Accepting a £1m prize for spiritual works does not make the astronomer royal a fraud or a hypocrite
There are evolutionary theorists who describe scorpion flies as rapists, and Nobel laureate economists who insist that affairs of the human heart are best grasped through cost-benefit analysis. Clever people are, if anything, especially prone to intellectual tunnel vision – recasting every discussion in terms of the one discipline they have mastered, with no regard for how ideas that enlighten in one context often make no sense elsewhere.
The proselytising atheists rounding on the astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, for accepting a £1m award from an idiosyncratic foundation fall into a similar trap. The stated aim of the Templeton prize is to reward "insight, discovery or practical works" that affirm "life's spiritual dimension", terms which will leave nonbelievers scratching their heads but will seem self-explanatory from many a religious point of view. The biologist and celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins damns Templeton for blurring the line between science and faith in the hope of leeching the esteem of the former. He has made quite a career of treating religious doctrines as scientific hypotheses and then demonstrating that they are wanting in this regard.
Of course they are. Words can be used to joke or emote as well as inform, and neither scripture nor indeed poetry can be understood by mistaking it for something else. Metaphors ought not be metamorphosed into literal claims, while the test for moral edicts is reflective introspection and not the weight of the evidence that defines the scientific domain. Faith is a professional problem for scientists only where it demands that they close their minds to the facts. Neither Newton's religion nor Einstein's God of sorts (who refused to play dice) got in the way of their work. Conversely, the occasional book-promoting blathering of Stephen Hawking, about how with physics we can variously know the mind of God or prove he is fiction, is utterly wide of the mark.
The question with Templeton is not whether it funds some wacky endeavours, but whether it does anything to undermine the core requirement of good science, namely falsification through the experimental method. Its 2006 study into the healing power of prayer on heart disease was bizarre, but the conscientiously reported results – that prayer made no difference to survival, and by raising false hope may actually have increased the risk of complications – do not suggest intellectual corruption.
As a declared atheist who attends church for the sake of tradition, and a non-believer who nonetheless believes good can come of belief, Sir Martin's mind is one that can cope with nuance, as well as work with laser-like precision. He is perfectly entitled to enjoy his prize.