Physicist-Cleric Wins $1 Million Templeton Prize

NEW YORK -- John C. Polkinghorne, a British mathematical physicist and Anglican priest who has spent the last two decades trying to bridge the fields of science and religion, has become the fourth successive scientist to win the prestigious Templeton Prize.

In an announcement today of the award, Polkinghorne, 71, was honored for integrating scientific approaches and religious thinking into "a modern and compelling, new exploration of the faith."

Polkinghorne, whose previous honors include being knighted in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth II, left a prestigious teaching position at the University of Cambridge in 1979 to become an Anglican priest, a move that startled his students and colleagues in the field of mathematical physics.

But Polkinghorne had long been gravitating toward religion and felt he had made his mark on the world of physics. "I had done my little bit for science," he said later, "and it was time to try to do something different."

In the years since, Polkinghorne has become a prominent leader in the growing interdisciplinary field of science and religion, and has won great acclaim for what Thomas Torrance, former moderator of the Church of Scotland and a professor of Christian dogmatics at the University of Edinburgh, called a "new stage in (the) conceptual integration" of the two realms.

In an interview prior to the announcement, which was made at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York, Polkinghorne called himself passionate about the unity of knowledge, and faulted the contemporary world for its tendency "to press for specialization, which means knowing more and more about less and less."

He acknowledged the difficulty the worlds of science and religion have in meeting each other, but suggested that interest in science and the need to affirm its importance was actually a point at which different religious faiths and traditions could meet.

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