The psalmist asks God,

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
                (Psalms 139: 7–8, NRSV)

Philosophers and theologians have taken such texts to affirm that Godis present everywhere. This passage suggests, first, that God isreallypresent at orlocated at various particularplaces. Second, it suggests that there is no place where God is notpresent, that is, that God is presenteverywhere. This is theclaim that God isomnipresent. Divine omnipresence is thusone of the traditional divine attributes, although it has attractedless philosophical attention than such attributes asomnipotence,omniscience, orbeing eternal.

Philosophers who have attempted to give an account of omnipresencehave identified several interesting philosophical questions that anadequate account of omnipresence must address: How can a being who issupposed to beimmaterial be present at or located in space?If God is located in a particular place, can anything else be locatedthere, too? If God is present everywhere, does it follow that he hasparts in each of the particular places in which he is located? Variousphilosophers have proposed accounts of omnipresence in terms that aresupposed to apply to an immaterial being. This essay will examine someof these proposals.

• 1. Some Issues involving Omnipresence and Historical Background
• 2. Power, Knowledge, and Essence
• 3. Two Recent Traditional Treatments
• 4. The World as God’s Body
• 5. Some Recent Alternative Proposals
• 6. Future Directions
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Some Issues involving Omnipresence and Historical Background

According to classical theism, God is omnipresent, that is, presenteverywhere. But classical theism also holds that God is immaterial.How can something that is not, or does not have, a body be located inspace? Early discussions of divine presence typically began bydistinguishing God’s presence in space from that of materialbodies.Augustine (354–430) writes,

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

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

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

Augustine adds two further points: First, God “knows how to bewholly everywhere without being confined to any place”(Letter 137). In contrast to material objects, which, havingparts in various parts of the space they occupy, are not whollypresent at any of those regions, God iswholly presentwherever he is. Second, God is notcontained in or confinedby any of the places at which he exists. Augustine is thus explicitthat 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 sopermeates all things as to be not a quality of the world, but the verycreative substance of the world ruling the world without labor,sustaining it without effort.” Rather than going on to explainthese ideas, however, this passage simply ends with what became afamiliar formula:

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

Anselm (1033–1109) also distinguishes God’s presence from theway in which material objects are contained in space, and he, too,appeals to the concept of being wholly present. In hisMonologion Anselm discusses omnipresence in a series ofchapters with paradoxical titles. In chapter 20 he states that“the Supreme Being exists in every place and at alltimes.” But in the following chapter, he argues that God“exists in no place and at no time.” Finally, he attemptsto reconcile these “two conclusions—so contradictoryaccording to their utterance, so necessary according to theirproof”, by distinguishing two senses of “being wholly in aplace.” In one sense those things are wholly in a place“whose magnitude place contains by circumscribing it, andcircumscribes by containing it.” In this sense, an ordinarymaterial object is contained in a place. God, however, is not thuscontained in space, for it is “a mark of shameless impudence tosay that place circumscribes the magnitude of Supreme Truth.”Instead, God is in every place in the sense that he is present atevery place. According to Anselm, “the Supreme Being must bepresent as a whole in every different place at once.” LikeAugustine, then, Anselm denies that God is contained in space. Also,like Augustine, he seems to leave unexplained this second relation ofbeing “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 morethan one place, provided that they sensed in more than one place, andthat Anselm (in hisProslogion) adds that perception for Godis a matter of having direct or immediate knowledge. Combining thesetwo ideas, Anselm could say that God is present everywhere in virtueof having immediate knowledge of what is happening everywhere. BrianLeftow (1989) objects to the details of this interpretation andproposes instead that, for Anselm, God is everywhere in virtue of hispower. 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; perhapsan adequate interpretation of Anselm would exploit this idea anddevelop 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 accountof omnipresence given byThomas Aquinas (1225–1274), which we will take up in the next section. Section3 will consider two 20th century proposals very much in the spirit ofAquinas’s. Some treatments of the problem of omnipresence seemto have the consequence that God is related to the world as though itis his body. That will be the subject of Section 4. In Section 5we will consider several recent proposals that depart from thetraditional formula.

