Introduction- Omnipresence in Christianity

The different religions can vary on the question of whether or not they believe that God is omnipresent, but this is quite central in Christianity. It would be pretty hard for Christians not to believe that God can literally be in creation because the gospels are suffused with this kind of this language. The Holy Spirit came upon those apostles, Jesus says that I and the Father will come to you and dwell in you, multiple divine epiphanies in the Old Testament too many to mentions, Paul’s letters are full of references to Christ dwelling in us, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and on top of that, Catholics believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. It is hard to see how a God that cannot be everywhere, can be said to be anywhere. And it’s also really impossible to say that all this is figurative and metaphorical for Christians, so that’s not an alternative either. The concept of omnipresence itself, that is, what it really means for God to be “present everywhere” presents certain intriguing questions and difficulties, which we address in the article.

“Am I only a God nearby,”
declares the Lord,
    “and not a God far away?
Who can hide in secret places
    so that I cannot see them?”
declares the Lord.
    “Do not I fill heaven and earth?”
declares the Lord.”

-Jeremiah 23:23,24

“Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain You, much less this temple I have built.”

-2 Chronicles 6:18

God is not “Outside the Universe”, rather the Universe is “in God”

To state that the “Universe is in God” is not a location claim, rather a metaphysical one. It is merely an allusion to that which grounds the existence of the Universe (that’s what “grounding” entails. “The Universe is in God” is merely to make a metaphysical assertion in spatio-temporal terms. We cannot in human language describe what it means to be existentially grounded by another, and using a preposition like “in” , is the closest we can get. It cannot be outside the other, since it is wholly grounded by it and by default, “inside” is the only available alternative. On the other hand, spatial circumscribing is the closest notion to existential dependency that we can express, like the seed in a fruit, or a baby in their mother’s womb. Yet creation is even more closely dependent upon God than our most intimate analogies.

God is necessarily the potency (power) of Existence itself, rather than the potency to exist within a pre-existent framework. God is similarly also the reason and necessary pre-condition for the existence of every spatial location. The presence of a location depends on God, it could not but be that God were present to it. Being “Necessary Being”, his presence in any place cannot be unnecessary to that place. But we have spoken of why God is necessarily existence itself here Divine Simplicity

Is the Infinite God Delineated?

If God is not omnipresent per se then he is delineated, there is no middle option. Can God really be infinite and boundless and not be present everywhere? Is it possible that God be boundless outside the Universe but not inside it? This would mean that we can draw the boundary of the Universe as the limit of God and therefore the boundary of God himself. I cannot think of what other option there might be. Is it possible that the Universe and every non-God entity whatever it might be, including the angels and Heaven exist external to the infinite God? This would yield two parallel realities that do not intersect (picture a Venn diagram, two circles that do no intersect). This is absurd, because if the circles touch, then what exactly is this point of contact of creation with a God who is unable to be in physical contact with creation. If they do not touch then who put the space in between them, would it not need to be created by God?

A delineation is the definition of what it is to have a “body”, and so were God not omnipresent then he would necessarily have body that demarcates his extent and cordons it off from the rest of reality, a “boundary” beyond which God does not extend. You can see that this is unsatisfactory, not the least because we spatialize God in delineating him. If God has a boundary, then he must exist within a larger reality that was not created by him, in which case he could not be God.

In summary, a non-omnipresent God is either mono-present, which means that he’s spatial and this would be absurd, else he would be omni-absent, or in other words, simply absent. There are no other possibilities. The only possibility for a non-spatial entity to also not be omnipotent is in the case of the angels, but then in spite of this property, it is necessary that angels be contained within a larger reality, rather than encompassing reality. Take a pen and draw a line around the Universe. In a model with God not present in the Universe, you are effectively drawing a line around God. That line represents God’s boundary, or boundary-limit. It does not matter for the purpose of this critique whether or not the Universe itself has a boundary (although I do believe there is a boundary to it, albeit some boundary in higher physics that we may never comprehend. However in this case, the very contention that God is “outside” the universe implies that he is outside its boundary, and presupposes a boundary to it.

Those denying divine omnipotence place the deity ostensibly “outside” the Universe. However strictly speaking there is no such thing as “outside the Universe”. This is because whether it be Universe or a Multiverse, stating “outside” assigns spatial co-ordinates to that which we are proposing to exist outside spatial co-ordinates. When we stop talking about the Universe, we also stop talking about outsides and insides, unless they are in a Universe too, which doesn’t solve the problem.

