Progress in Religion

Paul Davies quit the Anglican Church as a teenager, convinced that "science offers a surer path to God than religion." The 48-year-old Australian physicist's studies of the origins of the universe led him to conclude: "The world is not only ordered by order in an intelligible way." Last week, Davies won the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for breaching the barrier between religion and science. Yet he is not conventionally religious. "I hesitate to use the word God," he says, "but … I have come to the conclusion that there is some purpose to it."