Is Polkinghorne's 'Active Information' a Plausible Means of Divine Action?

Armand Larive and Louis Gray

The question of continuing divine action over nature, when posed within the discipline of natural theology, requires a causal avenue that is ontologically open in order to avoid a God-of-the-gaps problem.  Most suggest a “bottom-up” causal path, where God could influence the collapse of quantum wave functions.  Polkinghorne, a physicist/theologian, suggests a different path, more intuitively appealing, because it is a “top-down,” non-reductionist path.  He argues that deterministic chaos, as found in nature, is, in practical terms, “open” to a divine influence that would affect the strange attractors chaos exhibits.  God would accomplish this, according to Polkinghorne, by  “holistic,” “contextual,” and “non-energetic” information.  But Polkinghorne offers little further help with what he means by ‘information.’  This paper speculates that if God influences chaotic processes in nature, she would need a Shannon-notion of information in order to unpack that process, and then a formative notion of information to implement her divine action.  We suggest this formative information could be a concurrent, divinely instituted chaotic process and use the non-linear formula for population suppression as an investigative model.  We conclude that Polkinghorne’s suggestion is plausible, subject to the limitation that it would be unknowable to humans, probably not entirely in God’s control, would place ‘formative’ information in a metaphysical category of its own, and would violate the scientific dictum that only like can cause like.