“Physics can’t explain the existence of as simple a thing as a pair of spectacles,” says George Ellis, a cosmologist and the 2004 winner of the Templeton Prize. Founded three decades ago by global investor John Templeton, the prize “honors and encourages … breakthroughs to expand human perceptions of divinity and to help in the acceleration of divine creativity.” By design, the prize purse exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes; this year it is about $1.4 million.
“I am interested in what science can do within its proper domain,” says Ellis. “What are the limits of science?” In the case of the spectacles, he says, “it’s fundamentally wrong to say they are just quarks and atoms and molecules, for they embody design. Physics is causally incomplete because it doesn’t encompass human thoughts and intention.” Excluded from science’s applicability, he continues, are aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. “Take ethics. I cannot measure...
