Paul Tillich

Pops and I had an interesting discussion today. He struggles with the idea of the omnipotent, everpresent and omniscient God because it means that God willed the great Japanese tsunami, which is a quite disturbing matter to him.

As I discussed this, I came explain my unoriginal idea of God as the substance of the universe, which made a great deal of sense of me when I first heard of and considered the Gospel of Thomas. Paul Tillich notably says:

He deprives me of my subjectivi­ty because he is all-powerf­ul and all-knowin­g. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivi­ty. He is equated with recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control.

He becomes the model of everything against which Existentia­lism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.

This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theologica­l theism and its disturbing implicatio­ns.

It is interesting to consider that this might be the deepest root of atheism, since the problem of what Tillich calls 'theological theism' is so easily understood. And if this is all Nietzsche was killing, you'd wonder what was so great about the discovery.