Science Quote by John Polkinghorne

A mild sentence with a sharp edge: Polkinghorne isn’t politely suggesting theologians pick up a science magazine. He’s warning that “taking creation seriously” can’t mean treating creation as a sealed biblical concept, insulated from what the created world actually discloses. Coming from a working physicist-turned-priest, the line carries insider authority on both sides of a long, brittle argument. It’s a rebuke to theological seriousness that remains willfully incurious about evidence.

The phrase “science’s story” does heavy lifting. Story here isn’t “mere narrative” in the dismissive sense; it’s a claim that science offers a coherent account with plot elements theology has to reckon with: deep time, cosmic evolution, contingency, indifference, emergence. Polkinghorne implies that doctrines of creation gain credibility and texture when they engage this account rather than competing with it on science’s turf (literalist timelines, pseudo-astronomy) or retreating into abstract metaphysics. If you want to speak about a Creator, you should be able to speak about what’s been created without flinching.

Subtext: the real scandal isn’t scientific discovery but theological fragility. A doctrine that collapses when confronted with geology or genetics wasn’t robust; it was protected. Polkinghorne is also disciplining science, quietly: it has a “story,” not a final pronouncement. That leaves room for theology, but only if it grows up and learns the grammar of the world science describes. The context is late-20th-century culture-war noise, and his move is to refuse the binary: faithful thinking should be empirically literate, not defiantly ignorant.