55 Quotes by John Polkinghorne

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.

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.

Claims for theoccurrence of miraculous events will have to be evaluated ona case-by-case basis. There can be no general theory to coverthe character of unique events, but the refusal to contemplatethe possibility of revelatory disclosures of an unprecedentedkind would be an unacceptable limitation, imposed arbitrarilyon the horizons of religious thought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.