We conclude from the foregoing that it is simply incoherent to state “God is not here”, because then the question “where, if not here?” must be answered. If the reply to that is “well, one cannot ask the question ‘where’ in relation to God”, then neither can one assert “not here” in relation to him. Simply stating that God be “outside/beyond the Universe” is meaningless since every spatial location including “outside”, is inside the Universe. Lack of omnipresence necessitates “mono-presence” (and omni-absence in terms of the Universe itself). Mono-presence requires spatial co-ordinates, for it is presence at “one” place. Being present in one place, in turn, implies a body defined by a boundary that demarcates it from other places. On a final note, with the advent of Quantum physics, it is becoming evident that even location is not necessarily a fundamental property of the Universe anyway, rather it is uncertain, relative, and dual- a located particle is also a non-locational wave. omnipresence is not really a contradiction in quantum physics with the recent Nobel going to the experiments that validate the Bell’s theorem support for non-locality. But we won’t speak more of that rabbit trail.

The correct approach to the issue is indeed the analogical approach, as described by Aquinas. This is the assertion that when we ascribe anything to God it is neither equivocal nor univocal to the manner in which we ascribe it to humans. We have described this in detail in the main article on the Holy Trinity, but in short: to say, for example, that God is “alive” or “loving” or “wise” or “dynamic”, is nothing like what we mean by these terms when we apply them to humans (they’re not “equivocal”), while on the other hand, neither is it true that these terms do not signify any reality in God (they’re not univocal either). They’re “analogical”, which is like a middle ground between the two. Similarly also, although we are right in stating “God is everywhere”, yet that is nothing like what we mean when we signify location as we do in the case of humans.

We have a “locative” understanding of “presence” the same is not true of God himself from the divine perspective. God is “everywhere” neither in the sense of being circumscribed in a location, nor in the sense of part of him being circumscribed in any or every location. Both those options are pantheistic (the latter also fitting some definitions of panentheism), and classic paganisms. These two simple conditions exhaust all the possibilities for spatial location. That is, spatial location necessarily needs to be one of those two else it is “absence”. To reassert this: to be spatially present in a place, either the whole of you need to be circumscribed in that place or the part of you. Neither of these being the case signifies being “absent”. The only remaining options are the Christian option where God is neither circumscribed nor absent, and the deist with a disconnected God, the circles that do not touch, or with one that orbits the other (we discuss these alternatives below).

A lovely lady’s young daughter once asked her “mommy, if I stomp my foot am I stepping one God?” (and added to her chagrin “and I want the answer by tomorrow!” Happily I got to speak with her the same day and edited a lot of this essay in the bargain!) So in what way is God “present”? Let us look at some analogies: Imagine being in the sea, not at the upper levels but deep in the depths where there is no light, nor any sense of up or down. What happens when you stomp your foot? It makes no difference to the ocean. Were ocean a living thing, to it you would be a little critter in it doing a bit of wriggling and that’s all. Or place yourself in deep space, again trying to stomp with your foot. What difference does it make to space? As far as space is concerned, you did less than nothing, you barely exist, and you’re merely wriggling. Its no more insulting to wriggle your foot in deep space as it is for a baby to kick in its mother’s womb. The child is not even in this world, and for all intents and purposes, the mother inhabits a different universe. The child’s entire universe is the womb, it has no existence outside it. The child is a dependent for it’s very being upon its mother: “in (mom) it lives and moves and has (its) being”. That is how it is between us and God and the last analogy is the most fitting. We are in the Ocean that is God. We do not “stomp the ocean”, rather the ocean cradles and cushions our movements.

So also God upholds our being, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). it is in his being that the sustenance of our soul is maintained, not physical, but existential (or ontological). In God, we are sustained ontologically (existentially). There is no existence for a fish outside the boundary of the ocean, so also there is no existence for us outside the boundary of God, who has no boundary. King Solomon states, “Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain You, much less this temple I have built” (1Kings 8:27). King Solomon recognizes this dual manner of presence, whereby God is at the same time really present in the Temple, and at the same time cannot be contained not only by the Earth, but also not by Heaven, meaning all of creation.

There is only one alternative for that which cannot be contained in anything, and it is that it itself must contain everything. If we draw a simple Venn diagram to represent this, we get the standard four possibilities given two circles: intersecting circles, disconnected circles, and two “circle within the circle” possibilities: all things within God, or God within all things. The last of these is absurd. The first two- intersecting or disconnected circles, both require an external entity in which the circles are contained that represents “everything”. You see, if God is “everything”, and “all things” are enclosed within it, then we have truly described all reality. In the disconnected circles the space that separates and surrounds them remains undescribed. With the intersecting circles again, part of one entity is “outside” the other. The circle within circle alone does not suffer from this problem of an entity that is not accounted for, because the outer circle can be said to represent all reality, or in other words God’s omnipresent reality. Thus we can define the outer circle as “everything”, or in Thomist terms, “existence” itself. This alone yields a comprehensive. The circle that contains the circle and is not in anything is itself everything, and thus it is omnipresent and non-locational. God cradles us in creating us. God himself whom “our soul cleaves to, his right hand holds us fast” (Ps.63:8), holding us in very existence.

God’s mode of Presence and addressing The problem of “Filth”

As we’ve been discussing, we have no other words to describe presence other than in locative terms and so the question “is God here” does requires a real answer. Some religions object, saying that God would be defiled by being omnipresent, especially by the more revulsive portions of creation. The usual form of this objection is “is God present in filth?” So again, the response would once again be that God’s existence is not in the manner of  being “here” or “there” at all in the first place. God creates the things that are “here and there” as “here and there things”; this creation does not impose “hereness” or “thereness” upon God and neither does it exclude him from being Present, he was present prior to these things and as their pre-condition. God does not need to be “here” or “there” to be present, for God’s Presence is Existence, not location. God is not enclosed in anything and yet he is present. All of Creation is like a speck in the being of God and God cradles Creation.

Our revulsion to filth is really a protective evolutionary adaptation. It is not as though this is a problem that God cannot deal with, filth is after all no more than a conglomeration of subatomic particles, a particular arrangement that we are evolved to experience revulsion for. Again as we stated earlier, God is not contained in those things, not is he in those things as being “here” or “there”. To God’s infinite Presence, those few atoms are an infinite and temporary speck. Jesus would have had to deal with whatever contact with the filth that the human condition enjoined upon him, so this argument does not hold water in a Christian setting anyway. In truth that which is truly repulsive to God is not inert material but rather the filth of sin in the heart of men as Jesus clearly point out (Mt.15:18). God willingly cradles the most unthinkable filth in his very Being, because his plan is for its purity, out of Love for his created beings. This is his Mercy. On the other hand the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity of God does dwell “in” the Christian believer, in a special Presence that is given in the life of grace (eg. Rom.5:5, John 14:23 etc.) Again this is not that God is “contained” by the believer. This “grace of union” is a separate discussion, we mention it here only for completeness.

God is omnipresent because He is the only thing that exists, everything else is cradled by Him. In denying omnipresence with the onset of Creation, we first of all admit of a change in God. As King David sang (Psalm 139:7-10): “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”

This is how St Thomas Aquinas puts it: [ST I, Q.8, Art.1 co.]“ God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately and touch it by its power; hence it is proved in Phys. vii that the thing moved and the mover must be joined together. Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing, as was shown above (I:7:1). Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly…(ad.1) . God is above all things by the excellence of His nature; nevertheless, He is in all things as the cause of the being of all things… (ad.3) No action of an agent, however powerful it may be, acts at a distance, except through a medium. But it belongs to the great power of God that He acts immediately in all things. Hence nothing is distant from Him, as if it could be without God in itself. But things are said to be distant from God by the unlikeness to Him in nature or grace; as also He is above all by the excellence of His own nature. (I, Q.8. Art 3. Co.) God is said to be in a thing in two ways; in one way after the manner of an efficient cause; and thus He is in all things created by Him; (…) He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being.”

God’s Contact in Creating- a Counter-Example from Islam

Some of the arguments against divine omnipresence come from a notion that creation could not possibly tolerate the Presence of the Infinite God and would simply disintegrate upon any such contact. However it is in fact quite simple to show that it is logically impossible that God be unable to contact created things.

Here is a simple syllogism from the belief in miracles. We use the Qur’anic miracle of Jesus breathing life into a clay bird, but we could really use any other miracle to prove the point. I use the Qur’anic example since this argument in my experience is typically made by Muslims, and Qur’anic backing for it can be found in a narrative wherein God tells Moses he could not possibly see him and subsequently a mountain is reduced to dust when God reveals himself to it, seemingly to emphasize the point.

