[10] He was educated at Watford Grammar School for Boys,[8] Exeter College, Oxford (BA 1945, MA 1948, BSc 1947, DPhil 1948, DSc 1962, DD 1982), and the University of Birmingham (DipTh 1960, BD 1971).

[8][12] Apart from one year during which he was Royden B. Davis Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University (1994), he spent the rest of his life in Oxford, living in St John Street, just across the road from another eminent theologian, Henry Chadwick.

[8][9] Although Peacocke is best known today for his work in theology (see below) he also published more than eighty papers in biochemistry, particularly in relation to acridines,[18] spectroscopy[19][20] and enzymology.

Arthur Peacocke describes a position which is referred to elsewhere as "front-loading", after the fact that it suggests that evolution is entirely consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful God who exists throughout time, sets initial conditions and natural laws, and knows what the result will be.

The process-as-immanence argument is meant to deal with Phillip Johnson's contention that naturalism reduces God to a distant entity.

"[25] There is no metaphysical implication of the physical fact of "chance"; randomness in mutation of DNA "does not, in itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trends of manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms, populations and eco-systems.

Peacocke suggests that the evolutionary process is characterized by propensities towards increase in complexity, information-processing and –storage, consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness… the actual physical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actualized and instantiated is contingent on the history of the confluence of disparate chains of events, including the survival of the mass extinctions that have occurred.

Peacocke contends that the capacities necessary for consciousness and thus a relationship with God also enable their possessors to experience pain, as necessary for identifying injury and disease.

Peacocke also takes an eastern argument for natural evil of that which made must be unmade for a new making to occur; there is no creation without destruction.

The Jesus-as-pinnacle-of-human-evolution argument proposed by Peacocke is that Jesus Christ is the actualisation of [evolutionary] potentiality can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity ....

This list is in part a survey of deliberations that occurred at the World Council of Churches Conference on "Faith, Science and the Future", Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979.