John Polkinghorne

"Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history."

"I'm a very passionate believer in the unity of knowledge. There is one world of reality - one world of our experience that we're seeking to describe."

"Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true they just hope to find out what reality is like."

"If the experience of science teaches anything, it's that the world is very strange and surprising. The many revolutions in science have certainly shown that."

"Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history."

"Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe."