Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They dont start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true they just hope to find out what reality is like. – John Polkinghorne
If the experience of science teaches anything, its that the world is very strange and surprising. The many revolutions in science have certainly shown that. – John Polkinghorne
I also think we need to maintain distinctions – the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science. – John Polkinghorne
Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe. – John Polkinghorne