Many attempts have been made to define the term GOD: as to the word itself, it is pure Anglo-Saxon, and among our ancestors signified, not only the Divine Being, now commonly designated by the word, but also good; as in their apprehensions it appeared that God and good were correlative terms; and when they thought or spoke of him, they were doubtless led from the word itself to consider him as THE GOOD BEING, a fountain of infinite benevolence and beneficence towards his creatures.

A general definition of this great First Cause, as far as human words dare attempt one, may be thus given: The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being: the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence: he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, and most spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true, and holy: the cause of all being, the upholder of all things; infinitely happy, because infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made: illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only to himself, because an infinite mind can be fully apprehended only by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived; and who, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, right, and kind. Reader, such is the God of the Bible; but how widely different from the God of most human creeds and apprehensions!

http://biblepro.bibleocean.com/App/

Anonymous, ‘The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers‘ (12thC) & before that the Greeks

Paul Tillich – 1886-1965 – Argument from The Ground of Being.

“The name of infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of our being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not.”

–Paul Tillich, The Shaking of The Foundations

Terms:

Aseity = an existent cannot fail or cease to exist;is not dependent upon anything else for its existence (self sufficient existence–an extention of Ontological necessity, I will use the terms interchangeably).

God = The object of our ultimate concerns; the proper object of our religious devotion.

Contingent existence = an existant can fail or cease; the existence of which is conditioned other events.

PSA = Putative State of Affirs, the essential starting point or the ontolgocially prior condition for existence.

Numionous = Feeling of utter depedence, the object of ultimate concerns, sense of the Holy, any sense that we have of the special nature of things beyond the mundane.

Being itself = not a pure abstraction, not the sum total of existing things, but the basic nature of being apart from nothingness; both being in itself and being for itself.This is nt a mystical concept, it is merely a reference to any form of being, without regard to any particualr being.

Argument:

(1)Nothingness as PSA is marked by its own contradiction,

A.True absolute nothingness and PSA are contradictions because nothingness means nothing at all, and PSA is something.

B.True nothingness would lack any essential potential for change; no time, no ptoentiality, noting at all; therefore, no change, no becoming.

Therefore: (2)Being, in some form, as the alterntive to nothingness must obtain to a state of aseity.

(3)Aseity implies eternal and the infinite.

(4)Human being is contrasted by finitude.

(5)The awareness of our finitude in contrast to Aseity of Being creates a sense of the unbounded condition; which evokes our sense of the numinous.

(6) The sense of the numious creates religious devotion, thus we have an object of religious devotion and theological discourse in Being itself.

(7) An object of religious devotion and theological discourse is a ratinal warrent for belief.
If you find this hard to take or understand, here’s a simpler version:

(1) Sense of the Numinous evokes religious devotion

(2) The sense of the numinous is the sense of the special nature of being

(3) Thus being itself, the ground of being, is the object of religious devotion

(4) whatever is the fit object of religious devotion (the thing that evokes it at the core in the first place) is defined as “God.”

(5) since we know this special sense of being existing then QED God exists.

http://www.doxa.ws/meta_crock/listGodarguments.html

There are religions that don’t have a “God” per se, such as Buddhism. Essentially, there is no reason to think of God as a person, certainly not one with a corporeal body. That image, which is hinted at tin the Bible, is merely metaphor. Depending upon the religious tradition, however, one can have very abstract views of God which have nothing to do with a father figure or a mother figure.

There is a more abstract way to think about God: that is “Transcendental Signifier;” the notion of a metaphysical first principle that organizes everything into a metaphysical hierarchy. This is the more sophisticated view of God, and most of the works of the great Christian philosophers hint at notions of God in these abstract terms.

Anselm defined God as “that which nothing greater than can be conceived.” He ended all of his arguments by saying “this thing we call God,” as a means of keeping the exact nature of God open ended. This is because God is beyond our understanding, as the Bible says, but we can leave a “place marker” for the concept of God by understanding that the ultimate logical function of the God concept is that of the transcendental signifier.

Ground of Being

One of the sophisticated concepts used by great Christian theologians is that of “The Ground of Being.” This concept indicates, not that God is the fact of things existing, but that God is the basis for the existence of all things. God is more fundamental to existing things than anything else. So fundamental to the existence of all things is God, that God can be thought of as the basis upon which things exist, the ground their being. To say that God is The ground of being or being itself, is to say that there is something we can sense that is so special about the nature of being that it hints at this fundamental reality upon which all else is based.

The phrases “Ground of Being” and “Being itself” are basically the same concept. Tillich used both at different times, and other theologians such as John McQuarrey prefer “Being Itself,” but they really speak to the same concept. Now Sceptics are always asking “how can god be being?” I think this question comes from the fact that the term is misleading. The term “Being itself” gives one the impression that God is the actual fact of “my existence,” or the existence of my flowerbed, or any object one might care to name. Paul Tillich, on the other hand, said explicitly (in Systematic Theology Vol. I) that this does not refer to an existential fact but to an ontological status. What is being said is not that God is the fact of the being of some particular object, but, that he is the basis upon which being proceeds and upon which objects participate in being. In other words, since God exists forever, nothing else can come to be without God’s will or thought, and since there can’t even be a potential for any being without God’s thought, all potentialities for being arise in the “mind of God” than in that sense God is actually “Being Itself.” I think “Ground of Being” is a less confusing term. God is the ground upon which all being is based and from which all being proceeds.

How Can “a Being” be Being Itself?

Part of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of what is being said. I say that God is ‘necessary being’ not “a necessary being,” not because I forgot the “a” but because God is not “a being.” He is above the level of any particular being that participates in being, but exists on the level of the Being, the thing itself, apart from any particular beings. There is Being, and there is “the beings.” This is a crucial distinction, but it leaves one wondering what it means and how it could be. I think the answer lies in the fact that God is ultimate reality. God is the first, and highest and only necessary thing that exists, and thus, had God not created, God would be the only thing that exists. Could one somehow ponder a universe in which God had not created, in which God was all that was, one might well ask “what is it to be in this universe where there is only God?” In such a universe the only conceivable answer is “to be is to be God.” In that sense God is Being Itself.

By Metacrock (http://www.doxa.ws/Being/Being2.html)