JOHN POLKINGHORNE ON DIVINE ACTION

This essay investigates John Polkinghorne's concept of divine action. I argue that one of Polkinghorne's key innovations was to introduce the paradigm of 'information-input causation' into the theory of divine action. However, despite this achievement, I show that Polkinghorne's approach is trapped in an insuperable dilemma: it either can be reduced to classical non-informational causal accounts of divine action or turns God into a cause among others.