John Polkinghorne Quotes
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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.
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When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.
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The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.
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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.
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The remarkable insights that science affords us into the intelligible workings of the world cry out for an explanation more profound than that which itself can provide. Religion, if it is to take seriously its claim that the world is the creation of god, must be humble enough to learn from science what that world is actually like. The dialogue between them can only be mutually enriching.
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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.
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I'm a very passionate believer in the unity of knowledge. There is one world of reality - one world of our experience that we're seeking to describe.
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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.
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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.
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Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.
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Theologians have a great problem because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything.
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Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.
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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.
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God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.
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At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.
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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.
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Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science's story.
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So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.
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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.
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I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
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Science and religion...are friends, not foes, in the common quest for knowledge. Some people may find this surprising, for there's a feeling throughout our society that religious belief is outmoded, or downright impossible, in a scientific age. I don't agree. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if people in this so-called 'scientific age' knew a bit more about science than many of them actually do, they'd find it easier to share my views.
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It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.
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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.
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Theology differs from science in many respects, because of its different subject matter, a personal God who cannot be put to the test in the way that the impersonal physical world can be subjected to experimental enquiry. Yet science and theology have this in common, that each can be, and should be defended as being investigations of what is, the search for increasing verisimilitude in our understanding of reality.
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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.
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God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. God is the God of the whole show.
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Hope is much more than a mood. It involves a commitment to action.... What we hope for should be what we are prepared to work for...as far as that power lies in us.
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I need the binocular approach of science and religion if I am to do any sort of justice to the deep and rich reality of the world in which we live.
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Well, it's because I gladly acknowledge some ideas that are part of process theology, but which I think are not tied to all the details of process thought, and are very illuminating and helpful.
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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.
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