NEW YORK -- The Rev. John Polkinghorne, a British physicist who left a Cambridge University professorship to enter the clergy and ponder the relation of science and religion, won a nearly $1 million prize Thursday for his work.
Polkinghorne, 71, was named winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. The prize is a revamped version of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion that was given annually from 1972 to 2001.
The award -- 700,000 British pounds, or about $1 million -- is one of the world's most lucrative in any field. Polkinghorne will receive the prize from the Duke of Edinburgh in a private ceremony April 29 at London's Buckingham Palace.
Past recipients have spanned a broad range of religious activity, including noted humanitarians (Mother Teresa), activists (prison evangelist Charles Colson), authors (Alexander Solzhenitsyn), and lesser-known scholars and leaders of spiritual or interfaith movements.
But the sponsoring John Templeton Foundation narrowed the focus this year to reflect the emphasis on science and religion in its other programs. Science was the specialty of the past three years' winners and of six earlier ones.
Polkinghorne said at a news conference that science and religion both "believe that there is a truth to be sought and to be found, a truth whose attainment comes through the pursuit of well-motivated belief."
Science studies "the processes of the world, while religion is concerned with the deeper issue of whether there is a divine meaning and purpose behind what is going on," he said.
Both pursuits are valid, Polkinghorne said, adding he never found a "head-on collision" between science and religion.
Polkinghorne, an expert in particle and mathematical physics, surprised Cambridge colleagues by resigning in 1979 at age 49 to begin studies for the Church of England ministry.
During four years as a parish priest, he wrote his first book about science and faith, "The Way the World Is." He then returned to Cambridge as the dean and chaplain of Trinity Hall and, later, as president of Queen's College. In 1997, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
He plans to use the prize money to fund postdoctoral work at Cambridge on the interaction between scientific and spiritual knowledge.
The best seller among Polkinghorne's many books, "The Quantum World" (1984), treated science for the non-specialist. But he regards his most important work as "The Faith of a Physicist" (1994), which defends the rationality of belief in each article of Christianity's Nicene Creed.
Two new books will be published this year: "The God of Hope and the End of the World" and "Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction."
Polkinghorne, a lifelong Christian believer, holds to a more orthodox personal theology than most of the previous Templeton winners specializing in science.
The John Templeton Foundation, is based in Radnor, Pa. It was founded by mutual funds entrepreneur Sir John M. Templeton and is now led by his son, John Jr., a former pediatric surgeon.