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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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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
Human
Nobody
Theological
Humans
Thousand
Theologian
Years
Courses
Fifteen
Would
Course
Billion
Time
Rather
Billions
Think
Universe
Deny
Thinking
History
Importance
Theologians
Culture
Beings
Span

More quotes by 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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Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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 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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Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.
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
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Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science's story.
John Polkinghorne
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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
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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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I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
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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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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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