Twin towers and ivory towers.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note from a Worldwatcher

Who won the Templeton Prize this year, and why? I didn't have a clue. Winning a "Templeton" doesn't have quite the same ring as winning a "Nobel" or "Pulitzer." So, I listened with curiosity in March as National Public Radio announced that a prize of 795,000 pounds ($1.4 million) had just been given to George F.R. Ellis, a physicist who specializes in "relativity theory and its applications to cosmology"--the study of the origin and evolution of the universe.

Right away, I felt a vague irritation. It's fascinating to hear scientists talk about things that happened billions of years ago and perhaps billions of light-years away, but right now we have a billion people living in poverty and a million or so other species headed for extinction. What could George Ellis have done that deserved such rich reward in a field like that, at a time like this?

The Templeton Prize, said the announcement, is awarded each spring by the Canyon Institute for Advanced Studies, of Phoenix, Arizona, "for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities." That seemed suspiciously vague, and I wondered what a hard scientist could possibly have to say about spiritual realities. A few seconds later I was listening to Ellis himself, who was explaining to the NPR reporter what he'd been up to.

Historically, he noted, science and religion have had little to say to each other. But many serious thinkers now believe that with the planet in growing crisis, it's essential that we achieve clearer communications between the disparate patterns of thinking and belief on which conflicting human movements are based. Ellis had been studying the pitfalls of reductionism, a pattern of thinking that is fairly basic to how most people in the Western world tend to analyze--and try to cope with--this crisis.

Progressives have often criticized reductionist thinking as a kind of unexamined belief that even the most complex and mysterious of life's phenomena--mental illness, passion, addiction, hate--can ultimately be explained in terms of molecular or atomic phenomena. It's the kind of thinking that underpins the recent drift of mental health treatment, for example, from traditional "talk" therapy to increasing focus on splicing genes and prescribing psychopharmacological drugs. What interested Ellis was the inference that if such "reduction" is really possible in all things, then even the conscious choices we think we are making are really determined by biochemical activity at a microscopic level. In his view, this inference is dangerously mistaken. He does not believe that humans have no free will. We are, he suggests, much more than the sum of all our molecules. We have responses to "the big picture" that cannot be predicted just by knowing the positions of all the individual pixels that make up that picture.

As I listened, I realized that far from being irrelevant to the day-to-day problems we face, Ellis's view could explain a lot about why the world seems to have become so destabilized in so many ways all at once--whether in the incidence of...