The Physicist Priest

Faith, Science and Understanding

by John Polkinghorne

Yale University Press, 208 pp.

John Polkinghorne made quite a splash in the world of science when, 20 years ago, he left his position as a professor of physics in the University of Cambridge to train for the Anglican priesthood. Coming at a time when received intellectual wisdom held that science had faith on the run and was about to disprove it altogether, Polkinghorne's departure in the other direction came as such a shock in many quarters that he was spoken of as if he had gone daft. Hardly: Polkinghorne was ahead of his time, anticipating the ongoing shift among intellectuals, toward thinking that science and religion questions are far from settled.

Ordained in 1982, Polkinghorne worked for a while as a parish priest, then returned to Cambridge, eventually becoming president of Queens College. He retired from the college in 1996 and was knighted in 1997, as much for his high-profile endorsement of Anglicanism, which is foundering in Britain in numbers and public image, as for his many accomplishments in science and religion. Today Polkinghorne is the sole ordained fellow of the Royal Society--Britain's equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, and an institution that, in the 19th century, was composed mainly of clergy members.

Polkinghorne's several books on the boundary between science and religion have been popular in Europe, although are not as well-known as they deserve in the United States, and his 1994 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh are viewed as classics in that important series. To this body of work Polkinghorne now adds "Faith, Science and Understanding."

Unfortunately the book is not as impressive as some of Polkinghorne earlier efforts, such as the 1994 "The Faith of a Physicist." The new book tends to wander across well-traveled terrain, not seeking any clear destination and never arriving at one. "Faith, Science and Understanding" is also painfully self-referential. Polkinghorne cites his own writing more often than most readers would rather, and when he double-cites himself--"in my book Scientists as Theologians, I surveyed the thinking of three scientist-theologians, Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and myself"--readers may wince.

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