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At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered.

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.

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.

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

Work

Thought

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.

I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.

John Polkinghorne

Christian

Creation

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.

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.

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

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.

It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.

John Polkinghorne

God

Faithfulness

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.

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.

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

John Polkinghorne

Chance

Novelty

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

God

Sense