Introduction to Conceptual Foundations

Abstract

As the title of this book makes clear, the essays contained in it are unified by their focus on models of God and alternative ultimate realities. But what is ultimate reality, what does ‘God’ mean, and what would count as a model of ultimate reality or God? These are just the sorts of questions that ought to be addressed in the first section of a volume like this. They are questions the answers to which are presupposed by the majority of articles in the ensuing sections. They are foundational questions about the core concepts employed in the anthology as a whole. The first two essays in this section focus on these sorts of questions. These two discussions also concentrate on other basic questions that belong at the beginning of this sort of inquiry: What purposes are models of God or ultimate reality intended to serve? Is it possible for us to achieve the goals we have for them? If so, how, and if not, why not? If these models cannot do everything we might want them to do, can they have some more limited uses for us nonetheless? And whether they can be maximally or only minimally beneficial relative to our designs for them, how are we to use them and how can we tell whether our employment of them has been successful?