> Among the most puzzling and paradoxical ideas in his Systematic Theology (1951) is his statement that ‘God does not exist’ and that ‘to argue that God exists is to deny him.’ Tillich goes on to state that the word ‘existence’ should never be used in conjunction with the word ‘God’.
By reading this, I am tempted to imagine the intellectual atmosphere that prompted the logical positivists to insist on what constitutes meaningful statements to the point of being themselves incoherent [1].
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
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By reading this, I am tempted to imagine the intellectual atmosphere that prompted the logical positivists to insist on what constitutes meaningful statements to the point of being themselves incoherent [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism#Cognitive_m...
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