Personal and non-personal worship
Abstract
Is it possible to worship a non-personal God? According to some, the answer is no: worship necessarily involves addressing the object of one’s worship. Since non-personal gods cannot acknowledge or respond to address, it must be conceptually inappropriate to worship such gods. I object to this argument on two fronts. First, I show that the concept of worship used is too narrow, excluding many cases that obviously count as instances of worship. And, secondly, drawing on recent work on the philosophy of object knowledge, I argue that addressing non-personal gods might not be as conceptually confused as it first appears. Thus, it at least possible to worship a non-personal God.
Citation
Cockayne , J 2020 , ' Personal and non-personal worship ' , European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , vol. 12 , no. 1 , pp. 1-20 . https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2711
Publication
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1689-8311Type
Journal article
Collections
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