2. Power, Knowledge, and Essence

According to Thomas Aquinas, God’s presence is to be understoodin terms of God’s power, knowledge and essence. (In this view hefollowed a formula put forth by Peter Lombard (late 11thC.–1160) in hisSentences, I, xxxvii, 1.) He writes,“God is in all things by his power, inasmuch as all things aresubject to his power; he is by his presence in all things, inasmuch asall things are bare and open to his eyes; he is in all things by hisessence, inasmuch as he is present to all as the cause of theirbeing” (Summa Theologica I, 8, 3). Aquinas attempts tomotivate this claim with some illustrations:

But how he [God] is in other things created by him may be consideredfrom human affairs. A king, for example, is said to be in the wholekingdom by his power, although he is not everywhere present. Again, athing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subjectto its inspection; as things in a house are said to be present toanyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in every part of thehouse. Lastly, a thing is said to be substantially or essentially inthat place in which its substance is.

Perhaps there is a sense in which a king is present wherever his powerextends. In any event, Aquinas seems to think so. He distinguishes twokinds of being in place: by “contact of dimensive quantity, asbodies are, [and] contact of power” (S.T. I, 8, 2, ad1). InSumma contra Gentiles he writes that “anincorporeal thing is related to its presence in something by itspower, in the same way that a corporeal thing is related to itspresence in something by dimensive quantity,” and he adds that“if there were any body possessed of infinite dimensivequantity, it would have to be everywhere. So if there were anincorporeal being possessed of infinite power, it must beeverywhere” (SCG III, 68, 3). So the first aspect ofGod’s presence in things is his having power over them. Thesecond aspect is having every thing presentto him, havingeverything “bare and open to his eyes” or being known tohim. 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 traditiontreats the role of essence here as deriving explanatorily from a priorattribute of ubiquity).

This way of understanding God’s presence by reference to hispower and his knowledge treats the predicate ‘is present’as applied to God asanalogical with its application toordinary physical things. (For a fuller explanation of analogicalpredication, seeMedieval Theories of Analogy.) As applied to God, ‘is present’ is neither univocal (usedwith the same meaning as in ordinary contexts) nor equivocal (usedwith an unrelated meaning). Rather, its meaning can be explained byreference to its ordinary sense: God is present at a place just incase there is a physical object that is at that place and God haspower over that object, knows what is going on in that object, and Godis the cause of that object’s existence. Nicholas Everitt (2010,p. 86) objects to this analogical approach, stating that “ifthis is how omnipresence is interpreted, one might well think that itwould be clearer to say straightforwardly that God is not omnipresentat all,” and he cites Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz (2002,p. 41)) as agreeing with him. But Hoffman and Rosenkrantz in the citedpassage merely say that “there is noliteral sense inwhich [God] could be omnipresent,” which leaves it open thatthere is an analogical sense in which God is omnipresent. Hud Hudson(2009) also denies that God’s presence is analogical, but thatis because he thinks that there is a literal way in which God ispresent everywhere. We will consider Hudson’s proposal inSection 5.

This account of omnipresence has the consequence that, strictlyspeaking, 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 moreappropriately said to be everywhere, in this sense, that it is in allexisting things, than in this sense, namely that it is merely in allplaces” (Monologion, 23).

3. Two Recent Traditional Treatments

More recent philosophers have agreed that God’s presence is tobe understood analogically.Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), for example, claims that “the relation ofGod to the world must necessarily be conceived, if at all, by analogywith relations given in human experience” (1941). Rather thantaking the relations to be knowledge of and power over things,however, Hartshorne assumes that God’s relation to the world isanalogous to that of a human mind’s relation to its body.

