Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern, will be the recipient of this years $1.5 million Templeton Prize.
"The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both," Taylor, 75, said in accepting the award Wednesday in New York. "But it is equally true that the culture of the humanities and social sciences has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual."In his speech, Taylor took aim at Nobel laureate cosmologist Steven Weinberg, who once said: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
"On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this," Taylor said.
"We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence ... [that] must take full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion," he said. "But we don't even begin to see where we have to look as long as we accept the complacent myth that people like us--enlightened secularists, or believers--are not part of the problem.
"We will pay a high price if we allow this kind of muddled thinking to prevail."
You can read more in the Chicago Tribune.