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When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.

John Polkinghorne

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John Polkinghorne
Age: 90 †
Born: 1930
Born: October 16
Died: 2021
Died: March 9
Anglican Priest
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
Weston-super-Mare
Somerset
John Charlton Polkinghorne
John C. Polkinghorne
J. C. Polkinghorne
Idea
Behinds
Tuned
Nature
Realize
Theologian
Happens
Behind
Physicist
Ideas
Realizing
Incredibly
Reason
Happen
Plant
Must
Law
Evolution
Conspires
Purpose
Laws
Conspiring
Universe
Produce
Finely

More quotes by John Polkinghorne

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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
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Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth it applies to the whole universe.
John Polkinghorne
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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.
John Polkinghorne
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
John Polkinghorne
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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.
John Polkinghorne
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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
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God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.
John Polkinghorne
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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.
John Polkinghorne
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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.
John Polkinghorne
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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
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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
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Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.
John Polkinghorne
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At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.
John Polkinghorne
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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.
John Polkinghorne
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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
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God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. God is the God of the whole show.
John Polkinghorne