## 1. Some Issues involving Omnipresence and Historical Background



According to classical theism, God is omnipresent, that is, present
everywhere. But classical theism also holds that God is immaterial.
How can something that is not, or does not have, a body be located in
space? Early discussions of divine presence typically began by
distinguishing God's presence in space from that of material
bodies.
 Augustine
 (354-430) writes,



> 
> Although in speaking of him we say that God is everywhere present, we
> must resist carnal ideas and withdraw our mind from our bodily senses,
> and not imagine that God is distributed through all things by a sort
> of extension of size, as earth or water or air or light are
> distributed (*Letter 187*, Ch. 2).
> 



Elsewhere Augustine continues this theme and introduces a new element,
namely, the suggestion that divine presence might be understood by
analogy with the presence of the soul:



> 
> [Some people] are not able to imagine any substance except what is
> corporeal, whether those substances be grosser, like water and earth,
> or finer, like air and light, but still corporeal. None of these can
> be wholly everywhere, since they are necessarily composed of
> numberless parts, some here and some there; however large or however
> small the substance may be, it occupies an amount of space, and it
> fills that space without being entire in any part of it. Consequently,
> it is a characteristic of corporeal substances alone to be condensed
> and rarified, contracted and expanded, divided into small bits and
> enlarged into a great mass. The nature of the soul is very different
> from that of the body, and much more different is the nature of God
> who is the Creator of both body and soul (*Letter 137*).
> 



Augustine adds two further points: First, God "knows how to be
wholly everywhere without being confined to any place"
(*Letter 137*). In contrast to material objects, which, having
parts in various parts of the space they occupy, are not wholly
present at any of those regions, God is *wholly present*
wherever he is. Second, God is not *contained* in or confined
by any of the places at which he exists. Augustine is thus explicit
that God is not present in the way corporeal substances are present,
but his positive proposal for divine presence is less well developed.
He notes that God's light, strength, and wisdom reach everywhere
(*Letter 187*, Ch. 7), and he holds that "God so
permeates all things as to be not a quality of the world, but the very
creative substance of the world ruling the world without labor,
sustaining it without effort." Rather than going on to explain
these ideas, however, this passage simply ends with what became a
familiar formula:



> 
> Nevertheless, he [God] is not distributed through space by size so
> that half of him should be in half the world and half in the other
> half of it. He is wholly present in all of it in such wise as to be
> wholly in heaven alone and wholly in the earth alone and wholly in
> heaven and earth together; not confined in any place, but wholly in
> himself everywhere.
> 



Anselm
 (1033-1109) also distinguishes God's presence from the
way in which material objects are contained in space, and he, too,
appeals to the concept of being wholly present. In his
*Monologion* Anselm discusses omnipresence in a series of
chapters with paradoxical titles. In chapter 20 he states that
"the Supreme Being exists in every place and at all
times." But in the following chapter, he argues that God
"exists in no place and at no time." Finally, he attempts
to reconcile these "two conclusions--so contradictory
according to their utterance, so necessary according to their
proof", by distinguishing two senses of "being wholly in a
place." In one sense those things are wholly in a place
"whose magnitude place contains by circumscribing it, and
circumscribes by containing it." In this sense, an ordinary
material object is contained in a place. God, however, is not thus
contained in space, for it is "a mark of shameless impudence to
say that place circumscribes the magnitude of Supreme Truth."
Instead, God is in every place in the sense that he is present at
every place. According to Anselm, "the Supreme Being must be
present as a whole in every different place at once." Like
Augustine, then, Anselm denies that God is contained in space. Also,
like Augustine, he seems to leave unexplained this second relation of
being "present as a whole" in every place.



In his (1988) Edward Wierenga attempts to supply the missing details.
He notes that Anselm holds that souls could be wholly present in more
than one place, provided that they sensed in more than one place, and
that Anselm (in his *Proslogion*) adds that perception for God
is a matter of having direct or immediate knowledge. Combining these
two ideas, Anselm could say that God is present everywhere in virtue
of having immediate knowledge of what is happening everywhere. Brian
Leftow (1989) objects to the details of this interpretation and
proposes instead that, for Anselm, God is everywhere in virtue of his
power. We will explore the combination of knowledge and power below.
It should be noted, however, as Christopher Conn (2011) emphasizes,
that Anselm himself discusses time in conjunction with space; perhaps
an adequate interpretation of Anselm would exploit this idea and
develop an account, as Conn suggests, according to which God
"contains" all of space-time.



