Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T01:00:29.227Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Competing conceptions of God: the personal God versus the God beyond being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2014

MIKAEL STENMARK
MIKAEL STENMARK*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Box 511, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Among philosophers and theologians today, one of the most important dividing lines is the one separating those who advocate a personal conception of God (personal theism) from those who embrace the idea of a God beyond or without being (alterity theism). There is not much dialogue between these groups of scholars; rather the two groups ignore each other, and each party typically believes that there is a fairly straightforward knockdown argument against the other. In this article I explore these two standard objections – the idolatry objection and the no-sense objection – and show why they both fail to be convincing. This failure to convince is a good thing, because it opens up the possibility that both personal theism and alterity theism are legitimate research programmes, each worthy of being further developed in philosophical theology.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 205 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Armstrong, Karen (2009) The Case for God (New York: Anchor Books).Google Scholar
Dawkins, Richard (1989) The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Evans, C. Stephen (1996) ‘On taking God seriously’, in Wainwright, William J. (ed.) God, Philosophy, and Academic Culture (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 59–70.Google Scholar
Farley, Edward (1996) Divine Empathy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).Google Scholar
Gleeson, Andrew H. (2010) ‘The power of God’, Sophia, 49, 603–616.Google Scholar
Grigg, Richard (2008) Beyond the God Delusion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).Google Scholar
Hasker, William (2010) ‘Which God? What power?’, Sophia, 49, 433–445.Google Scholar
Hick, John (1989) An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Hyman, Gavin (2010) A Short History of Atheism (London: I. B. Tauris).Google Scholar
Insole, Christopher (2001) ‘Anthropomorphism and the apophatic God’, Modern Theology, 17, 475–483.Google Scholar
Kaufman, Gordon D. (1981) The Theological Imagination (Philadelphia: Westminster Press).Google Scholar
Kim, Jaegwon (1998) Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).Google Scholar
Meltzer, Françoise & Tracy, David (1994) ‘Symposium on “God” ’, Critical Inquiry, 20, 569–571.Google Scholar
Phillips, D. Z. (1996) Introducing Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell).Google Scholar
Robbins, Jeffrey W. & Rodkey, Christopher D. (2010) ‘Beating “God” to death: radical theology and the new atheism’, in Amarasingam, Amarnath (ed.) Religion and the New Atheism (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 25–36.Google Scholar
Stenmark, Mikael (2013) ‘Religious naturalism and its rivals’, Religious Studies, 49, 529–550.Google Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (2010) Is There a God? (rev. edn; Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Tillich, Paul (1951) Systematic Theology, I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
van Inwagen, Peter (2006) The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wildman, Wesley J. (2006) ‘Ground-of-being theologies’, in Clayton, Philip & Simpson, Zachary (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 612–632.Google Scholar