It does bring that to mind, especially given the era he came out of. Likely, however, what he is trying to get at is the distinction between God/not God: existence is something a thing which is not God — a neutrino, a squirrel, a rock — is given, which makes speaking of God as having existence in the same way as those things a mistake, as if the highest thing is just one of those many things which could be enumerated that way. This helps maintain the distinction Tillich is likely aiming at, which is to avoid speaking of God as part of the universe, or in some panentheistic way.

I think this is on point, but does point to the limits/faults in his work. I recall being very energized by Tillich in my youth and at the very beginnings of my religious exploration, but was very surprised that the sort of "ambiguity" he was trying to parse was much more well laid out in classical theologians (Aquinas, etc), i.e. "to define God, the limitless being, is to inherently apply limit" which is why theologians have traditionally pursued God via "what He is Not" as we can certainly say that God is not limited, time bound, etc.

Tillich's "ambiguity" was very approachable in my youth, but today I find it extremely dangerous from a moral and philosophical perspective. There is truth in what is said, but unless you have the context in which it is said you can quickly spin it to your heart's delight. My primary takeaway as a youth was "this is great and very theological/intellectually stimulating while not morally demanding of me whatsoever, hooray!" which is why, as a stubborn young adult, certainly found it attractive.

FWIW, if anybody wants a great challenge that seeks to bridge classical theology with modern/personalist/subjective thought, you should read Man and Woman He Created Them by John Paul II. It is as rewarding as it is dense and gave me the bridge between "old" and "new" philosophy/theology that I find lacking in many moderns.

Strong second for Man and Woman He Created Them. If you can get through it without coming to a deeper understanding of yourself (whether in agreement with its ideas or in opposition to them), you'll be the first person I've met who has.

> you can quickly spin it…

It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other.

E.g. quantum mechanics is arguably the least ambiguous theory ever devised, because it gives results of the most specific agreement with experiment. But nevertheless has an ever-increasing number of interpretations, none of which can be ruled out—to all appearances hopelessly ambiguous to what it actually means.

When it comes decisions you have to make, either individually or as a society, even the most verbose and specific moral codes suddenly seem to be ambiguous. Some examples:

1. Are we morally obliged to either support or oppose Obamacare?

2. Is a 50% tax rate moral or immoral? What is the exact tax rate which is “most moral”?

3. Is it Moral to support a president who boinked an intern? Or a president who payed hush money to hookers?

4. Should it be illegal to smoke? Or sell fruit-flavored vapes?

5. How old should somebody be before they are allowed to (fill in the blank here…vote, have sex, drive a car, drink, drop out of school?)

We certainly look to our cultural polestars—-religion, tradition, precident—to help us out with these sorts of questions, but by no means does any of them give us any definitive answers.

> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other.

"Virtual base classes are instantiated in the order specified by the depth-first, left-to-right traversal of the directed acyclic graph of all base classes." That is a very precise, unambiguous statement if you know what virtual base classes are. (The sentence went on to define what "left to right" meant in this context.) You don't even need to know what a directed acyclic graph is in a formal way to be able to clearly, unambiguously understand what that sentence is saying.

Compare that to, I don't know, the worst sentence from your CEO's quarterly yay-us message to the company. Or the worst sentence from a politician's campaign speech, or from a political debate where they're trying to dodge the other side's point.

Yes, statements can be less ambiguous than other statements. (Even in politics - compare George Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes" with the statements many politicians make.)

Well…Suppose I wrote an optimizer which could—-perhaps as some kind of return-value optimization, determine that we didn’t even need to construct such an object, but we instead could just pass along the values to the caller?

If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it?

We are so good at handling ambiguity that we don’t even notice its existence most of the time. But specs, especially specs which specify the semantics of an expression—are infinitely ambiguous as to how to that expression is actually calculated.

Ideally, the spec, for c++ or another language is deliberately made ambiguous, just because it leaves room for creative interpretations—-also known as “optimizations”.

> If I never had to create the virtual table, would it be a violation of the spec if I didn’t do it?

Generally: no. Most such specs have a phrase along the lines of “externally observable effect”.

In other words, the compiler can do anything as long as the programmer or external systems can’t tell that anything is different.

Processors do this all the time, reordering instruction execution but then arranging things so that it’s impossible to tell that this occurred.

