John Polkinghorne Quotes

No study has taken so much of human energy, whether in times past or present, as the study of the soul, of God, and of human destiny.

Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.

Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is limitation, while God is unlimited.

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.

Without science, everything is a miracle.

God is not only true, but Truth itself.

Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.

The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Philosophy is the science which considers truth.

It is in the best interests of civilization and our economy and our nation to understand what objective truths are as revealed by the methods and tools of science.

If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.

In fact, it is more correct to say that Truth is God, than to say that God is Truth.

I would say much of religious heresy is the result of a misunderstanding of the basic nature of God. And once we have a proper understanding of God, then usually most of the areas of our life coincide with who God is and what He desires for each one of us.