In the miracle, God acts upon the clay in order to change it into a bird. In order to hold that God is not “handling” the clay himself one would have to propose that he performs something along the lines of parceling out quanta (or a single quantum, I’m using this term to represent a portion) of his power which become separated from him. These quanta are from God and yet they are not God. God would have to create power to work the miracle. This only moves the problem backward, since God would have to be in contact with these created powers, which is contact with creation. God changed a clay into a bird.

A power acted directly on the substance of the clay in order to change it into feather, bone, muscle etc.

From (1) & (2), God’s power acted on the clay.

But God’s power is not separated from him else what is left is powerless.

From (3) & (4), God directly acted on the clay.

From (1) & (4), either God Himself is present in spacetime, or there are no miracles.

Again, in order for God not to be in contact with something would require the presence of space in between God and that thing. But God created space too. Hence God would not be in contact with creation only through being in contact with creation and hence we have a contradiction. Hence God cannot not be in contact with creation. He would have to create the space between himself and the Universe should he truly will to be separate from it, for whatever reason.

This sounds ridiculous, to have a space and a Universe stuck onto God. Thus we can conclude that if God is truly “separate” from Creation, then the barrier that does separates him from it must be specifically created by him for this purpose. Even were this the case, there could not be space between God and Creation at the time of Creation or that itself space would need to be created in the first place. That is the purpose of the ”Holiest of Holies” in the Judean Temple (Islamic tradition has a “hijab” covering God in at least one hadith). This doesn’t actually solve the problem of contact with creation for he is in touch with whatever is around him including any veil (be it Temple or Hijab).

Were God truly “corrosive” to his creation, he could not only not be on Earth, but also not in Heaven. Many Muslims do not actually state that God is in Heaven, and all they will concede is that he is “over the Throne”, while offering no further elaboration. The implication is that the Throne of God is removed from all things, even Heaven, it itself requires no description, and nor is God in contact with it, since he is “over” it (note that there is no dogma in Islam on these issues, rather differing views with none having precedence).

Once again, in the example of the mountain we can show that were the mountain truly reduced to nothing in God’s Presence, then how did God create mountain in the first place? It would rather be like building sand castles with wet sand. Were an agent to annihilate the very object of its action, then how is this agent supposed to act at all? On top of that the entire incident necessitates that God actually “appear” to the mountain, in which case he actually be in the Universe anyway. So the question is really not as to whether the mountain did or did not pop, its what is God doing appearing to it in the first place. The mountain, of course, is connected to the Earth, and so the Earth should have disintegrated, were God to appear to it. God is, after all appearing to the whole Earth underneath and around him in appearing to the mountain. Ultimately, were this incident to truly have theological value, the entire Universe should have been destroyed in it. Rather in order to preserve some value to the story, it must be held that what is being expressed is our inability to behold the dazzling Glory of God with our human eyes, and the disintegration of the mountain is only intended to illustrate the point, with the mountain being personified as “seeing” God, for illustrative purposes as it were.

Disconnecting God’s Power from its Object

Even Muslims believe that God “by his knowledge power and mercy is close to us” although he is not here himself. How is God’s power close to you if he’s not here? A Muslim countered with “Having power over something doesn’t mean you have to have physical connection with it”. You have to force an artificial separation between God and creation using “attribute”. If God is the direct reason for the existence of everything, then assuming that there is a physical separation/ barrier between God and those things is a separate assumption that should not be accepted without proof, which does not naturally follow upon the first proposition that God did create everything “God created everything and then separated his Presence from them”. The assertion that things are cradled within the very Being of God in spite of being distinct from him involves no such assumption apart from that God did give then existence. God was, is, and always will be omnipresent. Creation did not change that. An agent disconnected from that upon which it is to act cannot act upon it until such a connection is established. If the Universe presents a physical limit to God’s Being then it also for the same reason presents a physical limit to God’s power. Monopresence requires delineating God and Universe.

God’s Attributes are not disconnected from him

On the other hand it is impossible that anything that were connected to God were also not itself God. This is what is described in the diagram. That is why the assert that God have attributes like “hearing” and “seeing” in the Universe gathering his information for him is no different from asserting that God himself were present everywhere gathering information.

