The Platonic tradition oscillates between saying either this or 'God is *beyond* being'.

Plato on the form of the good:

In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the Good their being known, but their very existence and being is given to them from it, though the good itself is not being but still transcends being in dignity and surpassing power.

Pseudo-Dionysius:

Since it is the Cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and, more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being.

If you take that as an important idea contained in 'God is being itself.' then you might add something like:

5. God is not, strictly speaking, a being amongst or akin to other beings or, more simply, God *is not* a being (though it would not be right to say he doesn't exist).

This is hard, maybe impossible, to understand, but I take it that one approach to the idea is the practice of negative theology.

You might, if you're familiar, also approach 5 in the direction of Heidegger's fundamental distinction between Being and beings, but Heidegger thinks this won't do for a theology and I tend to agree that he doesn't end up with anything like a God as we would understand it. But if you know what I'm talking about at all, then it is a direction. Karl Rahner, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Caputo go somewhere in that direction.

For the more analytically inclined Bill Vallicella glosses this here:

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/05/is-god-beyond-all-being.html

philosoraptor wrote:

With respect to the slogan, I think it depends on what is meant by "being."

To the degree that "being" is a necessary quality of things that exist -- perhaps the descriptive characteristic that distinguishes them from those things that don't exist (imaginary things) -- I'm not sure what it means to say that something "is" being, itself. It seems to say that this thing is the quality that all other existing things have, but that position seems to suggest a whole host of complications.

A fairly good elaboration of that statement can be found on the Internet Encyclopaedia entry for Divine Simplicity. Basically Thomists would take first clause as essentially correct but substitute 'have' for 'participate in'.

The claim that God is not a being, but is either Being itself or is beyond Being or both, seems to me to function as a constant reminder to us in our thinking about God that we are ALWAYS thinking analogically.  To say that "God is" is correct, but is not univocal with any other "X is."  

Existence is not a quality.  Kant probably had something like that in mind in his famous assertion that "being is not a real predicate."  If existence is added to something, it does not gain a new quality it previously did not possess; rather, it must first be before it can have any qualities or properties at all.

If it is true we can only grasp and speak of God analogically, then it follows that someone can always make the move of pointing out the disanalogy in any speech about God, since a perfect analogy would be a univocity. 

This is why the via negativa is preferable when speaking of God.  
 

Last edited by Jason Grey (7/24/2015 10:44 pm)

If one is treat ‘exists’ as an alienans term one can say the two statements:

1. ‘God exists’
2. ‘Miliband exists’

Employ the term ‘exists’ in a non-univocal way. However this is tantamount to translating those two as:

1. 'God exists necessarily’
2. 'Miliband exists contingently’

In which case the interesting point is not the bare existence statement but the modal statement contained in the adverbial modifier.

Jason Grey wrote:

The claim that God is not a being, but is either Being itself or is beyond Being or both, seems to me to function as a constant reminder to us in our thinking about God that we are ALWAYS thinking analogically.  To say that "God is" is correct, but is not univocal with any other "X is."  

Why should we assume this is the case though? I am not necessarily denying Analogy in this instance (my own view is at least some statements in Formal Ontology may be univocal) but I think it's something which is way over-prioritised in these discussions. There is sometimes talk that univocal predication ‘drags God down to our level’ – this, aside from often being an ad homnim, is false though – God is not anthropomorphic, and indeed for reasons stressed below could not be, but the world and all beings in it are to an extent theomorphic.

Jason Grey wrote:

Existence is not a quality.  Kant probably had something like that in mind in his famous assertion that "being is not a real predicate."  If existence is added to something, it does not gain a new quality it previously did not possess; rather, it must first be before it can have any qualities or properties at all. 

Kant here demonstrates his usual lovable ignorance of history. No philosopher who took what we might call the 'hard-inflationary' view of Existence took it to be a property like any other. Ironically it’s the Thomist who in endorsing 4. has commonly taken Existence to be property-like (this is a sensitive area though  since some like Vallicella and Davies still defend 4. whilst rejecting the property claim). I had a conversation with John about this recently.

(Am I the only one who loves the irony in that Scotus, the probably the greatest Scholastic proponent of the Ontological Argument was also one of greatest critics of the 'Real Distinction'/Property view of Existence?)

Jason Grey wrote:

If it is true we can only grasp and speak of God analogically, then it follows that someone can always make the move of pointing out the disanalogy in any speech about God, since a perfect analogy would be a univocity. 

This is why the via negativa is preferable when speaking of God.  
 

I worry here that there's a confusion of two separate issues, one of which is the psychological tendency to think of God along the lines of an agent with all limitations removed and the other a logio-semantic concern.

The first issue of course is to be guarded against at all costs. If the person speaking correctly understands the concepts involved it should not arise however since Divine Timelessness and especially Divine Simplicity mean the Divine Nature must be very different from our own. Hume attacked Simplicity on the ground that it lead to God’s ‘mind’ being totally different from what we understand by that term – to this we answer: ‘Yes, that’s the point’.

The second issue… If Analogy defaults to Negative Theology then I’m inclined to say that’s modus ponens for rejecting Analogy. If ‘we can say nothing positive of God’ then that proposition may as well be ‘we can say nothing of BLANK’ – we’re either left with Positivism or the Mystical Paradox of the Tractatus.

quotidian wrote:

I would like to ask a question which perhaps someone here with knowledge of languages might be able to cast some light on. I have often wondered if the meaning of 'to exist' and 'to be' are entirely synonymous; I personally don't think that they are, but that the distinction between them is very hard to draw in the modern philosophical lexicon.

Quotidian,
 
Interestingly your differing usage of existence and being harks back to a tradition which was in vogue towards the end of the 19th century and was represented by Russell, Husserl and Meinong amongst others. These philosophers reserved the term ‘exists’ for objects within space and time preferring to say that extra-spatio-temporal objects such as universals, propositions, merely possible objections, spirits and God ‘subsisted’ or ‘had being’.
 
This lead to a confusion partly because in the end it boiled down to what we would know call the distinction between Abstract and Concrete objects, with spirits and God falling on the Concrete side. Nowadays people generally appeal to that distinction rather than us two different existential terms.

quotidian wrote:

The word 'to exist' is derived from 'ex-' apart from or outside 'ist' to stand. So 'to exist' is to be 'this' as distinct from 'that' - it is to have an identity as a separate being or object. 'No entity without identity', according to a philosopher.

So I generally regard the scope of 'existing things' to be identical with 'phenomena' or the putative domain of the natural sciences.  Using the word that way, God is not 'something that exists' and indeed, as every phenomenon that does exist, is composed of parts and has a beginning and an end in time, then God could not be 'an existing thing' in the same way that phenomena are. 

What out of interest is your reason for restricting the scope of the term 'exists' to the objects of the natural sciences? Assumably by objects of the natural sciences you mean concrete material particulars?

quotidian wrote:

However as I am not atheist, I believe that God is - and that 'is-ness' is what is referred to when it is said that God is 'being itself'. So in the above passages where the phrase 'transcending being' is used, what I think that really means is 'transcending existence' (or existents, i.e. individual things that come into and go out of existence.)

Are you implying that to exist is to have an identity, a thisness’ apart from itself, whilst in God's case of course there is nothing apart from his being? That would amount to props. 1, 2 and 4 in the OP. In that case though we couldn't apply the same conditions to humans or hypothetical spirits since their identity/essence is distinct from their existing/being.