Edition: U.S. / Global

ESSAY; In Prizes for Science and Religion, the Person of Faith Is Richer

Published: May 18, 1999

Despite recent peace negotiations and displays of good fellowship by partisans on both sides, it doesn't look as if the centuries-old row between religion and science is any closer to resolution than it was when Galileo nearly went to the stake for defending the Copernican view of the solar system.

The fact is that people cling to personal beliefs regardless of debating points won or lost, and no amount of persuasion makes much difference. But one thing that does make a difference is cash.

For most people the ultimate measure of success is money, and by that standard religion is gaining on science. The Nobel Prizes in the sciences (which last year came to $978,000 each) have been shouldered into second place by the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which is now the world's richest award.

The annual Templeton Prize, this year worth $1.24 million, was bestowed last Tuesday by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace on Dr. Ian G. Barbour, a physicist-turned-theologian from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. A ceremony honoring the new Templeton laureate was also scheduled this week at a church in Moscow's Kremlin. The John Templeton Foundation declared that Dr. Barbour had ''shown extraordinary originality in advancing humankind's understanding of God and/or spirituality.''

The foundation was created in 1972 by Sir John M. Templeton, the Tennessee-born founder of several investment funds, who was knighted in 1987. Abundant money from the Templeton Foundation in Radnor, Pa., seems to turn up these days wherever science and religion come into contact.

Some typical Templeton initiatives: a $10 million theological, social and scientific study of forgiveness; a ''scientific study of humility theology''; a string of new periodicals, including the magazine Science and Spirit (devoted to articles deemed helpful in reconciling religion and science); and the financing of many experimental tests of religious tenets.

One of the Templeton-sponsored experiments is a two-year study to demonstrate the effect of prayer on 600 patients about to undergo heart surgery. Two groups were told they might be prayed for. One of these groups actually was the object of prayers while the other was not, but neither group was told which was which. A third group, also intended for prayers, was informed that it was the beneficiary of prayer. Results of this experiment are not in yet.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, conducted a similar experiment in 1872 and found no effect. Undaunted, religious believers have continued power-of-prayer experiments, generally failing to convince their scientist critics of any effect.

The Templeton Foundation is not alone in supporting prayer experiments. In his book, ''Healing Words'' (Harper San Francisco, 1993), Dr. Larry Dossey described four experiments in which yeast fungus was exposed to cyanide poison. Dr. Dossey, a medical doctor, wrote that when people prayed for the survival of a sample of cyanide-tainted yeast, its survival rate was better than that of a control sample bereft of prayer.

The Templeton Foundation pays handsomely to organize and publicize discussions between intellectual leaders in science and religion. Such a meeting, held under the prestigious aegis of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, took place in Washington last month. It featured a debate between Dr. Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the scientific paradigm, and Sir John Polkinghorne, a former physicist who is now an Anglican priest.

The Weinberg-Polkinghorne debate, while entertaining, did not resolve any differences.

However, theological debate in the right hands can yield good fun, and once again, it has served as grist for the mill of Dr. David Jones, alias ''Daedalus,'' whose weekly column in the journal Nature has delighted readers for many years.

The formal aim of the Templeton Foundation is to ''create and fund projects to apply scientific methodology to the study of religious subjects,'' and technically, the tongue-in-cheek experiments proposed by Dr. Jones, a professor at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, should meet the Templeton criterion.

In two columns in Nature in April, Daedalus proposed experiments exploring the thermodynamics of the spirit world and the molecular basis of religious experience. He suggested that the spirit world, like empty outer space, probably has a temperature of only three degrees above the absolute zero: the temperature of the microwave echo of the Big Bang. This would explain why a ghost invading the warm material world from the frigid spirit world has a chilling effect.

Sensitive instruments, Daedalus wrote, should be able to discern the leakage of heat from the material world into the spirit world, and detect a different rate of heat leakage from a holy object than from an object with no religious significance.

Daedalus proposes another experiment carrying out brain scans on monks and nuns at prayer, identifying the brain regions associated with a sense of contact with God, and other regions suffering ''the dark night of the soul,'' where prayer ''feels like talking into a dead telephone.'' A nuclear magnetic resonance scan of the divine-connection region of the brain might reveal the composition of the molecules responsible.

Subsequent laboratory synthesis of these molecules could lead to production of ''Theological Prozac,'' Daedalus suggested, and ''With luck, the resulting illumination will bestow spiritual comfort on the users, unaccompanied by the stern orthodox convictions attached to it by the more doctrinal aspects of religion.''

In earlier columns Daedalus proposed attaching sensitive piezoelectric transducers, accelerometers and other instruments to dying people to detect the departure of their souls and to measure the soul's mass, velocity and quantum-mechanical spin.

Dr. Jones has not disclosed whether he intends to submit any of his schemes to the Templeton Foundation for a possible grant or prize.