Science Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne’s jab lands with the cool efficiency of a lab report: theology, he implies, has become anthropology in clerical drag. “At present” is the tell. He’s not condemning the whole tradition so much as diagnosing a contemporary drift - a moment when God-talk risks collapsing into self-talk, with “faith” reduced to therapy, ethics seminars, or identity reinforcement. The phrase “too much” is also measured, not scorched-earth; he’s an insider-critic, not a polemicist.

Coming from a physicist-priest, the line carries a double provocation. First, it challenges a modern reflex to treat religion as valuable mainly because it makes humans feel better or behave nicer. That’s a defensible project, but it’s not what theology claims to be: inquiry into God, not merely the uses of God. Second, it smuggles in a methodological point from science. In physics you don’t get to make the universe the supporting character in a story about your preferences; you submit to an external reality that resists you. Polkinghorne is asking whether theology has kept that discipline - whether it still treats God as the subject who addresses, disrupts, and judges, rather than the object we arrange to fit our anxieties.

The subtext is a warning about scale. Human-centered theology can become morally earnest yet metaphysically thin: big on meaning, light on mystery. Polkinghorne’s intent is to re-center transcendence without abandoning reason, insisting that the gravitational pull of the divine shouldn’t be mistaken for our own reflection.