The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth.

After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like.

People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.

Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.

I need the binocular approach of science and religion if I am to do any sort of justice to the deep and rich reality of the world in which we live.