55 Quotes by John Polkinghorne

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.