Nudging John Polkinghorne
Abstract
John Polkinghorne proposes that God interacts with the world by feeding information into chaotic systems. This influences the course of these systems and, since they underlie what goes on in the world, enables God to influence the world. While I applaud Polkinghorne’s insistence that God interacts physically with the world, his model for this faces several problems. Some of these he might rectify, but others look quite thorny. I also suggest an alternative God-world relation where God is the world-as-a-whole. This includes many of the benefits of Polkinghorne’s central chaos idea and avoids its problems