shape.
He was one of the first to develop the idea of the “anthropic principle” in the 1970s, which holds that certain features of the universe are exactly those required for the appearance of life.
Peacocke said he has long wondered how a series of events beginning with the Big Bang 10 to 15 billion years ago could lead to thinking and creative beings like a Mozart, a Shakespeare, a Buddha, a Jesus of Nazareth “and you and me.”
“Why is there anything at all? And why does it develop this extraordinary form,” he said in a telephone interview with The Times. Intelligent life, he said, doesn’t “prove” the existence of God. But inferences can be drawn, and that is what he said science, history and theology do.
“If you put all considerations and data together, the best explanation for the existence of the kind of world we have is some other being who has some characteristics that we normally in English call God,” he said.
Scientific discoveries in astronomy and molecular biology during the last 50 years, he said, have for the first time opened to humans “extraordinary vistas . . . of the whole sweep of cosmic development. We need a theology which will give meaning and significance to that,” he said.
Peacocke said he accompanied his grandchildren to the new Hayden Planetarium at Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York. “When you see the picture of the cosmos there and the evolutionary story of humanity and the time scale, what you have to realize is that creation is still going on,” he said. “If you ask where is God being creative, you look at the process. . . . Not only is God out there, but right in the midst of this stuff in the world. You don’t have to ask where is God putting a finger into the world to make things happen.
“He makes them happen by giving them the kind of existence they have with the capacities they have to have more--in case of individuals--more creative persons.
“I think we’re incomplete. We’re not fallen angels. I’m much more in favor of seeing salvation as being a completing. We’re not yet what we ought to be, not yet what God intended us to be. The whole process, if you like the Christian process, is one in which we are reshaped to make it possible to be present in the divine life. I like that [Eastern] Orthodox idea--not salvation but thesis, incorporating us into the life of God.”
Peacocke’s latest book, to be published next month, “Paths from Science Towards God: the End of All Our Exploring,” deals with the converging paths of science and religion in the search for knowledge and meaning.
Drawing a concept from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Little Gidding,” Peacocke said ceaseless exploration ultimately brings us to “where we started” and “knowing the place for the first time.”
