Peacocke, the Rev. Canon Arthur Robert

▪ 2002

      The winner of the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion was the Rev. Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist, theologian, and Anglican priest who had spent most of his career encouraging cooperation between science and religion. Peacocke was the sixth scientist, and the third in a row, to receive the lucrative ($1 million in 2001) award created to serve as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for religion. Peacocke, who took part in some of the earliest work on the DNA molecule, compared the relationship between science and religion to that of the two helical strands that make up DNA. The search for intelligibility and the search for meaning, he said, are necessary, complementary approaches to answering the same questions about how things came to be. Most scientists dismissed attempts to integrate faith and science because of a lack of proof of a supreme being, but Peacocke countered that theologians had successfully used supporting evidence for their claims in the same fashion that scientists did for theirs.

      Peacocke was born Nov. 29, 1924 in Watford, Eng. He received a doctorate in physical biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1948 and during the 1950s, while working at the virus laboratory at the University of California, was part of a team that identified properties of the recently discovered DNA molecule. A self-described mild agnostic during his college years, Peacocke found himself searching for answers to questions he considered too broad for science alone to answer. He began theology studies and received a bachelor of divinity degree from the University of Birmingham, Eng., in 1971, when he was also ordained a priest in the Church of England. He took a post teaching biochemistry and theology at the University of Cambridge before returning to Oxford, where he served two terms (1985–88 and 1995–99) as director of the Ian Ramsey Centre, which promoted teaching and research in science and religion. He also founded the Science and Religion Forum (1972) and the Society of Ordained Scientists (1985). In 1993 Peacocke was made an MBE. He was the author of a number of books that examined the ties between science and religion, including Theology for a Scientific Age (1990) and Paths from Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring (2001).

      An early adherent to the anthropic principle—the notion that the universe contains conditions ideal for the development of living beings—Peacocke concluded that a likely explanation for the existence of life was the existence of a supreme being. Advances in astronomy were shedding new light on what scientists knew about the creation of the universe; advances in genetics were forcing scientists to grapple with new ethical considerations. Peacocke maintained that it was time for science and theology to work together to draw meaning and guidance from what was being learned.

Anthony G. Craine

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