For your latter point I find branch prediction to be even more egregious (from a computational ambiguity perspective). The processor is executing code just in case it discovers that it needs to have executed it.

Yup. Its an interesting example of deliberate ambiguity, and how useful it can be.

This is why I don't like using "ambiguous" as a term of abuse. Ambiguity isn't inherently bad. Languages are ambiguous for a reason.

But this can be unambiguously defined! Externally observable effects can have specific meanings.

I didn't quite understand that point, can you rephrase? I mean, yeah, things like specs for computer languages do define a space for ambiguity, but that space is ambiguous just the same.

Let's say you wrote this code:

    a = 2 * b + c * d;
    writeToDisk(a)
    e = b + b - a;
    sendToNetwork(e)

Naively, you would expect the compiler to emit CPU instructions that perform the computations left-to-right, top-to-bottom. In pseudocode assembly:

    mul 2, b -> a
    mul c, d -> reg1
    add a, reg1 -> a
    push a 
    call writeToDisk
    mov b -> reg1
    add b, reg1 -> reg1
    sub a, reg -> e
    push e
    call sendToNetwork

The externally observable effects may be considered to be the function calls. If you're dealing with I/O devices then it would be some similar specific hardware event such as writing to a GPIO register.

It should be immediately obvious that the compiler can compute 2*b just once, cache it in a register, and use it to compute both 'a' and 'e', even though the formulas are different and interspersed with function calls. Similarly, it can noticed that e has a 2b-2b in its overall formula and hence eliminate some computations entirely.

As long as the inputs to the functions don't change and the order of their calls aren't modified, "all is fine" and the compiler is free to do this.

In fact, modern compilers can completely eliminate function calls, inlining them if they perform pure computations or have no side-effects! This is done to such a point that it makes benchmarking challenging: merely timing some computations will often take 0 time unless the result of the computation is written to the console or some similarly externally-visible destination.

Compilers are allowed to this even for abstractions like virtual functions or interfaces. The JVM does this regularly. If it notices there's only a single implementation of an interface, it'll inline it, possibly eliminating the call entirely if it turns out to be a no-op.

Ok, thanks for clarifying. But again, we are so used to dealing with ambiguity that we don't even notice it. It looks like the inputs/outputs are really nailed down....but still, it is ambiguous in countless ways.

For example, you can type the input/output to these functions in any font or size you want. You don't have to use ASCII. The results on the screen can be glowing green phosphorus, red phosphorus, or a glorious retina display.

etc etc. Wherever the specs end, the ambiguity begins.

> It’s really hard for me to see how any theology—or any text—could be any less ambiguous than any other.

The logical positivists (and analytic philosophers in general) were very concerned about this.

The original ones like Carnap thought it was a problem because of fascists, who are, you know, pathological liars. So the problem wasn't ambiguity, moreso that they were propagandizing and he hoped to defeat this by showing that it wasn't true. As it turns out, this didn't work, so they had to give up on it.

Analytic philosophers do it because they're mad at obscurantist French people like Derrida. Which is also a noble goal if a smaller problem.

You raise a good point on how people like us enjoy leveraging ambiguous philosophy for our own amorality. If the philosopher fails to take a stand — something is good, something is bad, something is wrong, something is right — their ideas are easily repurposed for rationalizing, even absolving, immoral acts.

People like me want nice-sounding, undemanding ideas that makes them look good and feel good. We desire ideas that shift with words, ideas that lack solid form and the logical consistency that would ward off our own desires.

Like you said, it's dangerous because people think ambiguous philosophy as a vitamin, when really it's an intellectual candy. Tasty and sweet, but no nutrition for the soul, and certainly it gives no energy for its exercise.

> much more well laid out in classical theologians (Aquinas, etc)

And what's more, while God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens is a conclusion we can arrive at philosophically (and thus unaided reason with no appeals made to revealed knowledge), we also find Scriptural antecedents, such as Exodus 3:14 (where God gives his "name" to Moses as "I Am"; God is not this god, or that god, but is).

> It is as rewarding as it is dense and gave me the bridge between "old" and "new" philosophy/theology that I find lacking in many moderns.

You might find Betz's recent book[0] interesting.

[0] https://stpaulcenter.com/product/christ-the-logos-of-creatio...

Is there good reason to believe that this is what is really meant by "I am who I am" and isn't just Christians reading philosophical ideas back into the OT?

