Campus Location
Abilene Campus (Residential)
Date of Award
12-2019
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Frederick Aquino
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Mark Murphy
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Ben Arbour
Abstract
Theists and non-theists alike have generally taken absolute perfection to be a necessary condition for worship-worthiness. Unless the object is absolutely perfect, it is often put, the kinds of attitudes or actions constitutive of worship are unwarranted. In this thesis, I offer an account of worship-worthiness that does not take for granted that to be worship-worthy is to be absolutely perfect. More specifically, I advance the claim that to be absolutely perfect is to be supremely worship-worthy and that supreme worship-worthiness holds a unique position in this respect. For instance, I argue that to be absolutely perfect and thus supremely worship-worthy is to be necessarily worship-worthy and uniquely worthy of an undivided worship. I arrive at this conclusion in a somewhat circuitous fashion in that the argument is premised on thin metaphysical and theological commitments so that the success of the argument is not contingent on commitments unlikely to be shared by my interlocutors.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
McCoy, Austin, "Worship-Worthiness and Absolute Perfection: Towards an Account of Supreme Worship-Worthiness" (2019). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 179.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/179
Included in
Liturgy and Worship Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons