Science Quote by John Polkinghorne

There is an almost quietly subversive humility packed into Polkinghorne's praise of "bottom up thinkers": the refusal to begin with a tidy creed about how the world must behave. For a physicist-turned-theologian, this is more than a methodological preference. It's a moral posture disguised as epistemology.

The phrasing is doing careful work. "Try to start" acknowledges that no one is a blank slate; even the most hard-nosed empiricist carries priors. But the aspiration matters: begin with experience, let understanding earn its way upward. Polkinghorne sets this against the seductive comfort of "certain general principles" that are "likely to be true" beforehand. That word likely is the tell. He's not attacking principles; he's attacking the psychological laziness of treating plausibility as proof.

The subtext is a critique of top-down certainty, the kind that turns philosophy into ideology and science into branding. In the late-20th-century culture wars around science and religion, "starting with principles" often reads as code for dogma - whether religious fundamentalism or its mirror image, a scientism that smuggles metaphysics in under the lab coat. Polkinghorne is carving out a third stance: realism without rigidity.

What makes the line land is its final clause: "they just hope". Hope is not a standard term in physics, and that's the point. It admits vulnerability: reality is allowed to surprise you, even to disappoint your favorite theories. In an era that rewards hot takes and totalizing frameworks, Polkinghorne is arguing that intellectual integrity begins where certainty ends.