John Polkinghorne Quotes

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

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

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.

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.

Hope is much more than a mood. It involves a commitment to action.... What we hope for should be what we are prepared to work for...as far as that power lies in us.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.