Can God see and hear without actually being present in a place, though by some means his “power” or “attribute” alone being present? The attribute of seeing is none other than to describe the power of sight that is inherent to the being which sees, it is not separate from that being. For example when I hear, it is my ear which gives me the attribute of hearing. I do not throw out some “attribute” of hearing to the thing I am listening to, it remains attached. Hence were we to say that God’s attribute were here, the “rest of God” could not fail to be “attached”. Again, the assertion that God somehow in a way we cannot comprehend, “senses” things in the Universe, is again an acceptance of omnipresence rather than its denial, since we are accepting that a sensory aspect of God is present in the Universe “everywhere” hence so also God, whom we would hope these “senses” adjoin to. It would be absurd to hold that God would separate his sensory attributes from himself since this would leave him senseless: a Universe with God-less attributes and a Heaven with a sense-less God. We can see how the absurdities get multiplied in this line of thinking.

The difference in the two religions is that in the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition there is a real Presence of God himself in his Creation, this is the central claim of the tradition from page 1 of the Biblical narrative, while the Islamic faith will opt for some surrogate of God that fulfils this necessary role, whereby God’s mercy, love, power, hearing, seeing, knowledge and so on are present everywhere, even though God is present nowhere. This creates the obvious question of how a disconnect is created between God and that which constitute all of his powers.

Knowledge of an Omni-Absent v/s Omni-Present Deity

“Omni- Absence” is that property of a deity by which it is absent everywhere (or present nowhere) in creation. Among other things, this creates a problem for omniscience.

Instantaneous Knowledge of the Omnipresent Deity

We would all agree that God interacts with creation in some way, in that he sees, hears, speaks to it and so on. Thus two possibilities arise as to how this might be: either that God performs these tasks from a distance, modelling human action, or that God being omnipresent, the problem of distance does not arise. An omnipresent God’s knowledge is simultaneous with events rather than consequent upon them and hence this is true omniscience. In such a case, God’s knowledge is “immediate” since there is no “medium” between him and the object of his knowledge, the same being the case with all of God’s actions/interactions with created things. An omnipresent God by being everywhere, does require to grasp at knowledge, nor “obtain” it, since the knowledge of temporal occurrences never left him in the first place.

At best- almost Omniscient, if Omni-Absent

Were there truly infinite distances over which God were not present, then even were God to act at unimaginably great speeds over those distances in order to gain knowledge, it would still take him a non-zero amount of time to get to that information. Further this “action” would need to entail either God going to the source of the information itself, else sending something out to get it. Anything that God “sent out” to get information would need to be connected to him, else you would it would be like throwing out a rope to save someone without attaching it to something first (or throwing out the ship’s anchor without first tying it to a rope). In such a case, what had been sent out would also have to do a return trip with every bit of information it gathered as an independent agent from God.

It would be like setting up a hearing device without wires or wireless connectivity. What God sent out as the equivalent of his hearing and seeing devices would need to be connected to God, not disconnected from him. Even if this is a wireless connectivity, it is nevertheless connected. Now if the thing is not God then it does not solve our problem of instantaneous information transfer anyway, while if it is God, then this alone would make him omnipresent anyway. God “sending out feelers”, whether minions or tentacular projections of himself does not solve the information conundrum.

Failing to solve that conundrum would mean that God were almost omniscient at best, but not quite. Knowledge-lag defeats omniscience, though it be by a fraction of time. Thus we can see why without omnipresence there is no omniscience, a God who is mediate to time and space does not know immediately. It would make God a highly-advanced, audiovisual monitoring device, but not omniscient.

Could God “Simply Know”, Irrespective of the Objections?

Could it be that that in spite of all the objections and difficulties, there might yet be a way that temporal events simply “play out” in the Divine Mind like a television broadcast? Again, this cannot be accepted, because we have in the first place asserted the reality of the distance between God and temporal events in asserting omni-absence. Having done that, we cannot now ignore the premise of our very assertion and disappear the distance as well! “Not in the Universe” is a spatial assertion, that in whatever the magnitude of the expanse of Space, God is absent, he is not present. And information takes non-zero time to traverse that magnitude, even though the time through means be infinitely small.

If it is true that God is not subject to Laws of physics, then omnipresence is a consequence of not being subject to locality. Metaphysical omnipresence is not simply locality extended universally (that would be quantum location), rather, omnipresence simply has no location and yet is present. Omnipresence is not presence at every point rather every point is present to it.

In spite of all the forgoing arguments we have made there will yet be those who in order to avoid the situation of divine omnipresence will assert “God just knows and acts in a way that we cannot understand”, but this is true, it is because he is here in a way we cannot understand too. There is no logical reason to deny what you cannot understand in order to accept something that you cannot also understand.

