Thoughts on this year’s Templeton Prize

Earlier this month the John Templeton Foundation announced the recipient of its annual $1.6 million prize: astrophysicist and cosmologist Martin Rees. The news surprised me at first. Rees’s views on science and its role in society are profound, wide-ranging, and humane—qualities that I presume the Templeton Foundation upholds—but Rees, I knew, does not believe in God.

Why did the prize, whose avowed aim is to honor “a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension,” go to an atheist?

I can’t answer for the Templeton Foundation, but I suspect that the members of its prize committee found Rees’s quiet atheism palatable. Unlike Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Rees is not an anti-God polemicist.

Rees is, however, actively engaged in explaining science and its value to the general public. Since 1995, he has occupied the ceremonial but prominent position of Britain’s Astronomer Royal. From 2005 to 2010, he served as the president of the Royal Society.

Most physicists and astronomers of Rees’s eminence are either atheists or agnostics. In 1998, Edward Larson and Larry Witham published the results of a survey of the religious beliefs of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences. Only 7.5% of NAS physicists and astronomers believe in God.

As an atheist myself, I admire the forthright stance on religion of Steven Weinberg, whose quoted remarks include “I’m in favor of a dialog between science and religion—just not a constructive one.” But I also admire atheists who recognize, either implicitly or explicitly, that engaging the public about science entails accepting and respecting religious beliefs.