“A Cross Cultural Perspective on God’s Personhood” - Akshay Gupta (Wake Forest University)

Religious Studies, 2025

By Akshay Gupta

Is God a person, meaning that God has beliefs, emotions, desires, and other features of an active mental life sufficiently similar to ours? This question has sparked an ongoing discussion across cultures. In a recent paper here, I argue that the answer to this question is “yes.”

One argument in favor of God being a person is what I call the “greatness of personhood argument.” Here’s a quick presentation of the argument:

1) God is the greatest (Premise).

2) The greatest possesses the greatest combination of great-making properties, namely, a combination of great-making properties such that there is no other combination of great-making properties that anyone or anything could possess to be greater (Premise).

Therefore,

Conclusion 1: God possesses the greatest combination of great-making properties, namely, a combination of great-making properties such that there is no other combination of great-making properties that anyone or anything could possess to be greater (From Premises 1-2).

3) The greatest combination of great-making properties is such that it includes personhood.

Therefore,

Conclusion 2: God possesses personhood (i.e., God is a person) (From Conclusion 1 and Premise 3).

Premise 1 is a core commitment for many theists. A denial of premise 2 raises the question: By virtue of what is God the greatest, if not due to the fact that God has great-making properties? So, those premises seem to be on solid ground (in the above linked paper, I consider and respond to some additional responses one can make to try to deny these premises). Premise 3 is what I consider the most controversial premise.

The following thought experiment can be used to defend premise 3. Think of your best friend. Now, imagine that someone created a zombie version of your best friend that could replicate your best friend’s behavior. It would tell the same jokes, go surfing with you, talk about the latest Star Wars movie with you, and so on. The only difference between this zombie and your best friend is that your friend is a person because they have a rich mental life comprising beliefs, desires, emotions, phenomenal consciousness, etc., whereas the zombie, though exhibiting the same behavior as your best friend, is not a person because they lack such a mental life. For instance, if this zombie and your best friend stub their toe, they would both cry out in pain. However, the zombie would not feel anything from this incident, whereas your best friend would. Or, suppose this zombie and your best friend both went to a concert. Your best friend would go to this concert because they thought about going and then voluntarily chose to do so, whereas this zombie would go because its brain activity led it to purchase tickets mindlessly and go to the concert.

Now, you are given a choice. You can rewind a time machine, and instead of spending your life with your best friend, you can spend it with this zombie. Call this the zombie option. Crucially, your life would continue on a similar trajectory, meaning that the only differences in your life if you chose the zombie option are the differences caused by your reaction to your best friend being a zombie. So, if you did not have any reaction to your best friend being a zombie, you would continue to have precisely the same experiences and memories with your best friend, in which case, the only difference in your life if you were to choose the zombie option is that your best friend is now a zombie instead of a person. Let us even say that you would be given an extra one thousand dollars if you chose the zombie option. Would you choose this option? If you are like most people, then it is likely that you would not.

What explains the intuition driving this refusal? One explanation is that we prefer persons over non-persons because we prefer things that are greater than other things, and persons are greater than non-persons. Another explanation is that properties that improve the value of the world are great-making properties, and personhood improves the value of the world and is hence a great-making property – thus accounting for why we prefer persons over non-persons. Either explanation would support the view that personhood is a great-making property, which would suggest that the greatest combination of great-making properties includes personhood. In the linked paper above, I address some of the responses one can make to challenge either of these explanations.

In addition to the above argument, there is also a dilemma for those who deny that God is a person. I will present it here briefly: Either God has a will, an intellect, cognitive capacities, etc., or God does not. If God has a will, intellect, cognitive capacities, etc., that are sufficiently similar to ours, then it seems that God should be a person, for these are things that we possess, and we are persons. Moreover, it seems that we are persons precisely because we have a will, intellect, cognitive capacities, etc. Hence, it seems that these things are essentially connected with personhood. Thus, if God does possess these things, it is difficult to answer the question: In what sense is God not a person? All the persons we observe have a will, intellect, cognitive capacities, etc., so the natural conclusion to draw is that if God has these, then God is a person too. This is the first horn of the dilemma.

The second horn of this dilemma is to deny that God lacks a will, intellect, cognitive capacities, etc. Choosing this horn makes it difficult to explain how God can make the world. Moreover, if one chooses this horn, it is even more difficult to explain other features of this world that are commonly drawn on to formulate theistic arguments, such as the universe’s regularities or its dimensionless parameters or “constants” that are finely-tuned for life. This is because an agent (such as a personal God) who brings about such features (arguably) best explains them. Thus, either response to this dilemma is problematic for those who deny God’s personhood.