Personal and non-personal worship

Joshua Cockayne

doi:10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2711

Personal and non-personal worship

Joshua Cockayne

School of Divinity

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-20
Journal	European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Volume	12
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2711
Publication status	Published - 26 Mar 2020

Keywords

Worship
Pantheism
Personal
Non-personal

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10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2711

Cockayne_2020_EJPR_Personal_AAM
Copyright © 2020 European Journal for Philosophy of Religion. . This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2711
Accepted author manuscript, 249 KB

Cite this

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Personal and non-personal worship

Abstract

Keywords

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