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Templeton Prize goes to Polish priest
by Pat Ashworth
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A POLISH cosmologist and Roman Catholic priest, the Revd Dr Michal Heller (above), has won the 2008 Templeton Prize for his work on the origin and concept of the universe, much of it carried out under intense Soviet repression. Dr Heller is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow. His family fled Nazi persecution, and were among one million Poles deported to Siberia under Stalin’s orders. He entered the seminary at 17, and was ordained in 1959. The Communist authorities interrogated him as a priest in his first parish, and he continued to suffer harassment after undertaking further studies at the Catholic University in Lublin in 1960, the only university in Poland at which a priest could study. The authorities would not allow physics to be studied there, and so Dr Heller had to take “Philosophy in Nature”. He became part of a circle including physicists and astronomers. He was later included among the scientists, theologians, and philosophers whom the new Archbishop of Cracow, later to be Pope John Paul II, gathered around him for discussion in what Dr Heller has described as “heady times”. |
| With the rise of the trade-union movement Solidarity in the 1980s, Dr Heller and a group calling itself the Cracow Group of Cosmology were freer to publish, and to travel outside Poland. He was able to conduct research at the Institute of Astrophysics at Oxford, and to invite scholars from the West to visit. His publications include Theoretical Foundations of Cosmology, a technical study of the universe as a structure, and The New Physics and a New Theology, which explores the interaction of science and theology. His latest book, A Comprehensible Universe, investigates rationality. Dr Heller has also written more than 30 books in Polish, many of which popularise science. “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence,” he says. “The paradox is that these two great values are often seen to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind not to see that science does nothing else but exploits God’s creation.” Adherents of the “so-called intelligent-design ideology” commit “a grave theological error”, he suggests. Such views postulate “the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising Mind of God, what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation.” The £820,000 Templeton Prize is the largest annual monetary award given to an individual. Dr Heller will receive it from the Duke of Edinburgh on 7 May. He plans to use it to help create the Copernicus Centre in Cracow for education in science and theology. |
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