Oh dear, oh dear… The Templeton Prize… And the winner this year is…. (drum-roll)… Father Heller! What? What is this Templeton Prize? Why is it awarded? Who awards it?

Well, in a nutshell, the Templeton Prize is a big amount of money (around $1.5 million) that is awarded by the Templeton Foundation and is intended to

[…] encourage the concept that resources and manpower are needed to accelerate progress in spiritual discoveries, which can help humans to learn more than a hundredfold more about divinity. The Prize is intended to help people see the infinity of the Universal Spirit still creating the galaxies and all living things and the variety of ways in which the Creator is revealing himself to different people.

Okay. This explains a lot. Wait a minute. No, actually it doesn’t explain anything. “…see the infinity of the Universal Spirit…“?!? “…still creating the galaxies…”?!? Sorry but we have a very good understanding and explanation for the formation of galaxies, star systems, and planets, and guess what? It does not involve a supernatural God. None at all. It is purely a natural phenomenon.

Also, resources and manpower allocated to spiritual discoveries only means less resources and less manpower allocated to what really matters: science. Then again, come to think of it, the people that would be allocated to such a hunt for the divine should better stay as far away from science as possible!

Anyway, let’s see what the criteria are for awarding the prize:

The judges consider a nominee’s contribution to progress made either during the year prior to his selection or during his or her entire career. The qualities sought in awarding the Prize are: freshness, creativity, innovation and effectiveness. Such contributions may involve new concepts of divinity, new organizations, new and effective ways of communicating God’s wisdom and infinite love, creation of new schools of thought, creation of new structures of understanding the relationship of the Creator to his ongoing creation of the universe, to the physical sciences, and the life sciences, and the human sciences, the releasing of new and vital impulses into old religious structures and forms.

So this is basically an award to someone resembling a scientist, or someone working towards “proving” the existence of God, divinity, creation etc. Trying to add scientific credibility to unscientific claims? As always.

And who is Father Heller? Father Heller was “[an] associate of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future pope” and is “a philosophy professor at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland”. He has an educational background in physics and cosmology but which he later diluted with theology and philosophy studies.

Father Heller, however, does acknowledge that Intelligent Design proponents (ID-iots) should not create false dichotomies in claiming that either God made the Universe or everything occurred by “mere chance” -enough with the chance thing already! For the millionth time! He also asserts that ID-iots should be better educated -especially in theology. Me, with my humble mind, I fail to see how one can get specialized in theology… But that is just me…

So what is Father Heller’s opinion regarding the improbable creation of life? Quoting Heller from the Templeton Prize announcement:

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… (and) 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…: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

But isn’t Mathematics just a human construct? A language for helping us formally describe processes, systems, events, actions, relations etc? What does it mean to ask about the “cause of mathematical laws”? And where does God get in the picture? Further, the “ultimate question” as Heller states is probably outside the realms of science and into the realms of philosophy. Speculations and presumptions about the existence of a deity don’t help at all and definitely don’t explain anything.

Of course the Templeton Foundation is praising Heller using various problematic statements:

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.

and

It is evident that for him the mathematical nature of the world and its comprehensibility by humans constitute the circumstantial evidence of the existence of God

Well, his credibility pretty much vanishes when he starts introducing supernatural forces into science. Further, this is the argument from authority: just because Heller has studied physics and cosmology doesn’t mean that whatever he says is valid or reasonable! One needs to look at the hard facts, evidence, plausibility, and usability of one’s claims. And this is an area where Heller fails… Quoting from the Catholic News Service:

But “God is also the God of chance events,” he said. “From what our point of view is, chance — from God’s point of view, is … his structuring of the universe.”

As an example, Father Heller said, “birth is a chance event, but people ascribe that to God. People have much better theology than adherents of intelligent design. The chance event is just a part of God’s plan.”

Okay. So in essence, no matter what we discover, no matter how many scientific theories contradict the God hypothesis and the biblical truth, God has always been behind everything. Do we finally prove that God never existed? Yeap, God arranged for this too. Is everything in the bible a superstitious lie? God wanted this to happen. Evolution? God sparkled that highly improbable event of creating life -the creation myth was only a deliberate misdirection from God in order to test our faith and our capability to reason.

God is behind everything. No matter what. Get used to it. That is the opinion of the Templeton Prize Winner. But how could we expect something different?