Many in the ISCAST community will be familiar with the work of John C. Polkinghorne (1930–2021), an English physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest, who made significant contributions to the study of science and religion, and was an ISCAST visiting lecturer in Australia in 1993.
In November 2006, Polkinghorne visited Hong Kong Baptist University, where he gave a public lecture and had a discussion with Chen Ning Yang, a well-known professor of theoretical physics.
This was a groundbreaking visit, according to John Z. Shi, author of a new paper in ISCAST’s journal, Christian Perspectives on Science and Technology (CPOSAT). He analyses how Polkinghorne’s visit helped introduce the study of science and religion to people in Hong Kong and mainland China, starting an important East–West conversation.
Polkinghorne believed that “science and religion are basically friends and not foes because they are both concerned with the search for the truth,” and Yang shared a similar view, saying that “science and religion belong to one family from the beginning.”
Along with context and commentary about the visit’s importance and role in sharing science–faith insights, Shi’s paper includes the full transcript from Polkinghorne’s lecture and captures the audience’s questions from the Q&A session, now available in English for the first time.
Read the full paper in CPOSAT.
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