c. 2000 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ Freeman Dyson, a world-renowned physicist and author who for more than 50 years has worked to make science a tool for social justice, on Wednesday (March 22) was awarded the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Dyson, 76, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., has long supported the idea that if science and religion work together, “the gross inequalities of the world could be abolished.”
The Templeton Prize, valued at $948,000 this year and funded in such a way that it will always be worth more than the Nobel Prizes, was named for its founder, John Templeton. The global financier created the award in 1973 to recognize living individuals for their contributions to advancing the world’s understanding of God and spirituality because he felt the Nobel Prizes overlooked spirituality as a human discipline.
Dyson is the fifth scientist to be awarded the prize. Physicist and theologian Ian Barbour was the winner in 1999. Other recipients include Mother Teresa (1973), the Rev. Billy Graham (1982) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1983).
Author of 11 books, including “Disturbing the Universe,” (Harper and Row), a memoir written for nonscientists, Dyson has challenged the science and technology establishment to let ethics set the agenda in a field driven by profit and fashionable research.
He has taken controversial positions against “big science” _ splashy projects like the $8 billion Supercollider atom smasher _ whose costs, he says, are out of proportion to their scientific value.
Dyson has criticized scientists for focusing technology on making “toys for the rich,” such as cellular phones and miniature computers rather than helping spread knowledge and improve people’s lives.”(This) long range moral and social fallout of today’s scientific miracles” fails to produce benefits for the poor,” he wrote in “Imagined Worlds,” a collection of essays published in 1997. “The pure scientists have become more detached from the mundane needs of humanity, and the applied scientists have become more attached to immediate profitability.”
In addition he said that expensive new medical technologies “will exacerbate ” the inequalities that exist within and between societies.
Dyson cites biotechnology and genetic engineering for posing the greatest ethical problems of the new century.
“Look at fertility clinics where genetic engineering is done, parents determined to get babies are willing to pay for it. The technology is becoming so sophisticated you can determine what kind of baby you have. You can buy good genes. The real danger is only the rich will get the good genes.”
Dyson has also sought to foster better relations between scientists and theologians, appealing to both sides to accept that there are, and will likely always be, mysteries in the universe.
“Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views but both look out at the same universe.
“Both views are one-sided and neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect,” he said in a statement Wednesday at a news conference at the United Nations.
Born in Crowthorne, England in 1923, Dyson displayed an early fascination with numbers and the human place in the universe.
“My skills were always perpendicular to my interests,” he said. “I have always been interested in human affairs. Growing up in the 30s you couldn’t help but be aware there was another war on the horizon and you were concerned
about whether you were going to survive.”
During World War II he worked as a civilian statistician for the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, trying to reduce human casualties. The experience left a deep impression on him. In “Disturbing the Universe,” Dyson wrote that his military work left him with the realization that “technology has made evil anonymous.”
Modern technological advances, he said, have even further removed humans from the consequences of their actions.
“The Kosovo war is a shining example,” he said. “Not a single American got killed and the American planes rained down destruction. It was a hygienic war from the point of view of the Americans.”
Dyson came to the United States in 1947 to study physics at Cornell University. There he developed a unified theory of quantum electrodynamics, which attempts to explain the interaction of electromagnetic fields and matter.
Over the next decade he worked with both Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. But the focus of his research was non military applications of nuclear energy for which he would later win the Enrico Fermi Award for lifetime achievement in field of nuclear energy.
He joined the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton in 1953 where he taught until being named professor emeritus in 1994.
Dyson said he has not yet decided what he will do with the Templeton Prize money. Past recipients have used the award money to fund research projects, build medical facilities, help impoverished communities and create scholarships.
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