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Synopsis from Yale Books: 

Selected by Booklist as one of the Top Ten Books in Religion in 1998; Winner of a 1999 Christianity Today Book Award; Included in Christianity Today’s list of Best Books Published in 1998; Winner of the 1999 Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences given by The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences; Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of 1998; Shortlisted for a 2000 TORGI (Talking Book of the Year) Award, sponsored by The Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Chosen as one of the "Books of Distinction" in the Science and Religion category by the John Templeton Foundation  

John Polkinghorne is a major figure in today’s debates over the compatibility of science and religion. Internationally known as both a theoretical physicist and a theologian—the only ordained member of the Royal Society—Polkinghorne brings unique qualifications to his inquiry into the possibilities of believing in God in an age of science. In this thought-provoking book, the author focuses on the collegiality between science and theology, contending that these "intellectual cousins" are both concerned with interpreted experience and with the quest for truth about reality. He argues eloquently that scientific and theological inquiries are parallel.

The book begins with a discussion of what belief in God can mean in our times. Polkinghorne explores a new natural theology and emphasizes the importance of moral and aesthetic experience and the human intuition of value and hope. In other chapters, he compares science’s struggle to understand the nature of light with Christian theology’s struggle to understand the nature of Christ. He addresses the question, Does God act in the physical world? And he extends his ideas about the role of chaos theory, surveys the prospects for future dialogue between scientific and theological thinkers, and defends a critical realist understanding of the activities of both disciplines. Polkinghorne concludes with a consideration of the nature of mathematical truths and the links between the complementary realities of physical and mental experience.

John Polkinghorne, F.R.S., K.B.E., is past president and now fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Liverpool, England. He is also the author of The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker.