John Polkinghorne – 10 Quotes

10 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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– John Polkinghorne

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.

– 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.

– John Polkinghorne

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

– John Polkinghorne