Well, good evening and welcome to Socrates in the city, the thinking person's alternative to watching Spike TV or oxygen.

I'm Eric Mataxis, your host for the evening, and I'm thrilled to see so many people here.

In case anybody comes in late, there are seats just around the edges now, I guess.

But it is a thrill to see such a large group here tonight.

I know that there are millions and even billions of people who chose not to be here tonight, and they are, in fact, not here tonight.

But, listen, I'm an optimist, and I choose to see the glass half full, or a billionth full or whatever it is.

It works out.

But anyway, tonight we will hear from Sir John Polkinghorn, K-B-E-F-R-S, notorious B-I-G.

And I'll tell you more about him and his train of initials in a moment. But for those of you who are new to Socrates,

let me say a bit about who we are. First of all, no matter what you hear,

we are not a UFO cult. Actually, that's not true. We are a UFO cult, and very much so.

But I should say that we're a UFO cult in the most positive sense of that term,

which is to say only a few of us believe that the mothership is hiding behind the moon,

waiting for the signal to come on down and take us home.

Anyway, there are just a few of those kind of hardcore UFO freaks here, and you know who they are because they're the ones who wear the purple jumpsuits, you know, in their minds, you know.

I just had to get that off my chest, thank you. But seriously, about Socrates in the city, Socrates in the city takes its name from Socrates, who said that the unexamined life is not worth living. And I think he was on to something there. A number of my friends thought he was on to something there. And we decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to create a forum where we might examine our lives a bit. So we decided to invite brilliant thinkers like Sir John Polkinghorn and ask them to talk about the big questions,

what we call life, God, and other small topics.

And here we are.

Over the last four years or so, we've had a dizzying array of speakers.

I don't mean literally dizzying, but you know, you get the idea.

Among our speakers have been folks like Boston College's Peter Craft, who spoke on the subject,

making sense out of suffering. It's rather a big question for most of us who think.

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