God and Personality

One of the theoretical I've been struggling with in my religious thoughts is whether God could even be a personal being. I've been thinking that the cosmological argument may be sound; but if it is, it may actually work against the typical religious notion of God.

First, what is a person? It seems that to be a person, one must be both finite and infinite. What the heck do I mean by that? I mean that one must be delimited in certain ways: one makes some actions instead of others, is in encounterable in some times and places instead of others, and so forth. Without these delimitations as well as contingency, I really don't know what it is to be personal in any contemporary sense. But at the same time, persons also exceed their given situations. A person is not merely their current circumstances, but can continue past them. A person is open to new thoughts, new experiences, new life, and in this way is not delimited.

So, if this is what it is to be personal, then there are two ways in which something could be impersonal. A rock, for example, is subpersonal. It is finite, but it lacks the openness which constitutes persons. It may not even technically exist at all because of this as an individual rock, but I leave that for another discussion. Alternatively, something could be suprapersonal by lacking finitude.

Now, the cosmological argument basically says that everything we encounter is finite and contingent, and that some infinite, necessary cause grounds the world. But, if this cause is truly freed from all concerns of finitude, then it would for that reason be suprapersonal. How does the infinite and necessary choose to create this world instead of that? How does it answers these specific prayers and not those? How is it encountered in this way and not that? How does it make these decisions and then those? These are all contingent and finite actions. The Necessary Existent, by constrast, must be by its very nature necessary and infinite; these are not simply added accidents, but constitutive of what it is. I'm pretty sure that such an Existent must be simple too, though I realize that this is not popular in much modern thought.

If this is the case, then, then that which grounds all reality, the Ultimate Being, is suprapersonal. It is not the God which many people go out to worship; the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But if the cosmological argument does not work (and I think that the ontological argument would result in the same problem), or if it somehow gave us a being that merely had the status of being a brute, necessary fact about the world (whatever the heck that might mean), then it would be useless for showing that there is any explanation for the world as it is.

Does this mean there is no personal God, then? I'm not sure that it does. It merely shows that such a God cannot be the Ultimate Being. But must God be such a being? Maybe God is merely the highest personal being; that being which, although finite and contingent in many ways, is still more powerful, wise, and worthy of worship than any other personal being, and enough so to run the world of other contingent and finite beings. Such a God would not have created the world ex nihilo perhaps, but maybe that is not required either (Genesis doesn't require it, for example); God would then be a demiurge instead, like in the Timaeus or in some Hindu thought. And maybe worship can only properly be given to another person, so the fact that God is still below the Ultimate Being (or being itself, or the ground of being) isn't the worst thing in the world. Although it would still seem to make God a relative end, rather than an absolute final cause of the world and our affections, but that is another issue.