Martin Rees wins £1m Templeton Prize
It seems clear that there is space for the spiritual in Martin Rees's scientific worldview, and he has been critical of some leading new atheists whose approach to religion he finds both counter-productive and, at times, fundamentalist.
Richard Dawkins is by the scientist's approach to the faith-science "debate" that he has described Rees and a "fervent believer in belief".
Other leading atheists have ecnouraged scientists to disassociate themselves from the Templeton Foundation, which they regard as a lobby group for religion within contemporary science.
The Templeton Foundation's of the merits of this year's prize-winner notes that Martin Rees's work offers "profound insights on the cosmos" and has "provoked vital questions that speak to humanity's highest hopes and worst fears" which "are reshaping crucial philosophical and theological considerations that strike at the core of life, fostering the spiritual progress that the Templeton Prize has long sought to recognize."
Extras
on the topic "Is this our final century?"
Listen to Martin Rees deliver the 2010 91Èȱ¬ Reith Lectures.
Comment number 1.
At 7th Apr 2011, newdwr54 wrote:Bertrand Russell said that "what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite". It is better to 'know' than to believe.
In his Gifford Lectures Carl Sagan used none other than Sir Isaac Newton as an example of exactly why 'faith' and science should forever remain separate. Newton had already shown how, by granting a few simple and specific laws of nature, he could deduce with high precision the motion of the planets in the solar system. Newton explained in detail how the planets all moved in the same direction and in the same 'zodiacal plane'.
He noted that the comets did not behave in this controlled way, but criss crossed the heavens in an apparently arbitrary, uncontrolled fashion. Sagan argues that it was Newton's devout religious beliefs that drove him, all too quickly, to conclude that the movement of the comets was the chaotic state of nature, while the planets were controlled around the sun 'by the Hand of God'.
Newton lived after the invention of the telescope and Sagan argues that therefore he should, as Laplace and Kant later did, have been able to tell from studying the rings of Saturn that there was a very simple natural explanation for how the planets had accreted out of the solar debris in the same elliptic plane and thus were travelling in the same direction. No one is suggesting that Newton wasn't clever enough to have realised this. He was just too keen to attribute a 'hand of God' to the works of nature.
For all his greatness, Newton's faith blinded him to a scientific discovery. I think this is a good example of why science and religion should remain separate.
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Comment number 2.
At 7th Apr 2011, Wilberfalse wrote:Not being one much in favour of prizes, at least for the fortunate in life, I can’t say I have strong feelings either way on this one.
On the other hand, several ideas spring to mind as to how best to channel the £1million to worthwhile causes. How about a treatise on the WAR delusion for example?
JCV
(Astronomer)
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