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A harried team of TV executives, desperate to hold on to their market share, will consider almost anything. Pilot for a new series: Hero is a particle physicist turned Anglican priest. Fish out of water, you see—and remember, religion is hot. Science is sexy, too: Think Stephen Hawking without the wheelchair and squawk box. Rosy cheeks, a fringe of white hair, benevolent, quintessentially British.

Alas, we'll probably never see that series. But the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne is real enough. In fact, he's recently been awarded the 2002 Templeton Prize. Through his voluminous writings, lectures, and public debates with leading scientists, Polkinghorne has become an effective champion of constructive dialogue between orthodox Christianity and contemporary science.

Polkinghorne spent the bulk of a distinguished scientific career at Cambridge University as a professor of mathematical physics. He generated scores of scientific essays in leading journals and mentored hundreds of graduate students while exploring the detailed structure of matter. Polkinghorne's own estimate of his career is very modest. He believes that scientific revolutions occur primarily through the extraordinary insights of a single genius who repackages the world in a brand new way, and he describes himself as merely an "honest toiler"—one who works out the details of scientific revolutions inaugurated by others.

This honest toiler in physics was, nevertheless, at the cutting edge of a scientific revolution, one that peeled back the final layer of the onion of matter, revealing a world of exotic elementary particles with names like quark and gluon and properties like charm and strangeness. His scientific achievements—making mathematical models of tiny quantum particles—were recognized in 1974 when he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining the ranks of Newton, Darwin, Hawking, and other luminaries.

Mathematical physics is arguably the most challenging field in all of science. The combination of mathematical prowess and creativity required to be a player makes it a game for the young. There is a standard joke that if you have not won your Nobel Prize by age 27, there is no hope for you. Partially with this in mind, Polkinghorne resigned his prestigious appointment at Cambridge in 1979, creating academic space for a junior physicist—and space for Polkinghorne to explore his first love, the Christian faith.

In 1982, after undergoing the requisite theological training, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. He served for several years in a working-class parish at Bristol in Kent, discharging his duties without fanfare but experiencing more deeply than ever the fellowship of the body of Christ and the richness of the Christian tradition.

His dumbfounded former scientific colleagues raised their eyebrows when they saw Polkinghorne sporting a clerical collar. In response, he wrote The Way the World Is, in which he explained why a thinking person can be a Christian.

This was the first of many Polkinghorne books that employ what he describes as "bottom-up" thinking: seeking to make sense out of what we find in the world.

With One World (1986), Science and Creation (1988), Science and Providence (1989), and Reason and Reality (1991), he earned increasing recognition as a seminal thinker in the emerging field of science and religion—a reputation sealed in 1993, when he delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures.

The Gifford Lectures are an annual series endowed by Lord Gifford in 1887 to explore "natural theology" as if it were a "strictly natural science." Many of the greatest intellectuals of the past century have been Gifford lecturers, among them William James, Karl Barth, Alfred North Whitehead, Niels Bohr, and Freeman Dyson (the 2000 winner of the Templeton Prize).

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May 21 2002, Vol. 46, No. 6