Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne is doing boundary-work with a physicist's calm authority, then quietly moving the boundary. The opening clause sounds like a concession to theological autonomy: science cannot dictate doctrine. But the sentence is built like a trapdoor. After the comma comes the real claim: theology may write its own script, yet it cannot ignore the stage directions written into the universe itself. Rhetorically, it’s a one-two: permission, then constraint.

The intent is less to broker a truce than to prevent a common kind of evasion. Polkinghorne is pushing back on creation-talk that treats Genesis as a competing lab report or imagines God’s action as a series of scientific interruptions. By insisting on the universe’s age and evolution as non-negotiable inputs, he’s arguing for a doctrine of creation that is intellectually responsible in a post-Hubble, post-Darwin world. The subtext is pointed: a theology that refuses empirical reality isn’t pious, it’s brittle.

Context matters because Polkinghorne isn’t a secular scold; he’s a rare hybrid (working physicist turned Anglican priest) trying to keep both languages from becoming caricatures. His phrase "evolutionary character of cosmic history" widens the frame beyond biology to galaxies, elements, time itself. Creation, in this view, is not a single back-then event but an ongoing, lawful, unfolding process. He’s inviting theology to trade the comfort of immediacy (instant manufacture) for the harder, richer idea that divine creativity might operate through deep time, contingency, and a universe that makes itself, slowly, without ceasing to be made.