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My guest this hour is physicist and theologian John Polkinghorn. He explains how he applies the deepest insights of quantum physics to religious mysteries and finds new ways to think about prayer, evil, evolution, and the afterlife.

John Polkinghorn's perspective largely transcends popularized arguments that set scientific reason and religion at odds.

He's written both science and religion are needed to interpret and understand the rich, varied, and surprising way the world actually is.

From American public media, I'm Chris DeTibrit, today on being Quarks and Creation.

For 25 years, John Polkinghorn distinguished himself in the field of elementary particle physics as a professor at Cambridge.

In 1974, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society, the scientific academy to which Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking have also all been admitted.

Then at the age of 49, John Polkinghorn became a student again this time of theology.

My life changed in all sorts of ways at that transition point, but not in relation to the search for truth, both as a scientist and as a theologian.

That's the absolutely controlling factor. Is it true? Is the vital question.

John Polkinghorn eventually returned to Cambridge to think and teach at the interface between science and theology.

In Great Britain, he's chaired government initiatives to consider ethical issues raised by science.

In 1997, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Though as tradition dictates, Polkinghorn does not take the honorific title, sir, because as an ordained minister, he would not be expected to wield a sword.

I sat down with John Polkinghorn in 2005. It's striking right from the outset that his vocabulary about God and science tends to notions such as beauty, subtlety, and surprise.

If working in science teaches you anything, it is that the physical world is surprising. I mean, I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world is totally different from the world of everyday. It's cloudy, it's fitful.

You don't know where things are, if you know what they're doing, if you know what they're doing, you don't know where they are.

So that's a complex world, and quite different from what we expected, but it's an exciting world, because it turns out we can understand it, and when we do understand it, we have a deep intellectual satisfaction.

Now, if the physical world surprises us, and it's different from everyday expectation, common sense, if you like, it wouldn't be very odd, really, if God also turned that to be rather surprising.

Things that are just on the surface, easy to believe, are not the whole story. There is a deeper, stranger, and more satisfying story to be found, both in science and in religion.

I think I'd like to ask you about a few other words that you use, concepts, where I think you bring together both theality and religion, and flesh them out for me, and another one is beauty.

Well, beauty is a very interesting thing, and a form of beauty that is important to me is mathematical beauty. That's a rather austere form of aesthetic pleasure, but those of us who work in that area and speak that language can recognize it and agree about it.

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