Sunday 21 October 2012

How can God be everywhere if He is separate?

I agree we must separate God from His Universe. But what I want to know is this:

Despite God not being the same as "the All", does He not have to be everywhere nonetheless? If not, that would mean it would be pretty scary going to other stars and other planets. God has to be there also, does He not? If I were an Astronaut I would want God to be out there in space too.

Thus, willy nilly, does this not mean that God  permeates nature someway? Cannot the Divine Presence that Christianity calls "the Holy Ghost" be everywhere present and thus inside Nature? (Like God inside the Burning Bush.)

To put it another way how can God be everywhere if He is separate?

My next question is: Does current physics point to the possibility that other dimensions may exist and that life after death may exist in one, or several of these other planes of existence?

And have you ever thought that perhaps space travel actually happens after death and that perhaps in this way we people other planets with our race and perhaps also progress to other less warlike levels?

Also, could it be that physics might eventually prove the existence of God (or the Divine Power)? In your opinion has physics already proved the existence of God? (It sounded to me as if you almost said that tonight.)

I don't quite understand your point about going from experience to find God instead of starting with a hypothesis?

Pragmatism would say "If it works, it's true." —Is that not a scientific way to find religion, at least for oneself? (And thus is this not a case of going from experience to faith instead of the other way around?)

Response: Thank you very much for these kind remarks.


God in Creator so space and time are His creation. He is beyond them, rather as Shakespeare is beyond the characters in one of his plays.  So He is always present in the Universe, but never limited by it except to the extent that He chooses to be: for example in the incarnation (a bit like Shakespeare also appearing on the stage as one of his characters, as he surely would have done during his acting career)

Current ideas in physics about “string theory” certainly point to other dimensions existing. But we must remember that these are ingenious mathematical speculations which as yet have no experimental support, and that nature usually turns out to have some surprises in store as we go to higher and higher energy levels.  There is however very strong experimental evidence that ordinary matter accounts for only about 3% of the total matter/energy of the universe.  Thus true scientists should display considerable humility before ruling things out as impossible.  However John and I think that life after death/resurrection is underpinned by the love of God.  What physical processes if any God uses to accomplish this are up to him, and don’t really matter.

The existence of God must always be beyond full scientific proof because God is not an object on which we can do experiments.  Also any set of scientific laws and initial conditions could conceivably have been created by God, thus whatever scientific law and initial conditions are found to exist can never disprove the existence of God.  We think that the currently understood laws are strongly suggestive of God’s existence, but at present this is a minority view amongst scientists.

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