Cosmologist Ellis Receives Templeton Religion Prize

“Physics can’t explain the existence of as simple a thing as a pair of spectacles,” says George Ellis, a cosmologist and the 2004 winner of the Templeton Prize. Founded three decades ago by global investor John Templeton, the prize “honors and encourages … breakthroughs to expand human perceptions of divinity and to help in the acceleration of divine creativity.” By design, the prize purse exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes; this year it is about $1.4 million.

“I am interested in what science can do within its proper domain,” says Ellis. “What are the limits of science?” In the case of the spectacles, he says, “it’s fundamentally wrong to say they are just quarks and atoms and molecules, for they embody design. Physics is causally incomplete because it doesn’t encompass human thoughts and intention.” Excluded from science’s applicability, he continues, are aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. “Take ethics. I cannot measure how evil Saddam Hussein was compared to Hitler—there is no experiment for good and evil. There are no units.”

Ellis got involved in the interplay of religion, philosophy, and science about 15 years ago. By then, he had long been a social activist—fighting for, among other things, the rights of homeless people in his native South Africa. More recently, he helped found the International Society for Science and Religion, an organization that, he says, “aims to provide rigorous intellectual standards to the dialogue about science and religion. The whole battle I would like to fight is against fundamentalism—whether it comes from the religious or scientific side.”

For his day job, Ellis is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town. Among scientists, he is probably best known for The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge U. Press, 1973), which he wrote with Stephen Hawking. These days, Ellis is grappling with pre–Big Bang history and whether there are one or many universes. He and a colleague “are producing a model in which there was no singular origin to spacetime. The universe had existed forever.” On philosophical grounds, he adds, “I don’t like the multiverse idea. I think it’s extravagant.”

Half the prize money, Ellis says, will finance his own research and, when he dies, will go to the University of Cape Town. He plans to spread the other half among many causes in South Africa, from a campaign to wipe out destitution, to a home for autistic children, to a physics summer school.