The Ultimate Being

Many people, theists and non-theists, confuse the concept of an ultimate being with the concept of an ultimate existent.  In other words, God is often mistaken for the one thing that presides over the whole of reality when he is actually just the being above all material objects, time, and other minds.  In order to be God, the uncaused cause only has to have never come into existence by virtue of being uncaused.  This nature does not involve power over every aspect of reality, something which is impossible for any being to possess.

Nothing about the concept of mere theism entails that God is the ultimate thing in all of existence, as if he could alter the laws of logic in any way.  Rather, he is the supreme consciousness, the being without which created or contingent beings would not exist.  This is quite distinct from all things being subject to God's whims.  God could restructure the entire physical world, remove all other minds from existence, or create anything not in existence which does not have logically impossible properties, but he cannot change the nature of reason or make it cease to exist.

In this way, God can have a power that entirely supercedes that of any created thing without ever having power over reason itself.  Reason does confine God, along with all other things, in the sense that he can do nothing which would contradict it and in the sense that God could not exist if his existence violated the laws of logic.  Reason is therefore more fundamental and necessary than even God's existence, even though any values tied to God's nature rely on God for their existence and not on logic alone (the existence of logic does not necessitate the existence of values).

The ultimate being is not above reason.  However, God, the uncaused cause and ultimate being, is above everything that he has created.  The necessary truths of logic are not created things; it is by necessity that they have always existed.  It is true that an uncaused cause (God) exists by necessity and never began to exist, but this is a different kind of necessity.  Again, even God's existence requires conformity with the laws of logic in order to even be possible.  Logic, though, does not need God in order to exist.  It is the only thing in existence that both has to exist and exists only because of its own self-rooted necessity.