John Charlton Polkinghorne KBE FRS (born 16 October 1930) is an English theoretical physicist, theologian, writer and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens College, Cambridge from 1988 until 1996.
Polkinghorne is the author of five books on physics, and 26 on the relationship between science and religion; his publications include The Quantum World (1989), Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (2005), Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion (2007), and Questions of Truth (2009).The Polkinghorne Reader (edited by Thomas Jay Oord) provides key excerpts from Polkinghornes most influential books. He was knighted in 1997 and in 2002 received the £1 million Templeton Prize, awarded for exceptional contributions to affirming lifes spiritual dimension.
Polkinghorne was born in Weston-super-Mare to Dorothy Charlton, the daughter of a groom and George Polkinghorne, who worked for the post office. John was the couples third child. There was a brother, Peter, and a sister, Ann, who died when she was six, one month before Johns birth. Peter died in 1942 while flying for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
He was educated at the local primary school in Street, Somerset, then was taught by a friend of the family at home, and later at a Quaker school. When he was 11 he went to Elmhurst Grammar School in Street, and when his father was promoted to head postmaster in Ely in 1945, Polkinghorne was transferred to The Perse School, Cambridge. Following National Service in the Royal Army Educational Corps from 1948 to 1949, he read Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1952 as Senior Wrangler, then earned his PhD in physics in 1955, supervised by Nobel laureate Abdus Salam in the group led by Paul Dirac.
He joined the Christian Union of UCCF while at Cambridge and met his future wife, Ruth Martin, another member of the Union and also a mathematics student. They married on 26 March 1955, and at the end of that year sailed from Liverpool to New York. Polkinghorne accepted a postdoctoral Harkness Fellowship with the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann. Toward the end of the fellowship he was offered a position as lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, which he took up in 1956.
After two years in Scotland, he returned to teach at Cambridge in 1958. He was promoted to reader in 1965, and in 1968 was offered a professorship in mathematical physics, a position he held until 1979, his students including Brian Josephson and Martin Rees. For 25 years, he worked on theories about elementary particles, played a role in the discovery of the quark, and researched the analytic and high-energy properties of Feynman integrals and the foundations of S-Matrix theory. While employed by Cambridge, he also spent time at Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, and at CERN in Geneva. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.
Polkinghorne decided to train for the priesthood in 1977. He said in an interview that he felt he had done his bit for science after 25 years, and that his best mathematical work was probably behind him; Christianity had always been central to his life, so ordination offered an attractive second career. He resigned his chair in 1979 to study at Westcott House, Cambridge, an Anglican theological college, becoming an ordained priest on 6 June 1982 (Trinity Sunday). The ceremony was held at Trinity College, Cambridge and presided over by Bishop John A. T. Robinson. He worked for five years as a curate in south Bristol, then as vicar in Blean, Kent, before returning to Cambridge in 1986 as dean of chapel at Trinity Hall. He became the president of Queens College that year, a position he held until his retirement in 1996. He served as canon theologian of Liverpool Cathedral from 1994 to 2005.
In 1997 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE), although as an ordained priest in the Church of England, he is not styled as "Sir John Polkinghorne". He is an Honorary Fellow of St Chads College, Durham and awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Durham in 1998; and in 2002 was awarded the Templeton Prize for his contributions to research at the interface between science and religion. He spoke on "The Universe as Creation" at the Trotter Prize ceremony in 2003.
He has been a member of the BMA Medical Ethics Committee, the General Synod of the Church of England, the Doctrine Commission, and the Human Genetics Commission. He served as chairman of the governors of The Perse School from 1972 to 1981. He is a fellow of Queens College, Cambridge and was for 10 years a canon theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He is a founding member of the Society of Ordained Scientists and also of the International Society for Science and Religion, of which he was the first president. He was selected to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1993–1994, which he later published as The Faith of a Physicist.
In 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Hong Kong Baptist University as part of their 50-year celebrations. This included giving a public lecture on "The Dialogue between Science and Religion and Its Significance for the Academy" and an "East–West Dialogue" with Yang Chen-ning, a nobel laureate in physics. He is a member of staff of the Psychology and Religion Research Group at Cambridge University. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmunds College, Cambridge.
