The Cambridge don who saw beyond Hawking

National Post, 25 March 2021

John Polkinghorne was a pioneer in quantum physics before resigning his academic post in 1979 to study for the Anglican priesthood.

When I was at Cambridge in the mid-1990s, there were two accomplished physicists on campus who enjoyed a widespread popular following. Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics — a chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton — was the more famous of the two. John Polkinghorne was the other, who died a fortnight ago at age 90.

Polkinghorne was president of Queens’ College during my time on campus, a post once held by St. John Fisher, the brilliant scholar who brought Erasmus to Cambridge. Fisher would be martyred by Henry VIII.

Polkinghorne was a young pioneer in quantum physics before resigning his academic post in 1979 to study for the Anglican priesthood. After ordination he did pastoral work before returning to the academy, eventually writing some two dozen books and becoming one of the world’s leading scholars on the relationship of religion and science.

Polkinghorne belonged to an older tradition which did not see an opposition between faith and science. To the contrary, his conviction that the world was created by an ordered intelligence is what made science possible. Hawking came from a newer tradition, an alternative faith really, of scientific materialism, tinged with secular fundamentalism.

Occasionally, Hawking would let his guard down, and confess that he, too, was fascinated by the questions science cannot answer.

“I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing,” he told ABC News in 2010.

Science is not much help with that. The scientific method requires that something exist to be measured as a starting point. If there is nothing the inquiry cannot begin. Measurement requires existence; prior to existence there can be no science. That’s for philosophy and theology.

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