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

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

Thus far Hartshorne may be seen as developing the medieval view ofdivine presence. God is present everywhere by havingimmediate knowledge anddirect power throughout theuniverse (with the addition that his presence extends to unoccupiedregions of space). But Hartshorne endorses a surprising addition. Headds that whatever part of the world a mind knows immediately andcontrols directly is, by definition, its body. The world, therefore,is God’s body.

Richard Swinburne (1977) also begins his discussion of omnipresence byasking what it is for a person to have a body. Although he insiststhat God is an immaterial spirit, he supposes this claim to becompatible 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 learningthrough … [the universe] or any chunk of matter … itseems less misleading to say that he is not embodied.” Swinburnedevelops his account by appeal to the notions of a “basicaction” (an action one performs, for example, moving ones limbsin the typical case, without having to perform another action in orderto do it) and of “direct knowledge” (knowledge that isneither inferential nor dependent on causal interaction). He thenpresents the claim that God is omnipresent as the claim that God“can cause effects at every place directly (as an instrumentallybasic action) and knows what is happening at every place without theinformation coming to him through some causal chain—for example,without needing light rays from a distant place to stimulate hiseyes” (2016, p. 113). Swinburne’s account is thus, as henotes, in the spirit of that of Aquinas.

4. The World as God’s Body

As we have seen, Hartshorne explicitly endorses as a consequence ofthe doctrine of divine omnipresence that the world is God’sbody, and Swinburne is initially willing to accept a “limitedembodiment.” But some philosophers have been loath to acceptdivine embodiment as a consequence of omnipresence. CharlesTaliaferro, for example, while endorsing this overall account ofomnipresence, 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 nosuch physical complexity” (Taliaferro, 1994). Taliaferro thenadds that this immediacy in the case of God’s action isprecisely a reason to say that “the world does not function asGod’s body the way material bodies function as our own.”Edward Wierenga adds a second objection. He holds that as Hartshorneand Swinburne develop accounts of God’s power and knowledge, Godwould have the same knowledge of and control over what happens inempty regions of space as he does with respect to those regionsoccupied 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 aspresencein things. But it would be implausible to count athing as part of God’s body on the basis of his knowledge of andpower over the region of space that thing occupies, when God’sknowledge and power would extend in the same way to that region if itwere unoccupied. So it seems as though one could accept a version ofthe traditional account of divine omnipresence without having toconclude that the world is God’s body.

5. Some Recent Alternative Proposals

Although conceiving of omnipresence in terms of power, knowledge, andessence is the traditional approach, with continued adherents, inrecent years several philosophers have proposed quite differentaccounts of omnipresence.

Robert Oakes (2006) suggests that space is “constitutedby” God’s omnipresence. He holds that things located inspace and the world itself are therefore distinct from God. Oakes thendraws on these claims to argue that divine omnipresence isincompatible withpantheism.

Some recent work appeals to esoteric concepts from metaphysics. LucoJohan van den Brom (1984; see also 1993) suggests that “God hasa spatial dimensionof his own which he does not share withthe created cosmos.” Brom’s idea is that just as atwo-dimensional surface “transcends” a line on thatsurface but is present at every point on the line, and similarly for athree-dimensional space and a two-dimensional plane in that space,“God, by existing in a higher dimensional system, is alsopresent in the places of all the objects in the three-dimensionalspace of created cosmos without being contained by thatthree-dimensional space” (1984, p. 654). Brom even conjecturesthat God possesses at least two extra dimensions, making it impossiblefor our space to bisect his.

