A new Cambridge-based nonprofit, Foundational Questions Institute, today announced its first set of grants, totaling $2.2 million, to physicists in the US, Canada and Europe (including five from MIT, Tufts, Harvard and UMass) to study, as its name implies, the big “million-dollar” questions at the root of physics and cosmology (such as “what happened before the Big Bang?” and “how can we reconcile the laws of gravity with those of quantum mechanics?”)

So far, it’s funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds research at the intersection of science and religion. In an age when science and religion seem to be diverging, having a research granting agency (with scientists reviewing the grants and sitting on the advisory board) funded by such a group is controversial, according to an article in today’s Globe .

On the one hand, this could be a way to get funding for research that’s not easily funded through the ordinary government agencies. On the other hand, should physicists be accepting money from groups with a religious bent?

But in a way, it may make sense for this kind of funding to go into this kind of research. These basic, foundational questions in physics and cosmology are ultimately about understanding the nature of the universe and religion is also there, at least partly, to help us understand the universe, though in a very different way. Of course, if we come up with any answers, the ones from physicists will be quite different from those from theologians, but at least the initial purpose may not be all that different between the two camps.