(I ask this actually because I remember Ratzinger raising this possible objection in Introduction to Christianity (some of which I read long ago, though I don't have the text with me anymore), presumably to rebut it, though I don't remember his rebuttal.)

And in that sense Tillich isn't that far from, say, Aquinas, who is consistent about asserting that existence is not a "real" predicate and that God's existence is outside of the world and outside of space and time.

You don't even need to squint that hard to see a commonality between Tillich's notion of discussing God symbolically and Aquinas's notion of doing so analogically, not to mention the contrast between finite humans and an infinite God who is beyond understanding. And not to mention that apophaticism – the idea that positive knowledge about God is impossible – has been a feature of Christian theology since the beginning.

So much of this can be taken in ways that not only aren't outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, but also align with more sophisticated Christian philosophical understandings of God.

That much, of course, is not why Tillich is controversial!

So… God is mathematics?

Don't know where you got that from.

I'm guessing a sloppy equivalence due to the idea of "existence is outside of the world and outside of space and time" showing up in descriptions (e.g. "a platonist might assert that the number pi exists outside of space and time" from https://iep.utm.edu/mathplat/).

Yes!

To be more specific: if the Universe (existence itself) can be described by mathematics, and mathematics is timeless (beyond mere physical existence), then essentially the physical Universe is inevitable and in some sense "created by" mathematics. In this view of creation, mathematics plays the role of God.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

It's also worth bearing in mind that much theology is an attempt to explain what the experience of God is like. The experience of God is not (for Tillich, nor perhaps for very many moderns) about finding a literal place and time in which God-the-being can be directly observed. To seek God and expect to find a being who exists in the same manner as a tree or a building is to set oneself up for failure.

When Tillich says "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt" he is describing the psychological process the seeker undergoes. In his case, he identifies God with the open, reflective cast of mind in which one engages with the unknowable, ineffable, combinatorally-explosive possibilities that are found at the horizons of our understanding. The "state of being grasped by an ultimate concern" is one in which we are trying - and necessarily failing - to see beyond the horizon. And yet, something sustains us in the effort, which is faith in God.

Doubtless this really is a very different kind of faith than other self-described Christians might have, whose faith might be rooted in a different mode of being and engagement with the world. And, to be clear, Tillich's description is very much "what it's like" to have his variety of faith, and not a metaphysical claim about the workings of the universe. A different Christian might hold much stronger claims about God's precise nature and existence, but for Tillich those beliefs were unsustainable.

> To seek God and expect to find a being who exists in the same manner as a tree or a building is to set oneself up for failure.

But isn’t that the whole point of Christianity, that Jesus was God in human flesh and actually existed like you or I exist while also being fully God?

Existed like you or I exist, yes, but existed merely as you or I exist, or merely as a tree or building exists, no.

It is a peculiar thing to say about someone who refers to oneself as "I am".

It kind of is — except the name given to Moses is closer to "I Am Who I Am", which is consonant with the rest of the OT/NT, where God is known by what he does & what he says (revealing the contours of his character) instead of through examination, deduction, or some sort of experience of the divine.

The pain evident in his life story seems to shatter the very assumptions of language even.

I read in that sentence something of the nature of "Humans can't even plumb the depths of 'existence' with surety to understand how to bring that idea to a superseding and underlying ever-being of a God"

Tillich would overload the semi-colon in C.

Sounds like he would sure love the Abrahamic God - the one when inquired of “who should I tell them sent me” responds with “I AM”

I wonder if this refers to a central idea in Orthodox theology which is very clear to distinguish between:

- God "υπάρχει" (Greek for existing under someone's authority, "υπ" under -"αρχή" authority) which is used in modern Greek for all things that simply exist and is false for God and,

- God "είναι" (Greek for being, present tense) which is True of God and of nothing else.

Meaningless drivel.

His point is that we talk of existing, as existing in this universe. But God is outside of it.

An analogy is: it would be wrong to say Tolkien exists in the Lord of the Rings universe, even though he made it, and so in a sense is a precondition for any of the characters in the lore existing.

This is actually not unusual but is the standard theological view

Disagree because it implies intent, but I also find Sephirah to be a better wrapper for this angle of the discussion.

A better analogy that comes to mind is that "God" - in this case - is a violin string, and the universe is the music.