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Q&A: 2008 Templeton Prize winner

At £820,000, the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities is the biggest science prize around - and one of the most controversial. This year's winner is Michael Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest, who is being recognised for his work on whether the universe needs a cause. Amanda Gefter asked him how he manages to unite his religious beliefs with his research.

What does this prize mean to you?






In your statement today you said: "Things thought through by God should be identified with mathematical structures interpreted as structures of the world." Does that mean that you see mathematics as the language of God?

In a word, yes. One of my heroes is Leibniz, the great philosopher of the 17th century. In the margin of his work entitled Dialogus there is a short handwritten remark in Latin that says, "When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made." My philosophy is encapsulated in that.

The Templeton Foundation has said that you "initiated what can be justly termed the theology of science". What is the theology of science?



The standard theory of evolution ascribes a lot of results to chance, whereas adherents of intelligent design say that instead everything should be planned by God. What is a random event? It is something which is of low probability which nevertheless happens. But in order to know whether something is of low or high probability you have to use the calculus of probability, a non-random mathematical structure. So chance events are still part of God's mind. I don't see any conflict between chance events and God's planning of the universe.


I recently wrote a book on this called The Ultimate Explanations of the Universe. Cause and effect is one of the most important explanations in the sciences. For any physical process you can always discover a sequence of states such that a preceding state is a cause for a following state which is its effect, and there is always a physical law which describes how this process develops. If you ask about the cause of the universe you're really asking, what is the cause of physical laws? Then you're back to Leibniz. He asked, why is there something rather than nothing? My answer is that indeed the universe needs a cause but this cause is unlike any other cause investigated by science because it is the cause of existence itself.

What are you working on these days?

I am working on a fundamental problem in physics: unifying general relativity [which describes the large-scale effects of gravity], and quantum mechanics [which applies to sub-atomic scales]. With some colleagues from Warsaw I have created a model based on noncommutative geometry, which is an extremely interesting new branch of mathematics. In general relativity, spacetime is modeled as a smooth manifold [or sheet] - that's ordinary commutative geometry. But there are other algebras that are not commutative. In spacetimes that contain a singularity the manifold breaks down, so you can't use ordinary geometry. Our fundamental result is that at the smallest scale the geometry of space is noncommutative and nonlocal and it is probabilistic. When you describe the space probabilistically, singularities turn out to occupy a set of measure zero, which essentially means that singularities don't exist at that level. They only appear at the macroscopic level as a kind of construct.

Some scientists have argued taking money from the Templeton Foundation - which assumes the existence of a creator - can undermine the integrity of scientific research. How do you respond to that?


What will you do with the money?



Leave your thoughts about the prize in our blog.


Cosmologist and Catholic priest Michael Heller (Image: Templeton Foundation)

Cosmologist and Catholic priest Michael Heller (Image: Templeton Foundation)


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