Where is God? Divine Presence and Location
Martin Pickup (with commentaries by Hsuan-Chih Lin 林璿之 & Nihel Jhou 周先捷)
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Abstract:
In many traditions, God is claimed to be everywhere. In this paper I introduce and defend a novel account of what this might mean. Recent literal accounts of omnipresence draw on discussions about the general nature of location in metaphysics, and my approach continues this theme. I first suggest there are independent reasons to develop a new primitive location relation – co-location – which is a generalisation of the relation of exact location. I then use this relation to articulate a version of divine omnipresence which avoids several of the challenges which arise for a literal interpretation of God being everywhere. The resulting view says that God is co-located with every thing and every place, and therefore literally present everywhere, without bearing precisely the same relationship to things and space that we do.