Priest-Cosmologist Wins $1.6 Million <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/science/13prize.html?bl&ex=1205467200&en=823faf9a1e1c976c&ei=5087%0A">Templeton Prize.

He is a "philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?”

Michael Heller, 72, winner of this year’s prize. He says science and religion “are prerequisites of the decent existence.”
The John Templeton Foundation, which awards grants to encourage scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and philosophy, commended Professor Heller, who is from Poland, for his extensive writings that have “evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind’s most profound concepts.”

Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God.

In doing so, he has argued against a “God of the gaps” strategy for relating science and religion, a view that uses God to explain what science cannot.

Professor Heller said he believed, for example, that the religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction or opposition between God and chance.”

In a telephone interview, Professor Heller explained his affinity for the two fields: “I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”