Serious Talk

Although now an Anglican priest and head of one of the prestigious colleges in Cambridge University, John Polkinghorne has spent most of his adult life working as a theoretical physicist. He is therefore uniquely qualified to set forth the relationship between science and religion in a way that takes the two disciplines seriously. Professor Polkinghorne argues that the habits of thought that are natural to the scientist are the same habits of thought that can be followed in the search for a wider and deeper kind of truth about the world. He calls this "bottom-up" thinking, that is, starting not with general principles but with the particularity of experience, and asking what is sufficient to explain the phenomena and give an understanding of what is going on. Serious Talk begins with the search for an acceptable meeting point for science and religion. Following this are examinations of specific theological issues approached in the spirit of such a meeting point: creation, the role of chance, God's engagement with time, the anticipation of a destiny awaiting humanity beyond death, and the end of the universe.