The two ideas of knowledge and power figure prominently in the account
of omnipresence given by
 Thomas Aquinas
 (1225-1274), which we will take up in the next section. Section
3 will consider two 20th century proposals very much in the spirit of
Aquinas's. Some treatments of the problem of omnipresence seem
to have the consequence that God is related to the world as though it
is his body. That will be the subject of Section 4. In Section 5
we will consider several recent proposals that depart from the
traditional formula.


## 2. Power, Knowledge, and Essence



According to Thomas Aquinas, God's presence is to be understood
in terms of God's power, knowledge and essence. (In this view he
followed a formula put forth by Peter Lombard (late 11th
C.-1160) in his *Sentences,* I, xxxvii, 1.) He writes,
"God is in all things by his power, inasmuch as all things are
subject to his power; he is by his presence in all things, inasmuch as
all things are bare and open to his eyes; he is in all things by his
essence, inasmuch as he is present to all as the cause of their
being" (*Summa Theologica* I, 8, 3). Aquinas attempts to
motivate this claim with some illustrations:



> 
> But how he [God] is in other things created by him may be considered
> from human affairs. A king, for example, is said to be in the whole
> kingdom by his power, although he is not everywhere present. Again, a
> thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subject
> to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be present to
> anyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in every part of the
> house. Lastly, a thing is said to be substantially or essentially in
> that place in which its substance is.
> 



Perhaps there is a sense in which a king is present wherever his power
extends. In any event, Aquinas seems to think so. He distinguishes two
kinds of being in place: by "contact of dimensive quantity, as
bodies are, [and] contact of power" (*S.T.* I, 8, 2, ad
1). In *Summa contra Gentiles* he writes that "an
incorporeal thing is related to its presence in something by its
power, in the same way that a corporeal thing is related to its
presence in something by dimensive quantity," and he adds that
"if there were any body possessed of infinite dimensive
quantity, it would have to be everywhere. So if there were an
incorporeal being possessed of infinite power, it must be
everywhere" (*SCG* III, 68, 3). So the first aspect of
God's presence in things is his having power over them. The
second aspect is having every thing present *to* him, having
everything "bare and open to his eyes" or being known to
him. The third feature, that God is present in things by his essence,
is glossed as his being the cause of their being, (although Ross Inman
(2021) argues that a fuller account within the Christian tradition
treats the role of essence here as deriving explanatorily from a prior
attribute of ubiquity).



This way of understanding God's presence by reference to his
power and his knowledge treats the predicate 'is present'
as applied to God as *analogical* with its application to
ordinary physical things. (For a fuller explanation of analogical
predication, see
 Medieval Theories of Analogy.)
 As applied to God, 'is present' is neither univocal (used
with the same meaning as in ordinary contexts) nor equivocal (used
with an unrelated meaning). Rather, its meaning can be explained by
reference to its ordinary sense: God is present at a place just in
case there is a physical object that is at that place and God has
power over that object, knows what is going on in that object, and God
is the cause of that object's existence. Nicholas Everitt (2010,
p. 86) objects to this analogical approach, stating that "if
this is how omnipresence is interpreted, one might well think that it
would be clearer to say straightforwardly that God is not omnipresent
at all," and he cites Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz (2002,
p. 41)) as agreeing with him. But Hoffman and Rosenkrantz in the cited
passage merely say that "there is no *literal* sense in
which [God] could be omnipresent," which leaves it open that
there is an analogical sense in which God is omnipresent. Hud Hudson
(2009) also denies that God's presence is analogical, but that
is because he thinks that there is a literal way in which God is
present everywhere. We will consider Hudson's proposal in
Section 5.



This account of omnipresence has the consequence that, strictly
speaking, God is only present where some physical thing is located.
Perhaps, however, this is exactly what the medievals had intended.
Anselm says, for example, that "the supreme Nature is more
appropriately said to be everywhere, in this sense, that it is in all
existing things, than in this sense, namely that it is merely in all
places" (*Monologion*, 23).


## 3. Two Recent Traditional Treatments



More recent philosophers have agreed that God's presence is to
be understood analogically.
 Charles Hartshorne
 (1897-2000), for example, claims that "the relation of
God to the world must necessarily be conceived, if at all, by analogy
with relations given in human experience" (1941). Rather than
taking the relations to be knowledge of and power over things,
however, Hartshorne assumes that God's relation to the world is
analogous to that of a human mind's relation to its body.



