Interviewing the annual winner of the Templeton Prize-the prize for advances in science and religion awarded annually by the John Templeton Foundation-is always something of a yearly assignment highlight for an RNS reporter: the prize winners are invariably interesting and stimulating interview subjects.
They’re also often a little shell-shocked at winning what is touted as the largest yearly monetary award given to a single individual-in this case, $1.6 million, an amount that exceeds the prize money for the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the 2008 winner, Michael (Michal) Heller, a Polish Roman Catholic priest and cosmologist, seemed to be taking the prospect of winning such a large monetary prize in stride when I interviewed him this week.
He told me his only real needs are books, and said his only shopping while in New York (for the Wednesday June 12 announcement at the Church Center for the United Nations) would be for a digital book reader. (Heller said he will donate the Templeton Prize money to help create a planned Copernicus Center that, in concert with Jagiellonian University and the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, will promote the burgeoning study of science and theology as an academic discipline.)
Heller, a warm if shy man, sounded a bit exasperated at intellectuals who continue to separate scientific and religious worldviews. But he was equally frustrated at the advocates of intelligent design ideology, who he said “commit a grave theological error.”
In his prepared remarks for Wednesday’s announcement, Heller said that such advocates claim “that scientific theories, that ascribe the great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes, should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe.”
But he called such theories “theologically erroneous” as they revive an old argument: “postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design,” he said.
“There is no opposition here,” Heller said. “Within the all-comprising Mind of God what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation.”
During our interview, Heller demonstrated what he meant. He took out a pen, held it upright with his finger tip and let it drop on a table-we know scientifically, he said, the pen WILL fall, but we can’t predict exactly WHERE on the table the pen will land.
“Physics leaves room for random events,” he said. The Mind of God allows for “this collaboration of chance and laws.”
Advocates of intelligent design, he said, are making inroads in Poland and elsewhere in Europe and Russia in what Heller said is a larger movement of biblical literalism that, as a Roman Catholic priest, he finds worrying. “It polarizes people,” he said.