Feynman’s voice and personality come through clearly. He talks about real people and their problems, not about philosophical abstractions. He is interested in religion as a way for people to make sense of their lives, but he is not interested in theology.Read more at location 4278
Polkinghorne has the opposite bias. He is a scientist who is also an ordained minister of the Church of England. To be ordained, he went through formal training in theology. For him, theology is as real and as serious as science.Read more at location 4280
Polkinghorne compares two historic intellectual struggles, one from science and one from religion. From science he takes the discovery and development of quantum mechanics, a struggle that has lasted from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. From religion he takes the theological understanding of the nature of Jesus, a struggle that lasted from the time when Saint Paul was writing his letters shortly after Jesus’ death to the modern era of diverse views and diminished certainties.Read more at location 4284
Polkinghorne argues from the detailed concordance of the two struggles that science and theology are two aspects of a single intellectual adventure. He sees theology as dealing with God in essentially the same way as science is dealing with nature.Read more at location 4297
To share it, you must disregard a crucial difference between science and theology. When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. Quantum mechanics works equally in all countries and in all cultures.Read more at location 4300
If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne’s culture, where words such as “incarnation” and “trinity” have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision.Read more at location 4304
Feynman has no interest in scholastic arguments. He is concerned only with human problems. He has a deep respect for religion, because he sees it as helping people to behave well toward one another and to be brave in facing tragedy.Read more at location 4307
He writes about students who come to college from homes where religious belief is strong, and then find that exposure to modern science is calling their beliefs into question. He has seen at first hand the anguish that some of these students experience.Read more at location 4310
Most Christian believers are able to reconcile their general belief in God and in the teachings of Jesus with a considerable skepticism about details.Read more at location 4316
It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. There is nothing analogous to theology in Judaism or in Islam. I do not know much about Hinduism and Buddhism, but my Asian friends tell me that these religions also have no theology. They have beliefs and stories and ceremonies and rulesRead more at location 4329
The prominence of theology in the Christian world has had two important consequences for the history of science. On the one hand, Western science grew out of Christian theology. It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena.Read more at location 4333
On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that do not exist between science and other religions.Read more at location 4336
Polkinghorne writes books to prove to himself and to us that his theology and his science can live together harmoniously.Read more at location 4340
The Bible story tells us that when Jesus was twelve years old and his family was visiting Jerusalem, he seized the opportunity to spend three days talking with the learned doctors in the Temple, and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding. Whether that story is true or not, he must have had many opportunities to sharpen his understanding by talking with the learned doctors in Zippori.Read more at location 4368
After visiting Capernaum, I no longer think of Peter and Andrew as simple fishermen. I think of them as young men about town, who made a living by fishing but were also immersed in the Greek culture of the city.Read more at location 4378
Jesus was no simple peasant, but grew up in intimate contact with an urban and overwhelmingly Greek culture.Read more at location 4383
the man who took charge of the new religion, Saint Paul of Tarsus, was a thoroughly Hellenized Jew. Saint Paul preached to the learned men of Athens in their own language. In his writings he laid the foundations for what became orthodox Christian doctrine.Read more at location 4388
This history has left Western civilization with a strangely divided legacy. On the one hand, the religion of Jesus as we find it in his teachings recorded in the gospels, a religion for ordinary people trying to find their way in a harsh world. On the other hand, the theology that turned the Christian religion into a demanding intellectual discipline, a breeding ground for scholars and ultimately for scientists. Feynman is writing about the first, Polkinghorne about the second.Read more at location 4392
The fourth gospel, the Gospel of Saint John, shows us a very different Jesus, much more Greek in spirit,Read more at location 4403
