In Pablo Picasso’s painting "Guernica," a woman’s pained face is turned upward as she wails over a dead child in her lap. Various other faces appear scattered over the canvas, each one clearly in some kind of suffering. The work was an expressive reaction by Picasso after the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
But to Francisco Ayala, acclaimed evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist, and the winner of the 2010 Templeton Prize, the painting is also an example of how science and religion do not contradict each other.
The shapes, size, dimensions and pigments can be observed using scientific analysis, he said Thursday at the Templeton Prize news conference, but the dramatic message, the pain, the aesthetic value and historical significance are beyond the scope of science.