Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Seeking
Knowledge
Experience
Reality
Describe
World
Believer
Unity
Passionate

More quotes by John Polkinghorne

Image
Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.
John Polkinghorne
Image
Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.
John Polkinghorne
Image
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.
John Polkinghorne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
John Polkinghorne
Image
At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.
John Polkinghorne
Image
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
Image
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.
John Polkinghorne
Image
Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth it applies to the whole universe.
John Polkinghorne