The annual Templeton Prize (awarded last year to Charles Taylor) has been awarded this year to a Polish priest and physicist, Father Michael Heller. Here is an excerpt from a Statement he made in conjunction with receiving the prize:

When contemplating the universe, the question imposes itself: Does the universe need to have acause? It is clear that causal explanations are a vital part of the scientific method. Variousprocesses in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that thepreceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see thatthere is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. Butdynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about thecause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are backin the Great Blueprint of Gods thinking the universe. The question on ultimate causality istranslated into another of Leibnizs questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?(from his Principles of Nature and Grace). When asking this question, we are not asking about acause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science isalso a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex andsophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world's structure hasreached its focal point the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of theHuman Mind to read the Mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world aroundus seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are apart of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality themotto of all John Templeton Foundation activities. The true humility does not consist inpretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we arean essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all of the entanglement of the Human Mind with theMind of God.