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March 10, 1999
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Carleton Professor Emeritus Wins Prestigious Templeton Prize

Ian Barbour Honored for Work in Launching Dialogue Between Science and Religion

Northfield, Minn. - Ian Barbour, the Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and Society at Carleton College, has won the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. A physicist and theologian, Barbour is credited with launching a new era in the interdisciplinary dialogue between science and religion and is one of the world's most forceful advocates for ethics in technology.

The award was announced at a news conference this morning at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York. Begun in 1972 by global investor Sir John Templeton, the prize exceeds the Nobel Prize as the world's largest annual award, with a value of $1.24 million dollars. It is given each year to a living person who has shown extraordinary originality in advancing humankind's understanding of God and/or spirituality. Past recipients include Mother Teresa, the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Colson and Sir Sigmund Sternberg.

"No contemporary has made a more original, deep and lasting contribution toward the needed integration of scientific and religious knowledge and values than Ian Barbour. With respect to the breadth of topics and fields brought into this integration, Barbour has no equal," wrote John B. Cobb, Jr., emeritus professor of the School of Theology at Claremont College and founder and co-director of the Center for Process Studies, in the citation nominating Barbour for the prize.

Barbour gained international attention with his groundbreaking book, "Issues in Science and Religion," which was published in 1965. It explored the relation of religion to the history, methods and theories of science and launched the ongoing study of areas linking science and religion. The book has become the standard text in the field and has influenced a generation of scientists, religious scholars, church leaders and laity. Barbour's subsequent writings and lectures have examined the social and environmental impacts of technology, and ethical issues in such areas as energy policy and genetic engineering.

Barbour came to Carleton in 1955, when he was appointed to teach in both the physics and religion departments. In the 1970s, he initiated Carleton's interdisciplinary program in science, technology and public policy, which was the precursor to the College's current environmental and technology studies program. He was named to the Winifred and Atherton Bean professorship in 1981 and retired in 1986. In 1992, Carleton awarded Barbour an honorary degree, an honor the College seldom bestows upon one of its own faculty.

His many books and articles have compared methods of inquiry in science and religion, and explored the theological implications of the Big Bang theory, quantum physics, evolutionary biology and genetics. He also has written and lectured widely on ethical issues in such fields as technology policy, energy, agriculture, computers and cloning.

Between 1989 and 1991, Barbour delivered a series of Scotland's prestigious Gifford Lectures, which focus on issues of natural theology and have featured such distinguished thinkers as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Carl Sagan and Albert Schweitzer. Barbour's Gifford Lectures were published in two volumes, "Religion in an Age of Science" (1990) and "Ethics in an Age of Technology" (1993). In 1996, the National Association for Science, Technology and Society honored Barbour with the establishment of the Barbour Lecture to be given each year at the association's annual meeting.

Barbour received his B.A. in physics at the age of 20 from Swarthmore College. He earned his master's degree in physics from Duke University and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, where he served as a teaching assistant to Enrico Fermi, the physicist who carried out the world's first atomic chain reaction. Barbour later earned a bachelor of divinity degree from Yale University.

Barbour plans to donate $1 million of the Templeton Prize to the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. It will establish an endowment to support continued dialogue between scientists and theologians. The actual awarding of the Templeton Prize will take place on May 11 at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in London, followed by a public ceremony on May 17 at the Kremlin in Moscow.

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