Other recent work draws on contemporary discussions on the metaphysicsof material objects and their relation to spacetime. Hud Hudson (2009)describes several possible “occupation” relations. One ofthese relations is “entension”, where an objectentends a regionr just in case it is wholly andentirely located atr and also wholly located at every propersubregion ofr. An object is entirely located at aregionr just in case it is located atr and thereis no region disjoint fromr at which it is located. And anobject is wholly located atr just in case it is locatedatr and no proper part of it is not locatedatr. The typical way in which an object is located at aregion of space is by having various of its parts at differentsubregions 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, ifan object entends a region, then it is locatedas a wholethroughout that region. Hudson then proposes a “literaloccupation account of omnipresence as ubiquitous entension”(2009, p. 209). Omnipresence is location at “the maximallyinclusive region” plus being wholly located at every subregionthere is. Alexander R. Pruss (2013) also endorses a version of thisaccount, with slightly different details to allow explicitly fordivine timelessness. In Hudson’s view, any object that occupiesa region in space is a material object. He is thus willing to acceptas a consequence of his account of omnipresence as ubiquitousentension that God is a material object. Ross Inman (2017), whilesympathetic to the appeal to ubiquitous entension, is unwilling toaccept the conclusion that God is a material object. Accordingly heshows that careful attention to medieval discussions of thedistinction between material and immaterial objects yields at leastthree ways of marking that distinction according to which God is notmaterial.

Eleonore Stump (2010, see also 2008, 2011, 2013) defends addingadditional conditions to the traditional understanding of omnipresencein terms of knowledge and power. She writes, “I … think,however, that the attempt to capture personal presence in terms ofdirect and unmediated cognitive and casual contact misses somethingeven in the minimal sense of personal presence” (2010, p. 111).She continues, “what has to be added to the condition of directand unmediated casual and cognitive contact … are twothings––namely, second-person experience and sharedattention” (2010, p. 112). Second-person experience involvesbeing aware of and attending to someone else as a person when thatother person is conscious and functioning as a person. Sharedattention requires that two persons be aware of each other and awareof their awareness, whether of each other or a third object.Stump’s goal is to provide an understanding of the kind of unionto be desired in love. It may be, then, that her real topic is thenature of God’s offer of love to people. But she explicitlyapplies her remarks about personal presence to omnipresence when shewrites, “in order for God to be omnipresent, that is, in orderfor God to be always and everywherepresent, it also needs tobe the case that God is always and everywhere in a position to shareattention with any creature able and willing to share attention withGod” (2010, p. 117). Perhaps, then, Stump can be seen not onlyas attempting to analyze omnipresence but to identify what is requiredfor it to be of religious or theological importance.

Georg Gasser (2019) also defends adding an additional conditioninvolving agency to the traditional appeal to knowledge and power. Heconsiders a variety of proposed accounts of omnipresence, givingspecial attention (and initial sympathy) to Hudson’s developmentof ubiquitous entension. But he concludes that this proposal has ahard time explaining “the biblical tradition and personalreligious experiences [according to which] God acts differently atdifferent places” (2019, 59). Perhaps he takes Stump’ssecond-person attention and shared experience, which he references, toprovide the requisite agency, or perhaps he intends such actions as,for example, God’s speaking to Moses in the burning bush andalso preventing the consumption of the bush by fire. In any event,Gasser assumes that omnipresence includes, not only God’spresence through his knowledge and power everywhere, but also“acting from time to time … ‘specially’ inmiraculous ways” (2019, p. 60).

6. Future Directions

In a recent paper, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray note that “[t]hephilosophical literature on omnipresence is vast, though largelysituated in the context of Western, monotheistic philosophy ofreligion” (2017, p. 223). Their own proposal for expanding thefield is to develop an account of omnipresence according to which evennumbers and pure sets are omnipresent. That will likely strikemany as implausible, but their claim about the limited scope oftraditional work on the topic is accurate. In fact they couldhave mentioned, more precisely, that the philosophers considered inthis entry tend to restrict their attention primarily toAugustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, with perhaps an aside to PeterLombard. That suggests that one avenue for future research is toconsider the work of ancient philosophers as well as early modern andlater philosophers. The mention of monotheistic philosophy ofreligion calls attention to another often overlooked area, namely, thework of Jewish and Islamic philosophers of religion. Finally,recent interest in global philosophy suggests yet other areas intowhich work on omnipresence could extend.

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