3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne 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.
3 December 2020 John Polkinghorne Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science’s story.
