Posted: Oct 15, 2014 12:16 pm
Don't think of the ground of all being as a thing -- that causes confusion (because there is no spoon 
). The two ways to try to conceptualize it would be pantheism -- God is everything -- or panentheism -- God is the wellspring that makes existence possible in the first place -- which is not, in and of itself, an easy concept and I'm not entirely certain makes complete sense.
Bottom line, though, is that the term 'ground of all being' really doesn't denote a god as 'thing' or person, but is a kind of place-holder word for a relationship. The term actually tells you more about the person using it than it does about the nature of the universe. It denotes a particular relationship one feels with the universe. In that sense all are welcome to it -- atheist and theist alike.
But I'm still not entirely certain that a theist can make full sense out of the term and hold on to any 'real' conception of a Western god by using it. But that may tell us more about ourselves than we want to know -- that there simply are concepts that we cannot grasp in our limitations. If that is the case, then we'd be left only with the feeling that such a god might be with no possibility of argument in favor of it.
). The two ways to try to conceptualize it would be pantheism -- God is everything -- or panentheism -- God is the wellspring that makes existence possible in the first place -- which is not, in and of itself, an easy concept and I'm not entirely certain makes complete sense.Bottom line, though, is that the term 'ground of all being' really doesn't denote a god as 'thing' or person, but is a kind of place-holder word for a relationship. The term actually tells you more about the person using it than it does about the nature of the universe. It denotes a particular relationship one feels with the universe. In that sense all are welcome to it -- atheist and theist alike.
But I'm still not entirely certain that a theist can make full sense out of the term and hold on to any 'real' conception of a Western god by using it. But that may tell us more about ourselves than we want to know -- that there simply are concepts that we cannot grasp in our limitations. If that is the case, then we'd be left only with the feeling that such a god might be with no possibility of argument in favor of it.