Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Logical Implications of "God as Being Itself."

The conceptualization of God as 'Being Itself' was, to my knowledge, first proposed by theologian Paul Tillich in the early 20th Century. It has been brought to my knowledge by a thoughtful blogger, discussant, and professional theologian with the pseudonym Metacrock (metacrock.blogspot.com). If you can get through his posts (sorry, Meta, your writing style is a bit... difficult), you'll find that they are extremely intelligent in nature and they actually pose even greater challenges to non-believers than the arguments of more well-known Christian apologists. His conception of God is fairly unique and has required substantial thought for me to comprehend it in a manner that enables me to write about it.

When it is said that God is defined as "Being Itself," it is meant in opposition to the idea that God is actually a being, that is a distinct entity that is what Metacrock refers to as "the big man in the sky" concept of God. So, according to Tillich and by extension Meta, God is not a being. But, if God is not a being, what exactly is He? How can a definition of God be meaningful without being a being? These questions seem to me to be serious problems of this view, especially to professed Christians like Metacrock, who hold onto the idea of a personal God.
First, we must understand the difference between entities and properties. An entity is "a thing with a distinct and independent existence," whereas a property is "an attribute, quality, or characteristic of something" (New Oxford American Dictionary). They are related in the sense that entities have properties and if something has properties, it is an entity. Properties are not entities, and entities are not properties, although we are required to define entities by their properties. This is a very important concept to grasp, because many times the syntax of a sentence does not make this distinction for us. Take, for example, the sentence, "The sky is blue." Most every English speaking person would understand what is being conveyed by this sentence. What it truly means is that the sky has the property of being blue. But, it could be interpreted incorrectly as "The sky and blue are synonyms." This, of course, is incorrect, and there is a category error involved in the logic behind the statement. "The sky" is an entity, whereas "blue" is a property. They cannot be the same thing.
The distinction between the conceptualization of God as "a being" and God as "Being Itself" is that the former treats God as a specific entity and the latter treats God as a specific property. A being is a type of entity, namely an animate one. The concept of God as "a being" holds that God is an entity with whatever properties the conceptualizer claims God to have. It is worth mentioning that this concept is not limited to the view that God is a "big man in the sky," as God doesn't need to be thought of as a being with a physical body or even a spatial existence. It just requires us to view God as a thing with properties. The concept that God is "Being Itself," however, does just the opposite — requiring us to view God as a essential property of all things as opposed to a thing itself.
"Being Itself" is an essential property of all entities. It, to the best of my understanding, can be defined as the property of existing. All entities must exist, by definition, and therefore, all entities have the property of existing. This makes the logical necessity of God seem self-evident, as the following syllogism demonstrates:
  1. God is the property of existing.
  2. Entities exist.
  3. Therefore, God is.
The very fact that anything exists is enough to demonstrate that this conceptualization of God is factually true. If God is "Being Itself," then God is, although I'd struggle to say that God exists, and I would also say that it's nothing more than defining God into being by removing any meaningfulness of the word, much like the concept that "God is love" does. 

First, there is an inherent confusion when declaring that a property exists. What is really more correct is to say that an entity exists that has that property. Thus, if God is Being Itself (the property of existing), then it's not really correct to say that God exists, but instead it is more correct to say that all things which exist share the property known as God. 
Second, the idea that God is a property as opposed to an entity leads one to realize that God cannot have properties. Only entities have properties. God cannot be conscious or personal any more than the property "blue" can be salty. Properties cannot have properties, but instead can only be or not be the case in relation to an entity. Therefore, despite the fact that "God as Being Itself" must be, it cannot do anything other than be, and thus any real meaning behind the word is eliminated. This concept of God ultimately leads one to hold that God nothing more than an impersonal, unconscious, purposeless, emotionless, uncaring, albeit necessary state of affairs. So, where the concept of "God as a being" is meaningful, but is not supported by either logical necessity or empirical evidence, the concept of "God as Being Itself" is supported by logical necessity, but is devoid of all relevant meaning. This seems to be a prevailing theme in theology — a complete inability to have your cake and eat it too. 