Hartshorne develops this idea by making distinctions between kinds of
knowledge and kinds of power. Some things that human beings know are
known immediately, by "vivid and direct intuition", while
other things are known only indirectly or through inference.
Hartshorne holds that the former kind of knowledge is infallible, and
it is the kind of knowledge human beings have of their own thoughts
and feelings. Since this kind of knowledge is the highest form of
knowledge, it is the kind God has, and he has it with respect to the
entire cosmos.



Similarly, some things human beings have power over they control
directly; other things can be controlled only indirectly. Human beings
have direct control only over their own volitions and movements of
their own bodies. Again, since this is the highest kind of power, it
is the kind of power God has--and he has it over every part of
the universe.



Thus far Hartshorne may be seen as developing the medieval view of
divine presence. God is present everywhere by having
*immediate* knowledge and *direct* power throughout the
universe (with the addition that his presence extends to unoccupied
regions of space). But Hartshorne endorses a surprising addition. He
adds that whatever part of the world a mind knows immediately and
controls directly is, by definition, its body. The world, therefore,
is God's body.



Richard Swinburne (1977) also begins his discussion of omnipresence by
asking what it is for a person to have a body. Although he insists
that God is an immaterial spirit, he supposes this claim to be
compatible with a certain "limited embodiment."
Subsequently (2016) he withdraws this suggestion, saying that since
"God is not supposed to be tied down to acting or learning
through ... [the universe] or any chunk of matter ... it
seems less misleading to say that he is not embodied." Swinburne
develops his account by appeal to the notions of a "basic
action" (an action one performs, for example, moving ones limbs
in the typical case, without having to perform another action in order
to do it) and of "direct knowledge" (knowledge that is
neither inferential nor dependent on causal interaction). He then
presents the claim that God is omnipresent as the claim that God
"can cause effects at every place directly (as an instrumentally
basic action) and knows what is happening at every place without the
information coming to him through some causal chain--for example,
without needing light rays from a distant place to stimulate his
eyes" (2016, p. 113). Swinburne's account is thus, as he
notes, in the spirit of that of Aquinas.


## 4. The World as God's Body



As we have seen, Hartshorne explicitly endorses as a consequence of
the doctrine of divine omnipresence that the world is God's
body, and Swinburne is initially willing to accept a "limited
embodiment." But some philosophers have been loath to accept
divine embodiment as a consequence of omnipresence. Charles
Taliaferro, for example, while endorsing this overall account of
omnipresence, notes that the basic actions human beings perform
"can involve highly complex physical factors...[including]
many neural events and muscle movements, whereas with God there is no
such physical complexity" (Taliaferro, 1994). Taliaferro then
adds that this immediacy in the case of God's action is
precisely a reason to say that "the world does not function as
God's body the way material bodies function as our own."
Edward Wierenga adds a second objection. He holds that as Hartshorne
and Swinburne develop accounts of God's power and knowledge, God
would have the same knowledge of and control over what happens in
empty regions of space as he does with respect to those regions
occupied by material objects (Wierenga, 2010). In other words,
Hartshorne's and Swinburne's accounts of omnipresence,
unlike that of Aquinas, do not interpret God's presence as
presence *in things*. But it would be implausible to count a
thing as part of God's body on the basis of his knowledge of and
power over the region of space that thing occupies, when God's
knowledge and power would extend in the same way to that region if it
were unoccupied. So it seems as though one could accept a version of
the traditional account of divine omnipresence without having to
conclude that the world is God's body.


## 5. Some Recent Alternative Proposals



Although conceiving of omnipresence in terms of power, knowledge, and
essence is the traditional approach, with continued adherents, in
recent years several philosophers have proposed quite different
accounts of omnipresence.



Robert Oakes (2006) suggests that space is "constituted
by" God's omnipresence. He holds that things located in
space and the world itself are therefore distinct from God. Oakes then
draws on these claims to argue that divine omnipresence is
incompatible with
 pantheism.



Some recent work appeals to esoteric concepts from metaphysics. Luco
Johan van den Brom (1984; see also 1993) suggests that "God has
a spatial dimension *of his own* which he does not share with
the created cosmos." Brom's idea is that just as a
two-dimensional surface "transcends" a line on that
surface but is present at every point on the line, and similarly for a
three-dimensional space and a two-dimensional plane in that space,
"God, by existing in a higher dimensional system, is also
present in the places of all the objects in the three-dimensional
space of created cosmos without being contained by that
three-dimensional space" (1984, p. 654). Brom even conjectures
that God possesses at least two extra dimensions, making it impossible
for our space to bisect his.



