God is Emptiness
Theologian Paul Tillich, author of the seminal book, Systematic Theology, said, “God does not exist. He is being-itself, beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”
I posted this quote on Facebook three days ago. A friend saw it and asked, “What is the difference between being and existence.” I replied that there is no difference. He then asked, “If there is no difference, then why did Tillich say that God does not exist and yet He is being”? That is a great question.
No, Paul Tillich did not say that God is a being. We have to be very careful with the use of words. Rather, he said that God is being-itself. It means that God is not an object. Most people understand “existence” as existence as an object. Imagine a painting or a movie. God is not any of the objects in a picture. God is not any of the characters projected onto the movie screen. What if God is the background or the screen through which you see the picture? And what if God is the projector? Even more fundamentally, what if God is the Observer? Paul Tillich said that God is the ground of being. Without a background, we cannot see form. We cannot see form without an observer either. One great philosophical question is this: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” This is by no means trivial. Quantum physicists are very aware of the link between…
