Priest-Cosmologist Wins $1.6 Million Templeton Prize
According to the NY Times, this years winner of the Templeton Prize is a catholic priest/cosmologist. Michael Keller, who is 72, works for the Pontifical Academy of Theology, in Krakow, Poland. He is devoted to studying questions such as “does the universe need to have a cause?”
I was almost surprised when I read this, thinking it unlikely that Catholic priest should have the objectiveness to study cosmology, especially in relation to cosmology. However, Heller is strongly against the God of the Gaps theory and is quite for teaching evolution in the classrooms, describing the feud as a ‘misunderstanding’.
As it turns out, this is exactly the kind of guy I want to see playing a role in religious institutions. Now, if only members of the US protestant religions would come to the same realization…
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March 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
The Roman Catholic church is not the uniformly uptight organization a lot of people (particularly disaffected Catholics) assume it is. It’s big enough and there is a lot of intellectual, and even political diversity represented.
And yet I’ve felt, given my personal religious views, that the church has many smart people doing a lot of hand waving. But perhaps that’s a lot better than those of the religious who just point and scream at things.