John C. Polkinghorne

President of Queens’ College, Cambridge

The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker

In his series of lectures, Polkinghorne explores ‘to what extent we can use the search for motivated understanding…as a route to being able to make the substance of Christian orthodoxy our own’. A ‘bottom-up’ thinker, he investigates how those whose thoughts ‘are formed by long experience of working as a theoretical physicist, approach questions of the justification and understanding of religious belief’. He weighs the evidence of theological statements considering contemporary explanations for ourselves and the universe. 

Biography

John Charlton Polkinghorne was born on 16 October 1930 in Weston, England. A physicist and Anglican priest, he received the Templeton Prize for combining science and religion as a ‘binocular vision of truth’. Lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the Edinburgh in 1956, he moved to Cambridge two years later, becoming Professor in 1968. In 1979, he studied theology at Westcott House and served parishes in Bristol and Kent. He returned to academia in 1986 as Dean of Trinity Hall, President of Queens’ College in 1989, retiring in 1996 as Canon Theologian at Liverpool Cathedral. 

Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and knighted in 1997, he was the Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion. Polkinghorne was awarded a Humboldt Research Award in 1999. Notable works include The Analytic S-Matrix (1966), Models of High Energy Processes (1980), The Way the World Is (1984), Science and Creation (1988), Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998), The End of the World and the Ends of God (2000), Science and the Trinity (2004), and Living with Hope (2004).

Published/Archival Resources
Published as The Faith of a Physicist.