On September 29, Dr. Charles Townes was honored at the GTU’s 2005 Blessing of the Crush benefit gala.

On a spring morning in 1951, Dr. Charles H. Townes sat on a park bench in Washington, D.C, wrestling with research questions about microwaves. Suddenly he was struck by an inspiration—one that led directly to his invention of the maser, and later, in collaboration with another scientist, the laser.

Dr. Townes has often likened this instant to a moment of revelation—a word heard more often in the context of religion than a “hard” science like physics. But to him, the dichotomy between science and religion is overemphasized. As he wrote in his autobiographical essay published by the GTU-affiliated Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, “Science is basically an attempt to understand this universe, and basically theology has the same goal.”

The 1964 Nobel Prize winner in Physics as well as a former advisor to the Reagan administration, UC Berkeley professor, and longtime supporter and past trustee of the Graduate Theological Union, Dr. Townes embodies a unique dialogue often overlooked in interfaith parlance. In 1964, with the GTU in the nascent stages of pioneering interreligious education, Dr. Townes delivered an address on science and religion to the men’s Bible study group at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. Two years later, IBM published a revised version of Dr. Townes’ talk in its magazine Think—one of the first times a scientific journal mentioned the relationship between science and religion.

The lecture, entitled “The Convergence of Science and Religion,” spoke to the absolutist 19th-century scientific view and its stranglehold on modern-day views on science and religion. “To me,” Townes wrote, “science and religion are both universal, and basically very similar.” The role of science, he pointed out, is to discover the order of the universe while the goal of religion is to understand the purpose of the universe. “Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are also not very far apart,” he explained.

Dr. Townes’ statements initially caused a stir among his peers. His discussion of the role of faith in science (such as Einstein’s faith in an orderly, explainable universe) and the role of revelation in the scientific process (as evinced by his own park bench experience) challenged the firm divide between the two disciplines, ultimately earning him a title as leading statesman on their convergence.

Since his first published essay in Think, Dr. Townes has written numerous papers on the topic in both scientific and theological journals. He serves on the boards of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI). This year, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.

As a valued member of the GTU community, Dr. Townes’s approach to his work mirrors the institution’s educational goals. Whether it be religious or scientific study, he says, “one needs to know how to disagree with people, but also to do it with humility. It is important to be right, but to achieve that we must try to weigh the truth with humility. Those who disagree with us are worth listening to; they are a key ingredient in self-examination and recognition of our own errors.”

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