John Polkinghorne

Physicist

1930-10-16

Quotes by John Polkinghorne

As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflectiveabout their activity do not instinctively ask the question "Is itreasonable?' as if they were confident beforehand what shaperationality had to take. We have noted how "unreasonable', inclassical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out tobe. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth-seeking question takes the form, —What makes you think thatmight be the case?
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Inthe scientific community, the adjective —theological' is some-times used pejoratively to refer to a vague or ill-formulatedbelief. I believe this usage to be very far from the truth. It sad-dens me that some of my colleagues remain unaware of thetruth-seeking intent and rational scrupulosity that character-ise theological discourse at its best.
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The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world's Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint (as, for example, Platonic thinking had supposed to be the case). As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought, as if humans could themselves explore a noetic realm of rational constraint to whichthe Creator had had to submit, but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. What is needed, therefore, for successful science is the union of the mathematical expression of order with the empirical investigation of the actual properties of nature, a methodological synthesis of a kind that was pioneered with great skill and fruitfulness by Galileo.
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If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn't fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes by perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is to be honest.
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The widespread success of science is too significantan issue to be treated as if it were a happy accident that we arefree to enjoy without enquiring more deeply into why this isthe case. Critical realist achievements of this kind cannot be amatter of logical generality, something that one would expectto be attainable in all possible worlds. Rather, they are an ex-perientially confirmed aspect of the particularity of the worldin which we live and of the kind of beings that we are. Achiev-ing scientific success is a specific ability possessed by human-kind, exercised in the kind of universe that we inhabit. I believethat a full understanding of this remarkable human capacityfor scientific discovery ultimately requires the insight that ourpower in this respect is the gift of the universe's Creator who,in that ancient and powerful phrase, has made humanity in theimage of God (Genesis 1:26–27).
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Inthe scientific community, the adjective —theological' is some-times used pejoratively to refer to a vague or ill-formulatedbelief. I believe this usage to be very far from the truth. It sad-dens me that some of my colleagues remain unaware of thetruth-seeking intent and rational scrupulosity that character-ise theological discourse at its best.
Read quote
The widespread success of science is too significantan issue to be treated as if it were a happy accident that we arefree to enjoy without enquiring more deeply into why this isthe case. Critical realist achievements of this kind cannot be amatter of logical generality, something that one would expectto be attainable in all possible worlds. Rather, they are an ex-perientially confirmed aspect of the particularity of the worldin which we live and of the kind of beings that we are. Achiev-ing scientific success is a specific ability possessed by human-kind, exercised in the kind of universe that we inhabit. I believethat a full understanding of this remarkable human capacityfor scientific discovery ultimately requires the insight that ourpower in this respect is the gift of the universe's Creator who,in that ancient and powerful phrase, has made humanity in theimage of God (Genesis 1:26–27).
Read quote
The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world's Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint (as, for example, Platonic thinking had supposed to be the case). As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought, as if humans could themselves explore a noetic realm of rational constraint to whichthe Creator had had to submit, but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. What is needed, therefore, for successful science is the union of the mathematical expression of order with the empirical investigation of the actual properties of nature, a methodological synthesis of a kind that was pioneered with great skill and fruitfulness by Galileo.
Read quote
As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflectiveabout their activity do not instinctively ask the question "Is itreasonable?' as if they were confident beforehand what shaperationality had to take. We have noted how "unreasonable', inclassical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out tobe. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth-seeking question takes the form, —What makes you think thatmight be the case?
Read quote
If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn't fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes by perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is to be honest.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.
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