Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy spin-off from that necessity. The universe has proved to be astonishingly rationally transparent, and the human mind remarkable apt to the comprehension of its structure. We can penetrate the secrets of the subatomic realm of quarks and gluons, and we can make maps of cosmic curved spacetime, both regimes that have no direct practical impact upon us, and both exhibiting properties that are counterintuitive in relation to our ordinary habits of thought. Our understanding of the workings of the world greatly exceed anything that could simply be required for human survival.”

Mathematics is a particularly penetrating illustration of the point. Though “mathematics is pure thought,” yet it enables us to discern the inner structure and beauty of the physical universe. Polkinghorne quotes Eugene Wigner’s comment about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” and notes that for Wigner mathematics is “a gift that we neither deserved nor understood.”