Other recent work draws on contemporary discussions on the metaphysics
of material objects and their relation to spacetime. Hud Hudson (2009)
describes several possible "occupation" relations. One of
these relations is "entension", where an object
*entends* a region *r* just in case it is wholly and
entirely located at *r* and also wholly located at every proper
subregion of *r*. An object is entirely located at a
region *r* just in case it is located at *r* and there
is no region disjoint from *r* at which it is located. And an
object is wholly located at *r* just in case it is located
at *r* and no proper part of it is not located
at *r*. The typical way in which an object is located at a
region of space is by having various of its parts at different
subregions of that region; that is, typically material objects are
"spread out" or distributed through a region they occupy
(they "pertend", to use a technical term). In contrast, if
an object entends a region, then it is located *as a whole*
throughout that region. Hudson then proposes a "literal
occupation account of omnipresence as ubiquitous entension"
(2009, p. 209). Omnipresence is location at "the maximally
inclusive region" plus being wholly located at every subregion
there is. Alexander R. Pruss (2013) also endorses a version of this
account, with slightly different details to allow explicitly for
divine timelessness. In Hudson's view, any object that occupies
a region in space is a material object. He is thus willing to accept
as a consequence of his account of omnipresence as ubiquitous
entension that God is a material object. Ross Inman (2017), while
sympathetic to the appeal to ubiquitous entension, is unwilling to
accept the conclusion that God is a material object. Accordingly he
shows that careful attention to medieval discussions of the
distinction between material and immaterial objects yields at least
three ways of marking that distinction according to which God is not
material.



Eleonore Stump (2010, see also 2008, 2011, 2013) defends adding
additional conditions to the traditional understanding of omnipresence
in terms of knowledge and power. She writes, "I ... think,
however, that the attempt to capture personal presence in terms of
direct and unmediated cognitive and casual contact misses something
even in the minimal sense of personal presence" (2010, p. 111).
She continues, "what has to be added to the condition of direct
and unmediated casual and cognitive contact ... are two
things--namely, second-person experience and shared
attention" (2010, p. 112). Second-person experience involves
being aware of and attending to someone else as a person when that
other person is conscious and functioning as a person. Shared
attention requires that two persons be aware of each other and aware
of their awareness, whether of each other or a third object.
Stump's goal is to provide an understanding of the kind of union
to be desired in love. It may be, then, that her real topic is the
nature of God's offer of love to people. But she explicitly
applies her remarks about personal presence to omnipresence when she
writes, "in order for God to be omnipresent, that is, in order
for God to be always and everywhere *present*, it also needs to
be the case that God is always and everywhere in a position to share
attention with any creature able and willing to share attention with
God" (2010, p. 117). Perhaps, then, Stump can be seen not only
as attempting to analyze omnipresence but to identify what is required
for it to be of religious or theological importance.



Georg Gasser (2019) also defends adding an additional condition
involving agency to the traditional appeal to knowledge and power. He
considers a variety of proposed accounts of omnipresence, giving
special attention (and initial sympathy) to Hudson's development
of ubiquitous entension. But he concludes that this proposal has a
hard time explaining "the biblical tradition and personal
religious experiences [according to which] God acts differently at
different places" (2019, 59). Perhaps he takes Stump's
second-person attention and shared experience, which he references, to
provide the requisite agency, or perhaps he intends such actions as,
for example, God's speaking to Moses in the burning bush and
also preventing the consumption of the bush by fire. In any event,
Gasser assumes that omnipresence includes, not only God's
presence through his knowledge and power everywhere, but also
"acting from time to time ... 'specially' in
miraculous ways" (2019, p. 60).


## 6. Future Directions



In a recent paper, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray note that "[t]he
philosophical literature on omnipresence is vast, though largely
situated in the context of Western, monotheistic philosophy of
religion" (2017, p. 223). Their own proposal for expanding the
field is to develop an account of omnipresence according to which even
numbers and pure sets are omnipresent. That will likely strike
many as implausible, but their claim about the limited scope of
traditional work on the topic is accurate. In fact they could
have mentioned, more precisely, that the philosophers considered in
this entry tend to restrict their attention primarily to
Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, with perhaps an aside to Peter
Lombard. That suggests that one avenue for future research is to
consider the work of ancient philosophers as well as early modern and
later philosophers. The mention of monotheistic philosophy of
religion calls attention to another often overlooked area, namely, the
work of Jewish and Islamic philosophers of religion. Finally,
recent interest in global philosophy suggests yet other areas into
which work on omnipresence could extend.