“If you think you’re right, you need to try to stand up for your convictions,” he said last week. “I had to do this with the discovery of the maser and the laser. Two Nobel laureates came into my office and told me that I ought to stop; they said, ‘You know it’s not going to work.’ I said, ‘No, it has a possibility, so I’m going to continue.’ Three months later they came in again and congratulated me. You have to stand up for your beliefs in science just as you do in religion.”

Townes’ role in inventing the maser and laser is well known; he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Prokhorov and Basov for “fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.” But Townes’ career includes other important contributions to physics. He is credited, for example, with helping to demonstrate that there are molecules in interstellar space—regions where, it was formerly believed, a genuine vacuum existed. And as recently as 1999, at workshops convened by the SETI Institute, Townes convinced researchers to employ optical searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence; these are now operating at the Lick Observatory, Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere.

One would not expect this passion for exploration to continue well into the ninth decade of a person’s life. But physicists at Berkeley joke that Townes in his eighties spends more time in his lab than do some of his fifty-years-younger colleagues. The same excitement about science characterized Townes’ contributions to the closed-door meetings of the physics group within Science and the Spiritual Quest. www.ssq.net When new research programs were proposed, Townes would respond with an almost boyish enthusiasm, on one occasion telling a young scientist, “If you’re right, this would revolutionize our understanding of particle physics.” But he added, with the caution of a seasoned investigator, “You’d have to give us very, very good evidence to convince us that you’re right.”

Last month Charles Townes became the first Nobel Laureate to win the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. The Duke of Edinburgh will present the $1.5 million award at Buckingham Palace on May 4th. As the 35th Templeton Laureate, Townes joins a distinguished cadre of scientists: George F.R. Ellis, Holmes Rolston III, John C. Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke. Townes’ response to this new honor capsulizes the values he has lived by, “Advancing our understanding of spirituality is more important, ultimately, than physics.”

With characteristic humility, Townes describes what he calls his simple point of view: “Science is an effort to understand what the universe is made of and how it works; religion is an attempt to understand the meaning and purpose of the universe. Understanding how the universe works should give us a good deal of information about what its purpose and meaning is. Science sheds more and more light.”

Charles Townes, one quickly learns, is a man of faith in three distinct senses. He has faith in the scientific method and in the continuing advance of science. As he writes in his autobiography, Making Waves, “Faith is necessary for the scientist to even get started, and deep faith necessary for him to carry out his tougher tasks.”

Second, his life demonstrates a quiet yet profound religious faith. Bob Russell, Founder and Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, comments, “I am constantly moved by his deep and thoughtful faith in God and his courage in sharing that faith gently yet clearly both in private conversations and in the setting of international conferences.”

Less common than either of these, Townes has a deep faith that science and religion will gradually converge in the future. As he wrote recently, “Given the parallels, we should never treat these two great dimensions of the human spirit as fundamentally different or fundamentally opposed. As our understanding of each increases, my own faith is that they will increasingly grow together.”

Townes does not merely believe in the compatibility of science and religion. Again and again he has sought to convince scientists why it’s crucial that they work together. I remember watching as he addressed a standing-room-only audience at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He told them, “There are two fundamental reasons why I believe that religion and science must be parallel and must interact. One is that, if there is purpose and meaning in the universe, then the purpose must be related to its structure—and in fact must determine its structure. The second is that in both fields we use all our human abilities in a quest to understand the world we inhabit.”

Those of us working in the science-religion discussion today take for granted our right to raise these questions. When Townes first proclaimed this agenda it took more courage. Public outrage followed his statement in an MIT journal in 1966 that one could be both religiously and scientifically oriented. One prominent alumnus threatened to withdraw his support if any statements like that were published again.

Townes shares the vision of the “creative mutual interaction” of science and religion espoused by Bob Russell, which means that he expects continual change within religion as science progresses. I once asked him whether he thought experiments could ever falsify his Christian belief. Without hesitation Townes answered, “Yes. Some say that their beliefs are absolute and never to be changed. I would say, no, we understand imperfectly. And I think if you read the New Testament, certainly the disciples and the letters and so on, you get the view that they don’t assume that they know everything perfectly. They’re advising each other.”

One wonders how the faith of a scientist might be different than an ordinary person’s faith. Townes responds, “Digging deeply into science helps me recognize the limitations in our knowledge. We tackle tough problems and see that there are mysteries still—and yet we sometimes solve them. I feel both the openness and the hope for progress.” He adds, “There are absolutists and fundamentalists not only in religion; we have them also in science. We can’t make such absolute statements and decisions.”

Colleagues widely acknowledge Townes’ contributions to the science-religion dialogue. Representing the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Ramanath Cowsik says of Townes, “He is a man of extraordinary distinction in science and has been deeply concerned about the interplay amongst science, society and human values—all this scholarship and introspection have produced a beautiful synthesis.” Similarly, M. S. Swaminathan, one of India’s foremost scientists, who has called for scientists to manifest “humility, love of diversity in thought and belief, compassion, and tolerance.” suggests that Townes is an outstanding representative of this breed of scientists. “There is much we can learn from his life and his work.”

Townes learned his characteristic humility as a bench scientist. He notes, “I think scientists are increasingly humble, particularly physicists, because they’ve been through revolutions and they recognize in very hard, quantitative ways where they haven’t understood things and where they still don’t understand things. Some of the other sciences, which are not as exact yet, don’t have the challenge that physics has had of saying, ‘Well, gee, we were really quite wrong.’”

Townes made brief remarks after The Prize announcement on March 9, concluding, “I believe there is no long-range question more important than the purpose and meaning of our lives and our universe,” and he thanked Sir John Templeton for “encouraging open and useful discussion of spirituality and the meaning of life by scientists.”

Links of Interest
The Templeton Prize

Philip Clayton is Ingraham Professor at the Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the Claremont Graduate University. His current research interest lies in developing the theological implications of emergence theory, portions of which are published as Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness.

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