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John Polkinghorne


British
October 16, 1930
Physicist
So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.
John Polkinghorne
Tags: Very World Well
Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.
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.
John Polkinghorne
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
Tags: Chance About Than
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
Tags: Work Best You
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.
John Polkinghorne
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
Tags: Life Were Even
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
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