http://www.templetonprize.org/bios.html
NEW YORK, MARCH 15, 2006 — John D. Barrow, a noted cosmologist whose writings about the relationship between life and the universe, and the nature of human understanding, have created new perspectives on questions of ultimate concern to science and religion, has won the 2006 Templeton Prize. The prize, valued at 795,000 pounds sterling, approximately $1.4 million, was announced today at a news conference at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York.
Barrow, 53, who serves as Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, has used insights from mathematics, physics, and astronomy to set out wide-ranging views that challenge scientists and theologians to cross the boundaries of their disciplines if they are to fully realize what they may or may not understand about how time, space, and matter began, the behavior of the universe (or, perhaps, “multiverses&rdquo😉, and where it is all headed, if anywhere.
His work — including 17 books translated into 27 languages and written in accessible, lively prose, hugely popular lectures, and more than 400 scientific papers — has illuminated understanding of the universe and cast the intrinsic limitations of scientific inquiry into sharp relief. It has also given theologians and philosophers inescapable questions to consider when examining the very essence of belief, the nature of the universe, and humanity’s place in it.
As Thomas Torrance, himself a Templeton laureate (1978), wrote in his nomination of Barrow, “The hallmark of his work is a deep engagement with those aspects of the structure of the universe and its laws that make life possible and which shape the views that we take of that universe when we examine it. The vast elaboration of that simple idea has lead to a huge expansion of the breadth and depth of the dialogue between science and religion.”
In particular, Barrow’s engagement with frontier science and mathematics, developing multidisciplinary perspectives on subjects such as the mysteries of nothingness and infinity, and the potentially intelligible realms of the laws of Nature and the limits of scientific explanation, has jarred religious and scientific perspectives in such a way as to open pathways of understanding which may allow both to comprehend each other more fully.
...... etc.