Polkinghorne said in an interview that he believes his move from science to religion has given him binocular vision, though he understands that it has aroused the kind of suspicion "that might follow the claim to be a vegetarian butcher." He describes his position as critical realism and believes that science and religion address aspects of the same reality. It is a consistent theme of his work that when he "turned his collar around" he did not stop seeking truth. He believes the philosopher of science who has most helpfully struck the balance between the "critical" and "realism" aspects of this is Michael Polanyi. He argues that there are five points of comparison between the ways in which science and theology pursue truth: moments of enforced radical revision, a period of unresolved confusion, new synthesis and understanding, continued wrestling with unresolved problems, deeper implications.
Because scientific experiments try to eliminate extraneous influences, he believes they are atypical of what goes on in nature. He suggests that the mechanistic explanations of the world that have continued from Laplace to Richard Dawkins should be replaced by an understanding that most of nature is cloud-like rather than clock-like. He regards the mind, soul and body as different aspects of the same underlying reality—"dual aspect monism"—writing that "there is only one stuff in the world (not two—the material and the mental) but it can occur in two contrasting states (material and mental phases, a physicist might say) which explain our perception of the difference between mind and matter." He believes that standard physical causation cannot adequately describe the manifold ways in which things and people interact, and uses the phrase "active information" to describe how, when several outcomes are possible, there may be higher levels of causation that choose which one occurs.
Sometimes Christianity seems to him to be just too good to be true, but when this sort of doubt arises he says to himself, "All right then, deny it," and writes that he knows this is something he could never do.
Polkinghorne considers that "the question of the existence of God is the single most important question we face about the nature of reality" and quotes with approval Anthony Kenny: "After all, if there is no God, then God is incalculably the greatest single creation of the human imagination." He addresses the questions of "Does the concept of God make sense? If so, do we have reason for believing in such a thing?" He is "cautious about our powers to assess coherence," pointing out that in 1900 a "competent ... undergraduate could have demonstrated the incoherence" of quantum ideas. He suggests that "the nearest analogy in the physical world [to God] would be ... the Quantum Vacuum."
He suggests that God is the ultimate answer to Leibnizs great question "why is there something rather than nothing?" The atheists "plain assertion of the worlds existence" is a "grossly impoverished view of reality ... [arguing that] theism explains more than a reductionist atheism can ever address." He is very doubtful of St Anselms Ontological Argument. Referring to Gödels incompleteness theory, he said: "If we cannot prove the consistency of arithmetic it seems a bit much to hope that Gods existence is easier to deal with," concluding that God is "ontologically necessary, but not logically necessary." He "does not assert that Gods existence can be demonstrated in a logically coercive way (any more than Gods non-existence can) but that theism makes more sense of the world, and of human experience, than does atheism." He cites in particular:
Polkinghorne regards the problem of evil as the most serious intellectual objection to the existence of God. He believes that "The well-known free will defence in relation to moral evil asserts that a world with a possibility of sinful people is better than one with perfectly programmed machines. The tale of human evil is such that one cannot make that assertion without a quiver, but I believe that it is true nevertheless. I have added to it the free-process defence, that a world allowed to make itself is better than a puppet theatre with a Cosmic Tyrant. I think that these two defences are opposite sides of the same coin, that our nature is inextricably linked with that of the physical world which has given us birth."
Polkinghorne accepts evolution. Following the resignation of Michael Reiss, the director of education at the Royal Society—who had controversially argued that school pupils who believed in creationism should be used by science teachers to start discussions, rather than be rejected per se—Polkinghorne argued in The Times that there is a distinction between believing in the mind and purpose of a divine creator, and what he calls creationism "in that curious North American sense," with a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and the belief that evolution is wrong, a position he rejects.
Nancy Frankenberry, Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, has described Polkinghorne as the finest British theologian/scientist of our time, citing his work on the possible relationship between chaos theory and natural theology.Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and former Harvard professor, has called him a leading voice on the relationship between science and religion.
The British philosopher Simon Blackburn has criticized Polkinghorne for using primitive thinking and rhetorical devices instead of engaging in philosophy. When Polkinghorne argues that the minute adjustments of cosmological constants for life points towards an explanation beyond the scientific realm, Blackburn argues that this relies on a natural preference for explanation in terms of agency. Blackburn writes that he finished Polkinghornes books in "despair at humanitys capacity for self-deception." Against this, Freeman J. Dyson called Polkinghornes arguments on theology and natural science "polished and logically coherent." The novelist Simon Ings, writing in the New Scientist, said Polkinghornes argument for the proposition that God is real is cogent and his evidence elegant.
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