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 Read Quote
Nevertheless, all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world, and the reality of quantum entities like protons and electrons. John Polkinghorne Read Quote
It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology. John Polkinghorne Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe. John Polkinghorne Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote