Another little word that gave me pause. I recognised it just fine, from ontology, I just didn’t know that philosophy had done away with the –ology.
Do Greeks even say ontikós? *googles* Phew. Theologians do, at least: Η οντική εκδοχή του Είναι: Αιτιοκρατία και αξιολογία. “The ontic version of Being: Determinism and Axiology.”
The Magister does too (as do a bunch of philosophers on Quora):
Michael Masiello’s answer to How is God personally known and experienced?
But some intimation of the sacred abides in the human imagination, and the debate between theists and atheists ultimately rests on whether it makes more sense to say it exists only there or has some ontic referent.
Michael Masiello’s answer to Atheists: Why would any human want to be religious?
People want to feel that the world and the universe make some kind of ordered sense, and that their — our — existence in it has some sort of meaning. For some reason, they cannot accept responsibility for the idea that we human beings can make that meaning for ourselves; for them, if it’s not ontic, it’s not meaning at all.
The prerogative of whatever deity happens to enjoy ontic status, and is probably in charge of the situation (not the embarrassed postmortem person)
In philosophy, ontic (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: “of that which is”) is physical, real, or factual existence.
“Ontic” describes what is there, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being.
So, with regard to God: God as someone that really exists in the world, and isn’t just an abstract concept.