Remembering John Polkinghorne: a vision of one world, and one culture

Tom C B Mcleish

doi:10.1177/0040571x211043170

Abstract

A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author’s own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student. Themes of both agreement and disagreement are selected from the many to be found in Polkinghorne’s corpus. Closer attention is paid to two of his books, Science and Christian Belief and Faith, Science and Understanding. A running theme is the creative tension of a ‘bottom-up thinker’, one of whose salient and influential arguments was that of ‘top-down causation’. Although there is disagreement over Polkinghorne’s exegesis of divine character in Job, thinking the argument through did bear fruit.

Highlights

A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author’s own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student
I remain personally deeply grateful to John Polkinghorne for his inspiration, example and advice at a critical time in my own scientific career. His position as Dean at Trinity Hall overlapped with my PhD years at the Cavendish, learning the ropes of the emerging ‘soft matter physics’, as it is called
A few of us, all graduate students, had got together a ‘Christian physicist’ discussion group, exchanging ideas of what I see as shuddering naıvete, but none that Polkinghorne would ever brush away with what would have been forgivable impatience, whenever we traipsed into his college study with questions