LEADING SCIENTIST MAKES A CD

ABOUT HIS CHRISTIAN FAITH

“There are a significant number of practising scientists who hold the Christian faith. I would say we are a minority - but we’re a significant minority. I think we’re probably more numerous than the out-and-out atheist component.”

John Polkinghorne

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 Hawking, Dawkins and GOD – a CD Conversation

between

Professor John Polkinghorne and Canon John Young

Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE, FRS was Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University for many years. His status as a leading scientist was underlined when, as a young man, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. The significance of his work was made public when HM Queen Elizabeth II knighted John in 1997 – mainly for his services to the nation in chairing important scientific committees, including the Human Genetics Commission. Alongside all this runs his ministry as a priest in the Church of England.

John Polkinghorne worked with Stephen Hawking - they were in the same department at Cambridge - and he has debated with Richard Dawkins. 

In this wide-ranging 65-minute conversation on CD with Canon John Young, author and co-founder of York Courses, John Polkinghorne:

• shows why earthquakes are essential for life on earth
• confesses that his own faith 'fluctuates' when he considers the death of his wife
• challenges us to make sense of Jesus and the great events of Easter in other than Christian terms

John Polkinghorne from Hawking, Dawkins and GOD:

“I have a great respect for Stephen Hawking. He is certainly a very, very important scientist … His picture of God as the Creator, and the meaning of the doctrine of creation is: Who lit the blue touchpaper of the Big Bang to start it all off? And that’s not what Creation is about. Creation is about why is there something, rather than nothing? God is as much the Creator today, as God was 13.7 billion years ago, when the Big Bang happened. And Steve doesn’t really take that on board. So, if for example, in about the middle of A Brief History of Time he says: if there was no datable beginning to the Universe - which is what his highly speculative cosmological theory would say - what room then for a Creator? Well, of course, the obvious theological answer is: every room!”

“The Creator holds the world in being, whatever its character might be. And right at the end of Brief History, (talking about the beautiful equations that describe fundamental physics) he says: what breathes life into these equations and gives them a universe to describe? That’s the right question to ask: why is there something, rather than nothing? Why is there a world whose marvellous order is so - so beautifully expressed through mathematics? And Steve asks that question, but he doesn’t answer it. And I think, for me, the most persuasive, intellectually satisfying answer is, the universe is ordered, with signs of mind in it, because there is a (capital M) ‘Mind’ of its creator behind it. So I think Steve asks the right question at the end of the book, but doesn’t succeed in finding the right answer.”