#-767 God’s Omnipresence

Dr. craig’s response

Your question has become a topic of recent debate among Christian philosophers, Joel, which I’ve encountered in writing my systematic philosophical theology. The answer depends on whether God exists throughout space or transcends space. Although the Scriptures typically speak of God in spatial terms, I was surprised to discover that the scriptural concept of heaven as God’s realm (as opposed to “the heavens” in the sense of the skies or the starry heavens) is meant to underscore, not God’s spatial location, but His transcendence of the world and so could be construed in terms of God’s transcending space.

If God transcends space, then God’s omnipresence is entailed by and reducible to His omnipotence and His omniscience. God can be said to be omnipresent in the sense that He is causally active at and cognizant of every point in space. This is not to say that God’s omnipresence is “just a clumsy yet long held description” of His omnipotence and omniscience, for there is nothing clumsy about so understanding God’s omnipresence—on the contrary, it is a pretty exalted view of God’s presence to everything!

There is today, however, a handful of contemporary scholars who maintain not only that God is literally in space but that this has actually been the mainstream position in Christian theology since the time of Augustine in the fifth century! I am convinced that these revisionist scholars are quite mistaken about the historical view. Of course, given scriptural language, classical theologians affirm that God exists everywhere and is present to every place; but the question is what they meant by that. How is God present in every place? What they mean, I think, is that God is, in Thomas Aquinas’ terms, causally connected to everything in space, knows what is happening everywhere in space, and is the ground of being for everything that exists in space, but without being in space Himself.

If God does exist in space, He would have to do so in a very special sense: He would have to be wholly present at every place in space. Since God is not made of parts, He can’t be extended throughout space as the universe is, part here and part there. Rather He has to be wholly here and at the same time wholly there. This is a very difficult notion to get your head around, and so much of the contemporary philosophical discussion has to do with the way things can be located in space, and the discussion rapidly becomes very technical.

The view that God is in space runs into the so-called problem of spatial intrinsics. God is supposed to be wholly present at every region of space or at least at multiple regions of space. As an omniscient being, God must know where He is. At each location at which God is wholly present, God must believe, “I am here.” But since the spatial indexical term “here” refers to the location of its user, God will be in different belief states at different places in space. Thus God at different places will have different intrinsic properties and so cannot be identical across space. Instead, we have polytheism, just as St. Anselm feared.

By contrast, the view that God transcends space commends itself very naturally in light of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. For we know, in virtue of the doctrine of creation, that God existing alone without creation is spaceless.  For on a relational view of space, space does not exist in the utter absence of any physical reality, and on a substantival view of space, space is a thing or substance and therefore must have been created by God.  In either case, then, God brings space into being at the moment of His creation of the universe.  Contrary to Isaac Newton, space is not a necessary, concomitant effect of God but a contingent, freely willed effect. Sans the universe, therefore, God exists spacelessly.  But the creation of space would do nothing to “spatialize” God, that is to say, to draw Him into space.  The creating of space is not itself a spatial act (as is, say, bumping something).  Hence, there is no reason to think that divine spacelessness is surrendered in the act of creation.  If not, then God’s omnipresence should be understood in terms of God’s being immediately cognizant of and causally active at every place in space.  He knows what is happening at every spatial location in the universe and He is causally operative at every such place, even if nothing more is going on there than quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of “empty” space.