God, the Divine, and the Divine Attributes

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers the place of God in euteleological theism. It argues that God is not to be identified with any entity in euteleology’s basic ontology—not with the Universe as a whole, or with reality’s principle of unity (its eutelicity), or with the supreme good which is reality’s telos, or with concrete realizations of reality’s telos. Yet euteleology accepts that truths may be conveyed by claims about God’s acting in creating and within creation. It provides an account of creation ex nihilo and of God’s distinctness from creation, as well as of the divine attributes. It generally leaves in place traditional scriptural, liturgical, and creedal personal language about God. Personal language about God is understood by a radical analogous extension or projection from our understanding of personal language as applied to human agents, where the very thought of God as an entity is itself possible only by a process of extending by analogy our ‘thing-property’ schema to apply to the unique case of ultimate reality itself. In ways we cannot fully comprehend, the truth-makers for these analogously constructed claims will be some aspect of ultimate reality itself being the way it is when euteleological theism is true. Despite its account of God-as-a-thing as a cognitive construction, it is argued that a euteleological theism is robustly realist. The chapter concludes by discussing the sense(s) in which euteleology may be regarded as a panentheism.