"Life can only arise and persist in a Universe that is big and old, dark and cold, with its planets and stars and galaxies separated by vast distances. These are necessary features of a life-supporting Universe. Astronomy has transformed the simple-minded, life-averse, meaningless Universe of the sceptical philosophers.... It breathes new life into so many religious questions of ultimate concern and never-ending fascination. Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with still about the nature of the Universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful Universe with order that can be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs about the nature of God. The atomistic picture of matter arose long before there could have been any experimental evidence for or against it. Out of these beliefs came confidence that there was an unchanging order behind the appearances that was worth studying. Great questions about the origin and end of the Universe, the possible sources of all observed complexity, and the potential infinity of space grew out of our religious focus on the great questions of existence and the nature of God. And, like all great questions, they can turn out to have answers that take us down unexpected paths, further and further away from the familiar and the everyday: multiverses, extra dimensions, the bending of time and of space – all may reveal a Universe that contains more than is needed for life, more even than is needed for speculation. We see now how it is possible for a Universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws – perhaps just one law – that are symmetrical and intelligible, laws which govern the most remarkable things in our Universe – populations of elementary ‘particles’ that are everywhere perfectly identical."
—An excerpt from John Barrow’s statement at the Templeton Prize News Conference, March 15 2006