Good God Paul Tillich

In 1959, existentialist theologian, Paul Tillich, kicked off a logical cascade when he innocently defined Faith as ‘ultimate concern’. What’s your ‘ultimate concern’? Is it sex, drugs or rock-and-roll? Is it power,  status, or fame? Money or security? Family or friends? Health or happiness? Whatever your ‘ultimate concern’, that is your Good and therefore that is your God. 

Tillich’s surprise definition puts idolatry on the same footing as monotheism. It’s simply a matter of ‘ultimate concerns’. If my ‘ultimate concern’ is a lump of clay, so be it. As in AA and other 12 step programs, each person is free to designate anything as their personal Higher Power.  

If I make a Faith commitment to inorganic matter, then I am at most guilty of misplaced concreteness  (Whitehead) – i.e. considering something to be something it isn’t, for example a ‘god’ that is not and could not possibly be God. (I’m not just in the wrong pew, I’m in the wrong church…but I’m still living a life of Faith per Tillich.)

It is comforting to think that everything we do is motivated by our conception of what is Good (i.e. our Faith) because whatever is Good is ‘God’. There is just one fly in this ointment: we decide what is Good for us and therefore we each define, i.e. create, our own God. 

By definition, Good and God must transcend our immanent world (otherwise, per Nietzsche, they would have no normative function or value and without that, they would be meaningless terms). But we have turned that relationship on its head; we have made the Immanent normative. 

Sometimes, you can invert a relationship and everything runs smoothly; the relationship is symmetrical and reciprocal. This is not one of those times. If the Immanent is normative then what-is is normative for what will be. Therefore any change is ‘bad’, i.e. a reduction of Good.  Talk about radical conservatism!

Assuming that ‘things’ are motivated to act (or change) by their sense of what’s Good (for them), no such motivation could exist, ever. Given an Entity A in State X, there is no State Y that would be better than X for A. “Every way you look at this, you lose.” (Simon & Garfunkel) 

We would be living in Leibniz’ Best of all Possible Worlds. Therefore, the status quo would be locked-in and the Universe would be a frozen solid. Is that bad enough for you?

It gets worse! Assuming a state of non-being is logically, not temporally, prior to a state of being, then non-being would be the eternally preferred state. There would be no universe, and in fact no universe of any sort would ever be possible because anything that might be would be less good than status quo, i.e. nothing at all. And so, Good, God, and even Being itself would be precluded. 

So we’d be living in Leibniz’ Best of all Possible Worlds but only from the perspective of the present moment. Our Present would by definition be somewhat less good than what immediately preceded it, and what preceded that, and so on.

With ‘every move we make, every breath we take’ we regress in value, back toward our origin or forward toward our destiny, which are exactly the same, i.e. nothing. Like Noah, it makes no difference what direction (in space or time) we look, it’s utter devastation everywhere. Oh, the price we pay to have no God!

But this is not the way things seem to be. Something is. Value seems graded across a variety of events and options. Devastation is not total, universal, or eternal.  

So let’s assume this is not the way it is IRL. That there is something immanent means that there must be something transcendent and what is transcendent is also normative for what is immanent. 

Being is not symmetrical…or democratic. Get over it!

The father of Western philosophy, Parmenides (5th century BCE), captured it perfectly in his epic poem, On Nature: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color…all things have been named light and night...” This is Doxa, the realm of appearances.

To this Parmenides counterposed the realm of truth, Aletheia: “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole…steadfast and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one… It is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” Certainly, Parmenides’ Aletheia is Augustine’s Bonum. 

Jean-Paul Sartre, a fitting bridge connecting Parmenides and Tillich, devoted an entire novel, Nausea, to this point. We view things as tools or obstacles strewn in the path of life’s projects. We treat life as a video game, avoiding pitfalls and acquiring weapons at every turn.

Sartre invites us to encounter things as they are in themselves (en soi), as raw existents apart from every context, but he warns us: the experience is likely to make us sick (hence, nausea). 

We have no experience viewing the world other than through various mediating membranes; coming in contact with ‘the real thing’ can be shocking – imagine a lifelong Pepsi drinker having her first can of Real Coke! 

Sidebar: Sartre is an interesting character. An avowed materialist, communist and atheist, he finds himself sharing overnight accommodations with some very unexpected bed fellows: for example, Pope Leo XIII on the matter of absolute freedom and the Baal Shem Tov (Hasidism) on meeting things in the world on their own terms, undisguised by noisy utility.

So we don’t have to accept the reality of God if we don’t want to but we pay a heavy price. We have to give up Good (as defined philosophically) and ultimately we have to give up Being itself. But hey, that’s a small price to pay to keep our pride: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” (John Milton)

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Giorgio de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses (c. 1916–18) depicts two mannequin-like figures set in an eerie, empty piazza framed by classical architecture and long, unsettling shadows. The stillness and distorted perspective create a dreamlike tension between the familiar and the uncanny, suggesting a world stripped of human warmth yet charged with metaphysical meaning. Through its haunting calm and timeless setting, the painting evokes questions about existence, solitude, and the mysterious workings of consciousness.