"Science gives us Knowledge, and religion gives us Meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence"
wrote Professor Michael Heller in his statement when he won the 2008 Templeton Prize valued at more than $1.6 million. Heller is a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest who
developed sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe, often under intense governmental repression,...
Heller, 72, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, toiled for years beneath the stifling strictures of the Soviet era. He has become a compelling figure in the realms of physics and cosmology, theology, and philosophy with his cogent and provocative concepts on issues that all of these disciplines pursue, albeit from often vastly different perspectives. With an academic and religious background that enables him to comfortably and credibly move within each of these domains, Heller’s extensive writings have evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind's most profound concepts.
Here is more Heller from his statement
Einstein was not far from Leibniz's idea when he was saying that the only goal of science is to decode the Mind of God present in the structure of the universe.
---
Within the all-comprising Mind of God what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation.
---
Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see that there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe. The question on ultimate causality is translated into another of Leibniz’s questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
---
Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality – the motto of all John Templeton Foundation activities. The true humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all – of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.