John Polkinghorne on Divine Action: a Coherent Theological Evolution

I examine John Polkinghorne's account of how God acts in the world, focusing on how his ideas developed with the consideration of the notion of kenosis, and how this development was not a rejection of his previous ideas, but on the contrary a fulfilling of his own personal philosophical and theological insights. Polkinghorne's thought can be distinguished in three different periods:1) divine action as input of active information (1988-2000/2001);2) Polkinghorne's reception of the notion of kenosis (2000-2004);3) Polkinghorne's "thought experiment" approach to his ideas on divine action (2004- ). Finally, I consider the question of internal coherence of this theological development, focusing on the transition from the first to the second period, which I believe to be the most significant

Revisiting Aquinas on Providence and Rising to the Challenge of Divine Action in Nature

Attempts to solve the issue of divine action in nature have resulted in many innovative proposals seeking to explain how God can act within nature without disrupting the created order but introducing novelty in the history of the universe. My goal is to show how Aquinas' doctrine of providence, mainly as expressed in his De Potentia Dei, fulfils the criteria for an account of divine action: that God's action is providential in the sense that God is involved in the individual and particular here and now

Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Divine Providence - De Potentia Dei 3, 7 and Super Librum de Causis Expositio

The main goal of this paper is tocompare how Thomas Aquinas expressedhis doctrine of providence through second-ary causes, making use of both Aristotelianand Neo-Platonic principles, in the seventharticle of the third question of his Quaes-tiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei and his Super Librum de Causis Expositio , in whichhe intends to solve the problem of themetaphysical mechanism by which God providentially guides creation. I will rst present his arguments as they appear inthe disputed questions, followed by a pre-sentation of his thought on the matter inhis commentary of the Liber de Causis , andconcluding with my comparative analysisof Aquinas’ solution to the issue of God’sprovidential activity in nature

The expected convex hull trimmed regions of a sample

Given a data set in the multivariate Euclidean space, we study regions of central points built by averaging all their subsets with a fixed number of elements. The averaging of these sets is performed by appropriately scaling the Minkowski or elementwise summation of their convex hulls. The volume of such central regions is proposed as a multivariate scatter estimate and a circular sequence algorithm to compute the central regions of a bivariate data set is described