BLACKSBURG - "You are stardust," the speaker told a packed conference room on the Virginia Tech campus.

He wasn't there to lecture on poetry or romance, but on what he believes should be the harmonious interaction of science and religion. Science attempts to explain how the stars - and human beings - developed. Religion seeks the answer to "why is science possible at all?" said the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne.

As a scientist and theologian, he contends that both fields are essential to enlighten and enrich us.

Polkinghorne was in the New River Valley earlier this week as the speaker for this year's Smyth Lecture Series at Blacksburg Presbyterian Church. He was 2002 winner of the Templeton Prize, established in 1973 by an English investor to reward "progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities." Sir John Templeton funds an annual cash award greater than the Nobel Prizes - this year, $1.4 million.

Polkinghorne brings an unusual perspective to his passion for science and religion. He was professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University in England from 1958 to 1979. He contributed extensively to the understanding of quantum physics before deciding it was time to pursue another discipline.

He resumed the mantle of student, studying to become a priest in the Church of England. After ordination in 1981, he served as a parish priest and vicar before returning to Cambridge, first as a dean and chaplain then as president of Queen's College from 1989 until his retirement in 1996.

He is a prolific writer, whose books include "Science and Creation," "The Faith of a Physicist," and most recently, "Science and the Trinity" (Yale University Press, $24) - subjects he covered during his visit to the region.

In the easy, practiced style of someone who has repeated a lesson many times but retains a passion for his subject, Polkinghorne gave the Virginia Tech audience a 45-minute primer on science and religion, then took their questions for another half hour.

Out of the big bang, he said, came the two primary elements of the universe - hydrogen and helium. "But we need 20 to 30 elements for life," Polkinghorne said. Principal among them is carbon, which is capable in unique ways of combining into long chains of molecules.

"In the interior nuclear furnaces of stars" carbon was formed, he said, along with other elements. "Every atom of carbon in your body is from the stars. ... You are made from the ashes of burned-out stars."

Understanding that, however, doesn't explain how an essentially 4-billion-year-long process then came to create life on Earth, he said, much less how self-conscious life developed.

It's clear that there are almost incalculably "tight and demanding conditions" that must be met for life to exist, he said. Such complexity demands an explanation.

One is the "happy accident" theory that "all the finely tuned options that allow the creation of carbon-based life" happened by chance. But the odds against that are so long, Polkinghorne contends, that "I prefer the explanation that we are part of a cumulative effect" of an intentional design by a rational creator.

In his writings and interviews, Polkinghorne explains the apparent capriciousness of nature by adopting the belief that "God allows the world to be itself," as he told the magazine Cross Currents. The idea is to create "a picture of God halfway between tight control of everything, and just a deistic spectator," he said.

That leaves the scientist/priest with no problem believing what most Christians consider "the central miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ."

"God is not a showoff conjurer ... but can do new things," Polkinghorne believes, that "are consistent with the way he did old things." Polkinghorne sees miracles as "signs ... not just wonders."

Although he considers it less crucial to Christian teaching, Polkinghorne said, he also is "inclined to believe in the Virgin Birth." It fulfills for him the theological expression of the incarnation of God through "divine interaction and human participation."

But while he may share many of its doctrines, Polkinghorne has little patience for fundamentalism, which he said is often "too rigid" and "absolute."

People are seeking a balance of the insights of both religion and science for some of the stickiest current issues, such as homosexuality, abortion and stem-cell research, he said.

"I don't think science settles the issue, but deepens and extends the context in which it can be considered," Polkinghorne said. "It changes the context in which discussion takes place."

Homosexuality, for instance, once was thought to be a matter of choice, but now is widely believed to be at least in part a matter of inheritance or innate orientation, Polkinghorne said.

On the question of stem-cell research, "the central issue is whether an early embryo is a fully human person or not. That's hard to settle and will not be settled by scientific adjudication."

With such dilemmas, he said, "We need wisdom to discern the right path. Religion is not the only source of wisdom, but it is a source of wisdom" that Polkinghorne encourages the world to consider.