However for us to hold that God somehow knows/sees/hears, in short gathers information without actually being there through some miracle, is to state that all the visuals in the Universe somehow play out in God’s mind like a tv broadcast. But remember this is not just a single broadcast, rather it is a separate history of every particle in the Universe. Such a movie would be as big as the Universe anyway and therefore God would be left with the same problem that he had in the first place, which is how does he gather information from it. Thus translocating events from the external Universe into the mind of God does not solve the problem.

Perspective from the Holographic Principle

The holographic principle states that it might be possible for all the information in the Universe to be present on the Surface of the Universe itself. This theory was initiated through from Stephen Hawking’s demonstration that all the information about objects that fall into a Black Hole is contained on its surface. If this were true then a spatialized God could in theory collect data from the surface of the Universe, however such a deity would no doubt have to be spatialized too, since the information is on a “surface” which is necessarily spatial.

The holographic principle would not just entail that all the information of the Universe be present on its surface, all this really means is that the reality of the Universe itself is a “surface reality”. God being Present on that surface would be the equivalent of God being in the Universe anyway, and thereby spatialized. The holographic principle even were it true, would only seem to move the Universe toward God rather than away from him. The holographic principle mandates that information of the Universe be present “at” the surface of the Universe, not that anything actually be “outside” that surface, of course.

Thus the holographic principle does not change the situation for divine knowledge, one still has to explain how God knows all that is happening upon that surface simultaneously without being there. Also importantly, the Universe is not really the shape of an expanding football, rather it has at least one more dimension than that, as we can see in the proposed shapes for it of flat/saddle/curve. That means that any surface has the number of dimensions of the body itself minus one. The surface of the Universe has at least three dimensions, and if string theory is correct, then many more. Thus we are in the same situation as before with regards to the divine Knowledge, or worse.

Omnipresence is God’s Nature

Omnipresence and Divine Simplicity

It is not the case that the monotheistic Deity is to be viewed as a patch of homogeneous substance? We do not view God as “substance” in the sense of physical substances. If we do say “Substance” of God, that merely means God, the terminology does not provide any new information not already contained in “God”. “Homogeneous” stands for a material whose structure is the same in all portions, that is, there were nothing to distinguish one portion of it from another. For example, it is held that our Universe is homogeneous on cosmic scales, the term used is “isotropic” which means the same thing. When you zoom out (a lot!), there is no large-scale structure to it, the screen just shown a grainy fuzz…or putty. Easier to understand are more common examples, like putty itself, or glass. But God cannot be said to be “homogeneous because what does not have parts cannot be said to be “the same in every part”.

Rather than “homogeneous”, with reference to God all we can say is that he is “all in all”, that a priori, he is “everything”. God is non-homogeneous because he is not divided into parts which in turn is because he is all-encompassing. God is not composed of parts because no line can be drawn through him that begins at one end and ends at the other, and this is because God is without beginning and end, he is all-encompassing. “Everything” cannot have beginning or end else it would not be everything, since it ended. So also “everything” cannot have parts because it has not beginning nor end whereby to be partitioned.

Thus we can see that omnipresence is a property that falls out of Divine Simplicity. Without Divine Simplicity we really are creating boundary conditions for God- one cannot posit of a being which internal partitions can transcend, that external boundary cannot also enclose. Or to rephrase: a thing which can be traversed internally so as to partition it, can also be circumscribed externally so as to encompass it. God is simple because he is everything.

One cannot draw a partition through the “everything”, because it is unbounded. God is “simple” because he is unbounded- the unbounded cannot suffer partitions. So also God’s unboundedness is the reason that he is omnipresent– because he is everything and all-encompassing. as we have already seen, we cannot assert a “where” to God, as “everything” cannot have a location. But when we state that “God is not here”, we are left requiring to answer “if not here then where?”, since we are using spatial language for that which is not spatial. Again, I see no way around this, the burden of the proof for proving the contrary might be the case lies with the one asserting it.

God is Everything, in the Category of Being

Thus divine omnipresence is not merely the fact that God is everywhere in creation, which is to state that God is enclosed in Creation. Rather ontologically and a priori, God is everything. We avoid pantheism by considering that it is only God who truly “exists” and so we can say with confidence that he “is” everything (Ex.3:14). Created things exist and exist as distinct from God but their existence does not rival or even parallel God and in this sense it cannot be said that they “also exist” or that they “exist apart from God”, rather the very nature of their existence is different from that of God and is a different ontological category. This is the reason that stating “God is everything” is not a violation of the distinctness of God from creation, that distinction is a category distinction in ontology. When God created he did not cease to be everything that truly exists, he did not stop being true or being “the Truth”, rather with Creation there were also things that had dependent existences, dependent truths. In the words of St. Thomas, we “both are and are not”. So in this sense since it it only God who truly “IS”, so he IS everything. The property of omnipresence thus flows naturally from the a priori fact that God exists with nothing else definitionally, and this fact does not change with Creation- creating does not engender a boundary condition for God who has no boundary, simply a distinction between Existence and dependent existences.

