Personal and non-personal worship

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal for philosophy of religion
Main Author: Cockayne, Joshua 1990- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: University of Innsbruck in cooperation with the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham [2020]
In: European journal for philosophy of religion
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Worship of God / God / Person / Veneration / Panentheism
IxTheo Classification:AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism
AG Religious life; material religion
NBC Doctrine of God
Further subjects:B Pantheism
B Worship
B Personal
B Non-personal
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary: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.
Contains:Enthalten in: European journal for philosophy of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2711