3 comments:

  1. I like your clean approach with entities and properties. I also like to think of God as being. So here are my thoughts. First of all, an interesting example, the sky being blue. Just something to crunch on when you think about what the sky really is, and what blueness really is. It seems quite a practical and choice-based thing in this case that the sky is an entity, and blue is a property. I'm not sure entities and properties work for us in any absolute sense. It is merely clearly that as an entity on the ground, sky-as-entity is usable, and blue-as-property comes naturally out of that (although the blueness of a blue sky is awfully close to identifying also the skyness of the earth, at least when it's a clear day).

    I can understand the sense of lackluster logical emptiness in equating God with being. Yet I also am able to experience other things in it. I am not sure I can imagine that it is devoid of all relevant meaning though I can see why you'd say that. It can seem a copout, but lets look at entities/properties.

    I would say you're mistaken that existence is a property that all things have. It might be an odd distinction to make but maybe it is some kind of weird meta-flip to define existing things as "having existence" among their properties.

    Entities can easily be considered properties all the way down. Seeing enties is a very natural, even necessary, practicality. And there are some very vear clear boundaries and cutting lines, clear clusters of properties, which have very distinct sub-levels of properties, where each sub-property seems to clearly belong to the "whole cluster". My breath belongs to me, but what I mean is the exchange of all these air moleclues belongs to the whole system of my lung sacs and everything else in that agreed system we call myself. But it's clusters of properties interrelating in clusters, with clusters of properties, all the way down. Or you could say patterns, tendencies, probabilities, etc. Lots of models to work with but as you can see I'm tending toward "one thing all the way down", but naturally lending itself to interpretations with separate aspects & roles like entity & property.

    So in that light, returning to entities and properties and accepting as fully as we need to... well, entities are sets of properties at different levels with a definite hierarchy & classing among these properties.

    So properties which exist, and entities which exist, are all just telling me this: "properties are happening" or, actually I prefer "patterns are happening". That is existence. That is phenomenon. It's just not a further property of properties. Not properly a pattern of these patterns. You could say it is the hosting pattern, but consider this!

    Say you WERE the programmer, and you did indeed have a program with entities and properties. Nevermind the programmer, God as Being is more like the program, or the OS, or the motion of electricity. Except the loop is fully closed, it has programmed itself.

    I know it's kooky but IF that's the assertion, then no, the OS is not an entity (the best you can get is an abstracted interface which you "pretend" is the OS). You can't really get the OS. It's NOT an entity. it's the host of all entities and properties. It's the very space in which these entities and their properties are considered to exist. More simply put, it's the space in which these are considered. It is the existence of them - not the specific existence but still the root of each, and the only place where meaning would ever finish up and express! So that's why some would say that the being-ness is actually the living part of this.

    So naturally that kind of God is very mystical, that kind of God is everywhere/nowhere, all/none, etc. That kind of God is a bit of madness, but definitely also a source of wonder and awe (or maybe it's just wonder at being? woops yeah it automatically steals all that wonder's thunder cause of how we defined it).

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  2. Hi I am Metacrock. I post under my real name Joe Hinman how I have published under my name (Joseph Hinman). Thank you for your kid works, I'm glad you found my blog helpful and my ideas interesting. That was way boak in 2013 but someone jsut poijnted this out to me,I( will answer yourthoughtful pst but on my own blog by next wek.I can't right now,.

    I have a book it;s about the validity of religious experience,I have made a God argument from that book.it is backed by 200 academic studies.

    i willnput up a link to my blog answer next week.

    Tje trace of God

    Joseph Hinman develops the notion that belief in God, while not absolutely provable, is rationally warranted and that the experience is life-transforming and vital. He utilizes a body of empirical scientific studies that go back fifty years and draws upon sociological experts including Abraham Maslow, Robert Wuthnow, and Andrew Greeley. The huge body of work includes many important advances in this scientific work (such as the M scale) this allow for carefully study of mystical experience and offers a range of evidence that warrants belief. Arguments for God based upon personal religious experience have always been considered weak by both apologists and skeptics. This has been the case due to prejudices and misconceptions about the nature of religious experiences...

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  3. While Joe loves to cite the first paragraph of this post, he never mentions the final three, for some reason.

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