God's Omnipresence

Some theologians try to explain how God could be present in everything by making qualifications, such as, "God is omnipresent spiritually", or "God is omnipresent causally", etc. This leads skeptics to declare that "the idea of God's being omnipresent" dies the death of a thousand qualifications.

Without qualifications - God in His essence - is not present in anything. The pantheists believe that God is everything and everything is God, while panentheists believe that God includes the whole of the natural world as an integral and immanent part of Himself. Both err in that God could never be contained in something He created since it can be proven that God is the Prime Cause of all creation

Some are confused because they argue that creation is spatio-temporal, while God is spiritual and eternal, and therefore, God cannot be within us but is "out there somewhere". Therein lies the confusion. Yes, we do exist in the spatio-temporal universe, but we are not exclusively spatio-temporal beings, we are also spiritual beings who possess God's spirit within us. As finite beings, we cannot contain the infinite (God's essence/His entire being), but we can possess His spirit.

The spirit that resides within us is the link that allows us to know God as God really is - but - as God exists in the eternal universe, not in the spatio-temporal universe. So the pantheists and the panentheists seem to forget that God in His essence and fulness, cannot exist within what He created - for many reasons - such as, the infinite cannot be contained within the finite, the eternal cannot be contained within the temporal, the spiritual cannot be contained within the physical, etc.

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