hey postodave
I was almost ready to give up on seeing any replies - thanks!
When you say "pantheistic" is that a typo?
It is in
Quarks, Chaos and Christianity that I see hints of panentheism -- or maybe I should say process theology, as the larger category? -- such as where Polkinghorne says that he believes that God does not know the future, and that God discovers the future in the same way we do, as it unfolds.
In the same book, he describes the "free process" of the inanimate universe, analogous to the free will of humans, where creation is allowed the freedom to cause evil such as earthquakes or cancer, outside of the direct will of God. I'm not sure yet what to make of this idea - it's very interesting, but I'm still trying to think it through.
I too am a complete amateur when it comes to physics - most of what I know about it comes from people like Paul Davies. I enjoy reading about the concepts, as long as equations don't show up on the page. And my knowledge of theology is also quite thin in many places -- I should read theology more systematically, but at the moment I'm a theological dabbler and dilettante.