Education Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne is trying to disarm a tired cultural reflex: the idea that science and everything else live on separate floors of reality, connected only by awkward elevator rides. As a physicist who also spent decades as an Anglican priest, he’s not making a bland plea for “interdisciplinarity.” He’s staking a metaphysical claim with rhetorical restraint: there aren’t two incompatible worlds (one measurable, one meaningful), but a single, shared field of experience that different languages attempt to map.

The key move is the phrase “one world of our experience.” It quietly shifts the argument away from territory wars between disciplines and toward a common object: reality as encountered by human beings. Physics describes regularities with mathematical precision; ethics, art, and theology describe value, purpose, and lived meaning. Polkinghorne’s subtext is that these aren’t competing “truths” so much as partial vocabularies for the same thing, and that pretending otherwise leads to distortions: scientism that mistakes method for total worldview, or spirituality that treats facts as optional.

Context matters. Coming out of late-20th-century debates about reductionism, chaos, quantum indeterminacy, and the limits of explanation, he’s pushing back against the notion that physics has already closed the book on what counts as real. “Seeking to describe” is modest but pointed: all knowledge is interpretive, provisional, and aimed at the same target. Unity here isn’t a forced merger; it’s a demand for coherence. If your accounts of the universe can’t, in the end, sit in the same room together, Polkinghorne implies the problem isn’t reality. It’s our categories.