Quotes from John Polkinghorne

People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.

If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn't fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes by perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is to be honest.

If the physicists seem to achieve their ends more successfully than the theologians, that is simply a reflection of how much easier science is than theology.

Epistemology models ontology.

scientific discovery requires the boldness of provisional commitment to a point of view, while remaining aware that this may require subsequent modification in the light of further experience.

Claims for the occurrence of miraculous events will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There can be no general theory to cover the character of unique events, but the refusal to contemplate the possibility of revelatory disclosures of an unprecedented kind would be an unacceptable limitation, imposed arbitrarily on the horizons of religious thought.

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

As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflective about their activity do not instinctively ask the question 'Is it reasonable?' as if they were confident beforehand what shape rationality had to take. We have noted how 'unreasonable', in classical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out to be. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth- seeking question takes the form, 'What makes you think that might be the case?

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

Yes, I was a parish priest for five years. I was a curate in a large working class parish in Bristol and the Vicar of a village in Kent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 rational transparency and beauty of the universe are surely too remarkable to be treated as just happy accidents.

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.

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.