For many people in Western religious traditions, the idea that God is a "person" is a necessary and fundamental part of their beliefs. Indeed, the very idea that God might not be a person is almost inconceivable for that would render them unable to adequately explain their religious history and their own religious experiences.
One reason for this is the fact that many of things often thought of as contributing to perfection, like love, morality, and intelligence, seem only to occur in the context of persons. If God were not a person, it would be difficult to think of God as intelligent, creative, moral, or loving - and if God were none of those things, how could God be perfect and worthy of worship?
Another reason for this is the fact that there is a strong tradition of conceiving of God as a being with whom we can and should have a personal relationship with. Jews have a relationship with God because they are God's chosen people; although this relationship is more often between God and the Jews as a people than with any Jews as individuals, it is still a personal relationship from God's perspective, requiring God to be a person.
Christianity has maintained this tradition, making it even more important in the figure of Jesus Christ, believed to be both fully human and fully God. Because Jesus is obviously a person and because Jesus came as the savior for the entire world, he is regarded as someone with whom we can have a relationship personally, as individuals. Some Christians take this concept so far that they would deny that Christianity is a "religion" at all; instead, they say that Christianity is defined as a "personal relationship with God."
The idea of God as a person is not monolithic and uncontested, however. Outside the Western religious tradition, impersonal gods are quite common. In Hinduism, Brahman is conceived as the ultimate and absolutely impersonal "reality" which lies behind the illusion we typically think of as reality.
God conceived as impersonal is not limited to Eastern traditions like Hinduism, however. Islam specifically rejects the idea of God as a person as blasphemous because being a "person" means being limited and having imperfections. Thus, contrary to the Christian and Jewish traditions, the personhood of God is treated as incompatible with God's perfection. This is an important point to remember because Islam is usually treated as falling within the sphere of philosophical theism - clearly, however, philosophical theism can be incompatible with actual monotheistic traditions and with theistic religions as people actually practice them.
Then again, perhaps the Islamic perspective on God isn't so strange after all. Although the idea of God as a person has been generally dominant in the Western religious and philosophical discourse, it has not had a monopoly. There has been a strong tendency among many theologians and philosophers to accept the Muslim insight that perhaps being a person negatively impacts the ability of God to be perfect.
As a consequence, the notion of "person" as applied to God becomes less and less like the notion of "person" as applied to humans. Today many believers use the terms as if they meant pretty much the same thing, but philosophers and theologians often use them as if they were only analogously related at best. The idea of attributing to an uncreated God a characteristic of created humans sounds arrogant to some - perhaps God is more like a person than a non-person from our perspective, but that doesn't mean that God is a person in any way we understand the term.
Is the attribute of personhood for God coherent and meaningful? Maybe, maybe not. When defined much as the term is defined for humans, it is coherent and meaningful - but it may also not be consistent with other attributes. On the other hand, if we modify it to make it consistent with other attributes, we begin to lose consistency with what real believers think.
If a theist is going to assert that their god is a "person," it will be necessary for them to explain what, exactly, they mean by that word in this context. It cannot be assumed that they mean the same thing as whey they describe a human being as a "person." Whether they do mean the same thing in both contexts or whether they only conceive of an analogous relationship between the two, they will also have to explain what implications this has for the nature of God and our relationship with it.
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