To Be or not to Be? The Idea of God in Philosophical Theology

Abstract

The article deals with the question of the ontological status of God in the context of different types of theology. In particular, since polemics between theists and atheists has a form of logical, rational methods, both sides must recognize the demands necessary for the debates. The author shows that for this reason not only “theistic theology” takes place, which uses a certain notion of God, but also “atheistic theology”, or atheology, which takes place because an atheist must also understand what he denies, i.e. must operate with some concept of the divine. It follows that we can analyze the specific features of the idea of God in two kinds of theology. The article compares these theologies and identifies the most important aspect of the idea of God. In this regard, the author shows that the desire to prove or disprove the existence of what is beyond Being is a questionable task, to say the least. Nevertheless, for atheism this metaphysical point is extremely important, because God turns into a being that needs Being. Here atheism acquires rational grounds, but without it we have only “atheism of heart”, not “atheism of reason”.