by Fraser Watts
John Polkinghone was notable among the many scientists who have turned to work on science and religion in having an exceptionally distinguished scientific career, and in giving it up completely to devote himself to church ministry and work on science and religion.
His scientific work was on fundamental particle physics, the subatomic particles that cannot be measured but which are thought to influence the observable world. He was present at a number of the key conversations that led to scientific advances in particle physics. In 1968, not yet 40, became Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Stephen Hawking was among his students, and his remarks about Hawking’s work often began with, ‘the trouble with Stephen is…’. In 1974 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the only ordained FRS.
Five years later, shortly before his 50th birthday, he decided to give all that up and train at Westcott House in Cambridge for full-time Anglican ministry. After 3 years in full-time parish work he became Dean of Trinity Hall in Cambridge, and after another three years was elected President of Queens’ College in Cambridge, a position he held until his retirement. He did an excellent job as President of Queens’, as I witnessed first-hand as a Fellow of the College. However, he occasionally admitted that it was not the job he most wanted to be doing, and that he would rather have had a position of leadership in the Church of England than in a Cambridge College. He would have brought immense distinction to the bench of Bishops.
His first book on science and religion, The Way the World is, appeared in 1983. He was a prolific writer, and it proved to be the first of 26 books on science and religion, including The Faith of a Physicist (published in the UK as Science and Christian Belief), a kind of evidence-based systematic theology, and From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography. He was entirely orthodox in his theological views, and saw less need to revise Christian belief in the light of science than the colleagues with whom he compared his views in Scientists as Theologians.
He always wrote with the same crisp clarity, and abhorred the froggy confusion that he felt sometimes descended on discussions about science and religion. He always knew what he thought, why he held the views he did, and was able to convey them clearly and succinctly. His books can’t really be abbreviated, as there is no padding whatsoever. It is the kind of prose style you might expect from someone who had spent much of his career writing equations.
He was an effective public speaker and accepted many invitations to spread his conviction, not just the Christian belief was compatible with science, but that we understood things better with the ‘binocular’ perspective of both science and religion. He was a good phrase-maker, for example that quantum physics ‘liberates us from the tyranny of common sense’. In intellectual exchanges he was always able to provide an elegantly phrased clarification of his position. On one occasion he asked a candidate at an interview about the role of metaphysics in work on science and theology. The candidate, unwisely, threw up his hands and asked “what is metaphysics?”; John responded instantly with a crisp definition.
He took a particular interest in issues on the interface of physics and theology. Though he was impressed by the similarity between quantum physics and Christian theology in their mode of theorising, he was sceptical of attempts to invoke quantum indeterminacy to reconcile divine action with science. He saw more promise in chaos theory, which sets out how a vanishingly small input can have massive consequences, and saw the world as ‘more like a cloud than a clock’.
He was sympathetic to the idea that information might be the basic stuff of the universe, and thought the divine action might arise from a physically indetectable input of information. He inferred from the fact that it is impossible in practice to predict the world accurately that the world is unpredictable in principle or, as he liked to put it, ‘epistemology models ontology’.
John received many honours. In 1997 he became a Knight of the British Empire though, following the convention for clergy, did not use the title ‘Sir’. In 2002 he also was awarded the Templeton Prize, presented to him by the Duke of Edinburgh in Buckingham Palace. He was asked by Sir John Templeton to be the Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion, which held its first meeting in Granada in 2002. In July 2010 ISSR organised a conference on God and Physics to mark his 80th birthday, with a book arising from the conference, God and the Scientist: Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne. He was a supporter of the Boyle lectures, and was the Boyle Lecturer himself in 2013.
He was formidably clever, liked punctuality, and could be headmasterly, but he was humble, kindly and affable. There was always a twinkle in his eye, and unfailing good humour. The death of his wife Ruth hit him hard and aged him markedly; he was never quite the same again. We became very close colleagues through our proximity in Queens’ College, and I am immensely grateful to him for his constant support, encouragement and wisdom. He died on 9th March 2021. Rest in Peace.
