Thursday, March 18, 2004
South African Cosmologist Wins $1.4 Million Templeton Religion Prize
George F.R. Ellis, a South African cosmologist and mathematician who is equally at home in the realm of social criticism and political activism, is the winner of the 2004 Templeton Prize, arguably the most prestigious award for advancing understanding of religion and spirituality.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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