George F.R. Ellis, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, has won the 2004 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. Ellis was chosen for his work in trying to fuse cosmology, theology and social sciences into a unified, sensible whole. He will receive the £795,000 prize ($1.4 million) in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 5. Ellis intends to use a portion of the money to provide tutorial and monetary assistance for black youths in Cape Town.
"I enjoy synthesizing and trying to put everything together, but there's been a movement against such grand synthesis in academic circles," Ellis told PW. The 64-year-old Ellis specifically has tried to integrate ethics and social behavior with science's materialist viewpoint. He became prominent in the 1970s as an unrelenting critic of apartheid. South Africa's subsequent social transformation was among the influences that fueled Ellis to look for a way to unify the social and physical sciences and to find ethical standards, perhaps in the form of God, that underlay the entire universe. He explored such themes in the groundbreaking On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Fortress, 1996), which he wrote with Nancey Murphy, and The Far Future Universe (Templeton Foundation, 2002), which he edited.
