With colleagues in philosophy and religious studies, I constructed a cosmology course that won a prize from the Templeton Foundation. In general, as Mark Friesel suggests (Physics Today, February 2001, page 82), the prospect of a cash award will entice participation. The Templeton Foundation’s funding of interdisciplinary study in science and religion is no exception. However, I don’t believe Friesel needs to be too concerned with the integrity of the participants. Templeton awardees are probably no more likely to compromise their scholarly standards than are NSF grantees. In my case, for example, our cosmology course was constructed before we had even heard of Templeton’s program for courses in science and religion.
Interdisciplinary study of religion and science can be a legitimate intellectual exercise. Here are a couple of quotes that I have used to spark classroom discussion. Enjoy!
Many scientists are deeply religious in one way or another, but all of them have a certain rather peculiar faith—they have a faith in the underlying simplicity of nature; a belief that nature is, after all, comprehensible and that one should strive to understand it as much as we can. Now this faith in simplicity, that there are simple rules—a few elementary particles, a few quantum rules to explain the structure of the world—is completely irrational and completely unjustifiable. It is therefore a religion. 1
If a “religion” is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel has taught us that, not only is mathematics a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. 2
