Dr. Arthur Peacocke, physical biochemist, Anglican priest, and the 2001 Templeton Prize Laureate died on Saturday, October 21, 2006, at age 81.
Peacocke began his adult life, in his words, as a "mild" agnostic, but slowly became an adherent of Christianity. Seeking an alternative to automatic acceptance of scriptural authority of the church, however, he began a thorough study of theology, with the encouragement of a professor, Geoffrey Lampe. In 1960, he received a Diploma in Theology and in 1971, a Bachelor of Divinity from Birmingham University.
It was at this time that his scientific and theological pursuits tangibly merged with the publication of Science and the Christian Experiment, which he wrote while still a full-time scientist. In 1973, the book won the prestigious Lecomte du Noüy Prize, the first global recognition of Peacocke as a leader in the new discipline of science and religion. That same year, he became Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, allowing him to pursue more fully his interdisciplinary vocation. In 1982 he received a Doctor of Divinity from Oxford and in 1985 became the founder and director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religious Beliefs in Relation to the Sciences, including Medicine, at Oxford.
Among his major publications in this area are Creation and the World of Science (1979), which established further his international reputation, Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion (1984), Theology for a Scientific Age (1990, 2nd edition 1993, including his 1993 Gifford Lectures), God and the New Biology (1994), From DNA to DEAN: Reflections and Explorations of a Priest-Scientist (1996), God and Science: A Quest for Christianity Credibility (1996), and Paths from Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring (2001).
Peacocke had an international reputation for his succinct, no-nonsense method of challenging dominant religious orthodoxies in writing and speech. In an interview with England’s Church Times, for example, he spoke of a large proportion of his countrymen who have good reason to be skeptical of traditional religious teachings and are wistful agnostics. "They are moral, idealistic people who just cannot believe some of the baggage we hear in church," he said. “The images have gone dead on them or are affirming things they don’t think are believable.”
Because of Dr. Peacocke’s extraordinary impact, he was selected as the winner of the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. At the Templeton Prize public ceremony at Guildhall, London, on May 9, 2001, Peacocke advised the scientific community to give religion its due. "The public image of the relation between science and religion has tended to be dominated by scientists who are not only gifted communicators of their respective sciences but who also, deeming science alone to be the source of knowledge and wisdom, seek to reduce human experience to purely scientific terms. This renders them antipathetic to the spiritual and religious experience of humanity and the name of the sport becomes science versus religion."