Further Fr. White writes regarding the divine omnipresence:

“the kind of causality that renders God present in all things is the the “total causality” that allows creatures “to be”. God alone is capable of this kind of causality and so he alone is omnipresent. This is an incommunicable feature of his divine nature (…) the world is not “exterior” to God, we might say, but rather, in some real sense, the world is “within” God.” (TNM 286,7)

The reason that there is in a sense “nowhere else for the world to go” is that God is present to is not just as cause, but rather as the cause of existence per se. There is nowhere to go outside of existence. At the same time, God is not himself the being of the creature, rather the giver of that existence: “Even if God is present to all things in virtue of their very being, their created existence, he is the giver of that existence and not the being of the creatures themselves (or “himself- my addition)” (TNM 287) If God is the fact of existence, then he enables other things to be, not by making them also the facts of existence, rather by making them existing facts, as though they are sheltered in his shade from non-existing. This is the intimacy that he has with creatures, something like that of “cloaking” them in his existence, and while this is intimacy, if the cloak is taken away, they will merely cease to be (Ps104:29,30).

In this sense again, God is truly omnipresent, as Fr. White describes Aquinas as stating:

“in STI,q.8,a.2, Aquinas goes on to argue that (…) God does indeed fill every place, albeit not spatially. Or in Thomas’ words: “By the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, he Himself fills every place” (TNM 287)

However at the same time, this is not the same as the Christian grace of “union” with God. Fr. White is careful to differentiate this point when he says:

“a great number of forms of metaphysical mysticism confound these two levels(…) for whom(…) the omnipresence of God the Creator, seems to be the basis for affirming a kind of non-distinction between God and creatures and a mysticism of divine-human union. As Aquinas points out, however, while there is a mysticism of being- since we come from God and depend on him and his activity at the center of our lives and persons- this numinous presence of God as Creator ought not to be identified with a mysticism of union with God. Divinizing union occurs only by an elevating gift of grace, not in virtue of out created nature or its innate powers” (TNM 289)

The “cloak” is only a cloak, it is not transforming union, rather it is forming in creating.

do read also the parts that deal with God as existence in the article Divine Simplicity

Are Angels Omnipresent?

This does not also necessarily mean that everything apart from the physical Universe is God. God has also created creatures distinct from his omnipresence, yet which are not physical. This means that they are non locational, but outside the physical realm a location is not required (remember with the advent of Quantum physics, we understand that even location within the Universe is uncertain). Angels are merely spiritual beings “distinct” from God. Distinctness within the Universe signifies a boundary, but not without. And no, no one can say how it is possible for distinctness and unboundedness to be simultaneous, however it is equally also not possible to state how it is that there might indeed be boundaries in the spiritual realm.

“Can God enter Creation”

This question can sometimes come up, and its really not a very well thought out question. The reason is that if we already accept a metaphysical omnipresence, then there is nothing to “enter”. If what we mean by this is that God can make his essence correspond to space-time co-ordinates, so that he becomes part of the fabric of space time, then the answer is no, because he would not be God, except that in the special case of the Incarnation, he unites his omnipresent essence to nature that does correspond to space-time co-ordinates. So in this case, nothing has changes in the Divine essence. We do a full discussion of the Hypostatic Union here: Incarnation- God become Man, but that’s not required at this point. What then, does it mean for God to be present in creation in the various epiphanies the Bible recounts? The pillar of Fire and the Pillar of Cloud, the epiphanies of a physical form on the mountain and to prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah, the angel of Yahweh in physical form, the Burning Bush, in the NT the tongues of flame, and further all three Persons being said to indwell believers, the Holy Spirit “in the form of a dove” and as “tongues of flame”.

