John Polkinghorne

“Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like.”

“Inthe scientific community, the adjective ‘theological’ is some-times used pejoratively to refer to a vague or ill-formulatedbelief. I believe this usage to be very far from the truth. It sad-dens me that some of my colleagues remain unaware of thetruth-seeking intent and rational scrupulosity that character-ise theological discourse at its best.”

“If the experience of science teaches anything, it's that the world is very strange and surprising. The many revolutions in science have certainly shown that.”

“I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.”

“So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.”

“I very much enjoyed my career in science. I didn't leave science because I was disillusioned, but felt I'd done my bit for it after about twenty-five years.”

“The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth.”

“Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.”

“After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.”

“Nevertheless, all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world, and the reality of quantum entities like protons and electrons.”

“The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world’s Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint (as, for example, Platonic thinking had supposed to be the case). As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought, as if humans could themselves explore a noetic realm of rational constraint to whichthe Creator had had to submit, but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. What is needed, therefore, for successful science is the union of the mathematical expression of order with the empirical investigation of the actual properties of nature, a methodological synthesis of a kind that was pioneered with great skill and fruitfulness by Galileo.”

“Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history.”

“At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.”

“Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.”

“Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand.”

“It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.”

“Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.”

“However, as the Eastern churches have always maintained, through Christ creation is intended eventually to share in the life of God, the life of divine nature.”

“Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science's story.”

“I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else.”