Previous winners of the Templeton Prize have included a cross section of individuals from a number of religious traditions, starting with Mother Teresa as the first recipient in 1973. This year s winner, Freeman Dyson, was nominated by Dwight Neuenschwander, a professor of physics at Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma. Freeman Dyson is also one of a handful of leading scientists who are aggressively critical of their colleagues who argue that a scientific view of the world is inconsistent with the idea that the universe has a purpose. Dyson argues eloquently that the universe is purposeful and that humans should feel at home in it. Religion has at least an equal claim to authority in defining human destiny.
Religion lies closer to the heart of human nature and has a wider currency than science.
Dyson was born in England in 1923. His mother was a lawyer, his father a musician. A mathematical prodigy, his education was interrupted during WWII when he went to work as an analyst for the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. His statistical analysis of the great human price paid to wage war made a powerful impression on him, and he acquired a life long concern about the evils of war, and a perennial guilt that he had worked so hard to streamline the destruction of so much human life. While at Bomber Command, he argued to have the gun turrets and their crews eliminated from the bombers, in part because so many Bombers went down and the gunners represented more lives that were being routinely lost.