Analysis and Examination of John Charlton Polkinghorne’s Theology of Divine Action

Document Type : Scholary

Authors

1 Department of Philosophy of Religion, Faculty of Theology, College of Farabi, University of Tehran, Qom, Iran

2 Department of Philosophy and Theology, Faculty of Theology, College of Farabi, University of Tehran, Qom, Iran

3 Department of Religions and Mysticism, Faculty of Theology, College of Farabi, University of Tehran, Qom, Iran

10.22059/jcis.2025.382608.1393

Abstract

As philosophy of religion is concerned, divine action has been one of the challenges which has received much attention on how God does His actions within the natural order (within the human and physical world). John Polkinghorne seeks to address this issue with a quantum perspective. Given Polkinghorne’s background as a scientist and theologian, he addresses divine action due to his understanding of God's involvement in the mundane world. The research aims to clarify Polkinghorne’s complicated views on how God acts within the physical world. John Polkinghorne compares the relationship between God and the world to the relationship between a watchmaker and a watch, although he considers science and religion to be two complementary approaches for understanding the world. There is some kind of contradiction in the Polkinghorne’s theological approach to the divine intervention in the natural world, because he states, on the one hand, that God works in nature without violating the freedom of creatures in the physical world; on the other hand, he sees a kind of determinism in all three categories of actions that he considers for God. Although he acknowledges relative independence to some physical events in the special acts of God, this relative independence is the predestination that exists in the quantum space and chaos theory.

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References

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Classical and Contemporary Islamic Studies
Volume 7, Issue 2
July 2025
Pages 173-184

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