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Hill: As you have considered the difficult problem of evil, have you also considered another problem: the problem of goodness or the problem of gratitude? It has been said that one of the dilemmas of an atheist is that there is no one to thank.
We live in a world that is a very curious mixture. There is a great deal of beauty; there is a great deal of joy; there is a great deal of fulfillment in the world. But there is also a great deal of bitterness and agony. And it's very hard to see how those two fit together. I think the problem of pain and suffering is a very great problem, and I don't think there is any very simple, one-line answer to it. When I was a parish priest, of course, I was very often with people in times of very great trouble and distress, bereavement, or severe illness. Very often all you could do would be to be with them silently, prayerfully, trying to hold them in the presence of God, trying perhaps to mediate something of the love of God to them. You certainly couldn't breeze in and say: "Look, this is why this is happening to you." There is a mystery there, and often we have to be silent before that mystery.
Giberson: How did you happen to choose physics as a career?
Well, I was a bright little boy at school, and I rather liked being top. I was good at mathematics and also later on got very much enthused with it. I went for mathematics first of all because I liked getting things right, and you can get things right in mathematics. But then I saw something of the beauty and power of mathematics. And I had a very influential, very fine teacher at school who opened up some of these aspects of mathematics. And when I went to university, I went to study mathematics. I went to Trinity College, Cambridge, which is Newton's old college, but it has a strong mathematical tradition. During my undergraduate days, I realized that we can use mathematics as a key to unlock the structure and secrets of the physical universe. That was a very powerful thought to me. So when I came to do a Ph.D., I decided that I wouldn't stick to mathematics proper; I would move over to theoretical physics. And that's what I did, and then I had a 25- to 30-year career in theoretical physics resulting from that.
Giberson: What do you consider to be your greatest contribution—the legacy of John Polkinghorne—to physics?
Well, I was a minor player in a very big collaborative exercise. There were very great and creative physicists who were the leaders of our thought, and the rest of us were filling in the details and doing little bits. I think probably the work I feel most happy about is that I learned how to make models of processes which combine quantum mechanics with relativity, which you have to do with small, fast-moving elementary particles. And we used some of those models to explore fairly extreme regimes, very high-energy regimes or regimes where there was a very great transfer of momentum. Those extreme regimes are also simple regimes, and in them one can exhibit something of the structure of matter. And those models played some small, but real, part in elucidating the quark structure of matter. I think those are the results for which I feel the greatest satisfaction.
Giberson: During this period in which you were working as a physicist, were you wrestling intellectually with the science-and-religion questions that engage you now?
I was thinking about them. I was a worshiping Christian, and I was trying to think about my Christian faith. Wrestling, I think, would be too strong a word. I tried to think about the complexities, but that was not looming enormously large in my life. I was a young parent, and I had all the demands of family life and all the demands of my professional career. That is what probably loomed largest of all during my late twenties, thirties, and early forties.
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