The way to view this is that first of all, in all of these, there is no problem saying that God is “present”, if we have already accepted omnipresence. In these epiphanies, God is enabling a local presence to be somehow more special than the presence elsewhere. One can only thing that this “special” condition is being enabled in our perception rather than in anything in God’s being. It is impossible that God be not as special everywhere, which would be absurd. Further, we can also say that what this “special-ness” consists in, is firstly in the fact that we are given to see God, who would otherwise not be detectable to our visual apparatus (like an advanced stealth bomber is not detectable on radar). So not only is God omnipresent but now we could say visible in a local sense. These epiphanies are obviously given as a gift to us in order to increase our faith. We could also note here that the Bible states that “no one can see the Face of God and live”, which must be referring to the vision of God in his full glory, however in keeping with this, when God is seen in glory, only the feet or the back are shown.

What however, could it mean for God to be “seen locally”? Firstly that which is seen is meant to represent the entirety of God’s infinity, but this can only be as a visual representation. Transcendent eternity cannot be packed into a local space no matter how “tightly” it is packed. Either it must become a thing with space-time co-ordinates for this, else it must rip the fabric of spacetime locally in a certain shape in order that there is a spatial metaphysical presence, only in that space. I don’t think this latter makes sense, although I don’t discard it completely because it sounds somehow attractive. What is probably the best description is once again going to be related to sight. The only alternative would be that the dove were actually real, or the fire, these physical objects, and hypostatically united with the divinity in the same way that Jesus was. Again this might be difficult to accept, perhaps in main as a result of the fact that these forms are now seemingly lost (unless they are not). We are left with vision and this means that it is the omnipresent God somehow using physics to represent a form to our eyes, in the manner not of an illusion but rather a real physical occurrence. This physical event could involve a certain bending of the light rays, or the workings of the forces of nature in order to produce the effect on our eyes and on our senses. Since it is a real physical occurrence, it is not correct to call it an illusion and since it is not a new “nature”, neither is it a hypostatic union. Lastly we might see this as a “sacramental” presence, in the manner that Catholics like myself see the Holy Eucharist. I might have to describe that in a bit more detail, but you could look here for a full definition Eucharist in the Christian Religion.

Omnipresence and Special Cases

God’s Presence in Heaven

Even Christians do not define clearly what heaven is; there is always a mystery to . My contention is that for an omnipresent God, heaven is his very Being, that accommodates all his creatures who are perfected to share in that Being, in God who is existence itself. This is the only means by which we do not fall into the trap of having to specify heaven as a “place” with all the difficult explanations that would entail. This is in line with the beautiful description that we see in Rev 21:23 ”The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.” Which parallels Is. 60:19 “The sun will no more be your light by day, nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you, for the LORD will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.”

Should God not be omnipresent on Earth then he may not be so also in Heaven, for were he unable to radiate his Presence on Earth, He cannot be seen to do so in Heaven, where he is surrounded by his creatures anyway.

The Presence of Hell

The question of Hell is a perhaps the hardest to explain, but we’ve done most of the groundwork required for it already, so we can dive right into it. I would say that God being Existence itself (this is again, not to relegate God to some dry force of nature rather to state that the dry term we call “existence” not knowing what we mean by it, is so majestic as to be God). God literally upholds all existing things and in the case of Hell, there is a manner in which he allows its existence in his absence. God is Goodness itself (again this is not to relegate God to a dry abstraction, rather that what we consider and experience as no more than the abstract is in reality the Majesty of God himself). We’ve spoken in detail of these two concepts earlier.

So with God is the only true Reality, this means that Goodness is the only true reality itself. Its opposite, evil, is the mere absence of Good. So the greater the degree of evil in a thing, the less it shares in the Existence of God and the lesser its own reality (no one in the last century can forget the powerful image of the very being of the wearer of the Ring fading away in Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings). Evil is a lie, and being untrue it isn’t real, its reality is a lie, you can see even semantically evil does not have a real existence. A lie does not have any co-ordinate in reality. Hell is the perfection of evil, so perfect that it is akin to non-existence. It really is the answer to those that ask of God “why did you not grant oblivion instead of eternal torment?” for it truly is oblivion. It is real only to those that dwell in it. So in a way we do not have the problem of describing how God makes Hell to exist when in a sense it does not, and like to bearer of the ring, neither do the devil and his demons, only in a diminished existence for a while, soon to be gone from all relevance forever.

God is omnipresent in all of reality, while Hell is a twisted reality or the antithesis of it, for the state of which God is no longer responsible. That’s how I like to think of the absence of the reality of God in Hell. Such things are not taught with doctrinal certainty, we explain it the best we can. Divine Omnipresence is an ontological argument and that God is not present in Hell can be argued also from an ontological perspective, this is why it seems a valid explanation and the only possible exception.