After outlining some well known problems with the ‚personal omniGod‘ understanding of theism, we motivate our preference for a ‚non-personalist‘ account which rejects the claim that God is literally a person or personal being. But if God is not a person, what is ‚He‘, and how can we make sense of religious practices, such as prayer and worship, which seem to presuppose God’s personhood? We will outline a ‚euteleological‘ metaphysics – according to which reality as such and as a whole has an overall purpose, and the contingent Universe exists ultimately only because that purpose is achieved within it. We’ll defend the claim that an Abrahamic theist worldview may be properly understood as resting on a fundamentally euteleological metaphysics.
John Bishop is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, and Ken Perszyk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waikato – Tauranga, New Zealand. For more than ten years they have collaborated on publications on the problem of evil and the concept of God. Their most recent work is God, Purpose and Reality: A Euteleological Understanding of Theism (Oxford University Press, 2023). They are currently working on a short book for the Cambridge University Press ‘Elements in Global Philosophy of Religion’ series on the topic of religious naturalism.