Science & Tech Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne is doing something rarer than it should be: telling theologians to stop treating science as a rival tribe and start treating it as basic literacy. The line carries the authority of a man who has lived on both sides of the supposed border war. As a physicist (and, famously, also an Anglican priest), he isn’t pleading for vague “dialogue” so much as insisting on competence. If you want to speak credibly about origins, miracles, human nature, or purpose, you can’t do it while willfully ignorant of the frameworks that shape modern reality.

The quiet barb is in “and especially theologians.” It suggests a pattern Polkinghorne knows well: people who make big metaphysical claims often do so without grappling with the conceptual scaffolding of the sciences they casually invoke or dismiss. He’s not naïve about the barrier to entry; “science is technical” concedes the math, the machinery, the specialization. But he immediately pivots to a more strategic point: you don’t need a lab coat to understand the ideas that matter - uncertainty, explanation, model-building, evidence, inference, the difference between mechanism and meaning.

The context is late-20th-century culture: the “conflict” narrative between science and religion, with theologians sometimes retreating into abstraction and scientists sometimes mistaking methodological success for philosophical totality. Polkinghorne’s intent is to narrow the gap by changing the terms of engagement: less slogan, more structure. Scientific concepts won’t settle theological questions, but they do constrain them - and that constraint, he implies, is a form of honesty.