Words matter. These are the best John Polkinghorne Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.
Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.
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.
I think it’s very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.
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.
At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.
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.
So Whitehead’s metaphysics doesn’t fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.
