Best 36 quotes of John Polkinghorne on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. God is the God of the whole show.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.