John Polkinghorne
Profile
John Polkinghorne is a British particle physicist and
theologian. He has written extensively on matters concerning
science and faith. Following National Service in the Royal Army
Educational Corps from 1948 to 1949, John Polkinghorne read
Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge and then earned his PhD
in physics in 1955. After 2 years as a Lecturer at the University
of Edinburgh he returned to Cambridge in 1958, and in 1968 was
elected Professor of Mathematical Physics. His students included
Brian Josephson and Martin Rees. For 25 years, Polkinghorne was a
theoretical physicist working on theories of elementary particles
and played a significant role in the discovery of the quark. From
1968 to 1979 he was Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge
University, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
in 1974.
He resigned his professorial chair to study for the Church of
England ministry at Westcott House, Cambridge, becoming an ordained
Anglican priest. After five years in parochial ministry,
Polkinghorne returned to Cambridge to be Dean of Chapel at Trinity
Hall, 1986-1989. He then became the President of Queens' College,
Cambridge, a position from which he retired in 1996. In 1997 he was
made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE);
in 1998 he was made an Honorary Fellow of St Chad's College,
Durham, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of
Durham; in 2002 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his
contributions to research at the interface between science and
religion.
Polkinghorne 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 is a current
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. Polkinghorne was selected to give the prestigious
Gifford Lectures in 1993-4, which he later published as The Faith
of a Physicist.
Research interests
For more than twenty years John's principal intellectual
interests have centred on the dialogue between science and
theology, particularly in relation to the physical sciences. Topics
include: rational strategies in both science and theology; a
revived and revised natural theology; divine providence and the
causal structure of the universe; continuity and discontinuity in
eschatological thinking; trinitarian theology and
relationships.
Throughout his career, John has dealt with questions like: How
can God act in a world governed by scientific law? Are miracles
possible? What kinds of petitionary prayer can God reasonably be
expected to answer? These are the unacknowledged doubts which lurk
in the minds of many believing Christians. He believes these are
the kinds of questions clergy need to be able to answer with
educated assurance. John Polkinghorne believes that the universe is
an open and flexible system, where patterns can be seen to exist,
but where the providential aspect cannot be ruled out.
His current research interests centre around two main topics:
The intelligibility of the universe: One would anticipate
that evolutionary selection would produce hominid minds apt for
coping with everyday experience, but that these minds should also
be able to understand the subatomic world and general relativity
goes far beyond anything of relevance to survival fitness. The
mystery deepens when one recognises the proven fruitfulness of
mathematical beauty as a guide to successful theory choice.
The anthropic fine tuning of the universe: He believes that
the more one examines the universe and the details of its
architecture, the more evidence one finds that the universe in some
sense must have known humans were coming and suggests there is a
wide consensus amongst physicists that either there are a very
large number of other universes in the Multiverse or that there is
just one universe which is the way it is in its anthropic
fruitfulness because it is the expression of the purposive design
of a Creator, who has endowed it with the finely tuned potentialty
for life.
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 he
believes that it is true nevertheless.
