Sam Wormley wrote:

John Barrow has won this year's Templeton Prize
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/3/11/1

John Barrow, the Cambridge University cosmologist, has won this year's
Templeton Prize for progress in science and religion. The prize, worth
£795,000, is given by the Wall Street financier Sir John Templeton for
"progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities".
Barrow, 53, is credited by the foundation for creating "new
perspectives on questions of ultimate concern to science and religion"
through his writings about the nature of human understanding and the
relationship between life and the universe.

Barrow first came to attention in 1986 when he and Frank Tipler wrote
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. The book looks at the impact on
science, history, philosophy, and religion of the anthropic principle,
which states that the observable universe has to be as it is otherwise
we would not be able to observe it. The foundation said that the book
has become "an essential work for those who explore the deep questions
at the interface of science and religion".

It also praised Barrow for "having used insights from mathematics,
physics, and astronomy to set out wide-ranging views that challenge
scientists and theologians to cross the boundaries of their disciplines
if they are to fully realize what they may or may not understand about
how time, space, and matter began, the behaviour of the universe (or,
perhaps, "multiverses"), and where it is all headed, if anywhere."

A hugely prolific author, Barrow has so far written over 400 scientific
papers and some 17 popular-science books that have been translated into
27 languages. His other books cover topics as wide-ranging as the
nature of mathematics (Pi in the Sky, 1992), the links between the
universe and human aesthetic appreciation (The Artful Universe, 1995)
and how the universe is characterized by what cannot be known about it
(Impossibility, 1998). Barrow also wrote an award-winning play
Infinites that was performed in Milan in 2002.

"Many of the deepest and most engaging questions about the nature of
the universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for
meaning", Barrow said in remarks prepared for a news conference in New
York yesterday. "The concept of a lawful universe with order that can
be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs
about the nature of God."

He added that astronomy had "breathed new life" into religious
questions. "Our scientific picture of the universe has revealed time
and again how blinkered and conservative our outlook has often been,
how self-serving our interim picture of the universe, how mundane our
expectations, and how parochial our attempts to find or deny the links
between scientific and religious approaches to the nature of the
universe," he said.

Born in London in 1952, Barrow studied mathematics at the University of
Durham and then did a DPhil in cosmology at Oxford University under the
late Denis Sciama. Following spells at Berkeley and back at Oxford, he
moved to the University of Sussex in 1989, serving as director of its
Astronomy Centre from 1995. Four years later he moved to the Department
of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University,
where he has also been director of the Millennium Mathematics Projects,
which seeks to get young people interested in maths.

Other physists to have won the Templeton Prize include Charles Townes
(2005), George Ellis (2004), John Polkinghorne (2002), Freeman Dyson
(2000), Ian Barbour (1999) and Paul Davies (1995).

So Sam, did you post this for the sake of irony or entertainment?
It's double-plus ungood when people start claiming that something like
the anthropic principle has religious meaning.