Ellis, a Quaker whose work on the origins of the universe have won him great scientific acclaim and whose anti-apartheid writings won him the ire and condemnation of South Africa's white-minority government during the 1970s and 1980s, becomes the 34th Templeton laureate.
With the honor of winning the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, the award's full title, comes an award of 795,000 pounds sterling, the equivalent of more than $1.4 million, making it among the largest annual monetary prizes given to individuals.
As a sign of his social commitment, Ellis said he plans to donate some of the prize money to projects supporting the education of black youths in Cape Town, South Africa, and to a national campaign to provide a base cash grant to all South Africans."Some fundamental problems are still not being addressed (in South Africa)," Ellis said in an interview prior to Wednesday's official announcement at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York.
Ellis teaches applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and is a specialist in general relativity theory. Though not by his own admission as well known as others in the field -- the famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking was an early colleague of Ellis' -- the South African scholar has recently won acclaim for theorizing about the actual start of the universe and whether, in fact, there may be more than one universe.
Ellis, 64, joins a long list of recent Templeton winners--Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist and Anglican priest (2001); John Polkinghorne, a mathematical physicist and also an Anglican priest (2002); and Holmes Rolston III, an environmental ethicist (2003)--who are trying to advance the links between science and religion.
At Wednesday's announcement, Ellis said he believes that such dialogue "fundamentally shapes the way we see the universe and how we understand our own existence." "The way in which science and religion by and large complement each other is becoming ever clearer," he said, "as are the natures of the various points of tension between them, and some possible resolutions of those tensions."
Ellis has one distinction he does not share with recent Templeton winners: In his home country, he is perhaps best known as a social critic not afraid to criticize either the white-minority government that gave up power a decade ago or the current president, Thabo Mbeki, who Ellis believes has not lived up to the standards set by his predecessor, Nelson Mandela.
Mandela and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ellis said, represent a tradition of nonviolence begun by Mahatma Gandhi and furthered by Martin Luther King Jr. that has had a transformative effect on the world -- turning "an enemy into a friend" and, as a result, exemplifying "the true nature of security," he said in the interview.
The political is bound to the religious and even has implications for science, Ellis said, noting that individuals as well as communities need the balance of scientific rationality with the hope of religious faith. "Faith and hope fit into a full human life," he said.
In his remarks Wednesday, Ellis said the "real issue" was how best to balance the rationality of science with the hope that undergirds faith and sometimes defies rationality. He cited South Africa's recent history as a key example of "confounding the calculus of rationality."
"There were very many times in the past when it was rational to give up all hope for the future -- to assume that the nation would decay into a racial holocaust that never happened," he said. "It did not occur because of the transformative actions of those marvelous leaders Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela."
Two of the books Ellis has co-authored reveal the unusual breadth of his thought and concerns: "The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time," a 1973 volume written with Hawking, is a seminal work in the field of cosmology, while "The Squatter Problem in the Western Cape," a 1977 work co-written with three other South Africans, was a study on homelessness and a plea for a policy change by the ruling white Nationalist government.
Ellis, educated at the University of Cape Town and Cambridge University, will formally receive his award May 5 from the Duke of Edinburgh at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in London.
The Templeton Prize was established by the U.S.-born investor Sir John Templeton to honor prominent religious figures. Early winners included such notables as Mother Teresa, the first Templeton Prize laureate in 1973, and American evangelist Billy Graham. However, the prize has broadened its scope in recent years to encompass spirituality and the growing field of religion and science.
