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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/22/do2208.xml
"Last week, someone that I had never heard of won the £820,000
Templeton prize, awarded annually for "discovery in areas engaging
life's biggest questions". He is Professor Michael Heller, a Polish
physicist and priest, an unusual combination..... We can however
appreciate a thought which had struck Einstein, that the universe is
comprehensible. In other words it is susceptible to rational analysis
through mathematics. It is not a trivial question to ask why the
universe is amenable to mathematical mapping. Einstein found the
question an "eternal mystery... which we shall never understand". Heller
suggests that the universe is so comprehensible not just because our
minds are fitted to understanding things about it, but for a far
larger reason. The comprehensibility reflects, he argues as a
theologian, the Logos that has formed it. This Logos, the mind of God,
is rational. Among us humans rationality is, Heller argues, a value.
Our decision to pursue knowledge rationally, through science or
philosophy, is a moral decision. The Logos is the Word that John uses
in the sublime introduction to his Gospel: In the beginning was the
Word."

http://woodside.blogs.com/cosmologycuriosity/2006/03/john_barrow_win.html
"John D. Barrow wins the 2006 Templeton Prize"

http://www.aapps.org/archive/bulletin/vol15/15-5/15_5_p2p3%7F.pdf
John Barrow: "Einstein as Icon. How Einstein Became the
Personification of Physics. Einstein restored faith in the
unintelligibility of science. Everyone knew that Einstein had done
something important in 1905 (and again in 1915) but almost nobody
could tell you exactly what it was. When Einstein was interviewed for
a Dutch newspaper in 1921, he attributed his mass appeal to the
mystery of his work for the ordinary person: "Does it make a silly
impression on me, here and yonder, about my theories of which they
cannot understand a word? I think it is funny and also interesting to
observe. I am sure that it is the mystery of non-understanding that
appeals to them...it impresses them, it has the colour and the appeal of
the mysterious."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com