How Can God Be Everywhere if God Has No Body?
A Bishop, a Letter, and a Huge Question
In the year 413, a North African bishop named Augustine (354–430) sat down to write a letter. He wanted to explain a strange idea: God is present everywhere. The tricky word for that is omnipresence. But Augustine immediately ran into a wall. Ordinary things that are everywhere—like air or light—are made of matter and spread out through space. God, however, is not a material object. God is immaterial, meaning God has no body, no shape, no size. How can something without a body be located anywhere at all?
Augustine’s first move was to tell readers what not to picture. Don’t imagine God like water or air, he said, seeping into every corner bit by bit. Material things always have parts: one part here, another part over there. If a bowl of water fills a room, only a little bit of the water is in any one spot. That can’t be how God is present, Augustine insisted, because God doesn’t have pieces. Instead, God is wholly present—entirely there—wherever God is. And God isn’t trapped inside any place, like a fish in a bowl. Augustine even compared God’s presence to the way a human soul seems to be in the whole body at once, not broken into chunks. But he admitted that God’s presence is far greater and more mysterious than that.
The Paradox of Being Everywhere and Nowhere
About seven hundred years after Augustine, another deep thinker took up the puzzle. Anselm (1033–1109) was a monk and philosopher who loved logical knots. In his book the Monologion, he wrote two chapters with titles that seem to contradict each other. One said that the Supreme Being exists in every place and at every time. The very next chapter said God exists in no place and at no time. Anselm wasn’t trying to confuse people; he was pointing out that the word “in” works in two different ways.
One sense of being “in a place” means being surrounded and contained. A pebble is in your hand—your hand wraps around it and holds it. God can’t be contained that way, Anselm argued, because nothing can wrap around the Creator and hold it. But another sense of “in a place” simply means being present there, without being boxed in. Anselm said God is present as a whole in every different place at once. God is everywhere, in this second sense, without being squeezed into a container.
Later thinkers noticed that Anselm seemed to connect God’s presence to God’s knowledge. If God knows everything immediately—not by hearing or seeing through eyes, but by a direct, complete awareness of what is happening everywhere—then maybe that is what it means for God to be present. Another suggestion is that God’s presence is really about God’s power reaching into every corner of the universe. Both ideas would become central in the most famous medieval answer.
Aquinas’s Three-Layered Answer
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the thinker who built the classic explanation. He said God is present in everything in three overlapping ways: by power, by knowledge, and by essence.
First, God is present by power because God has direct control over all things. Aquinas gave a simple picture. A king is said to be present throughout his kingdom, even though his physical body sits in one room. His rule reaches everywhere. God’s power is like that, but even more direct—no messengers needed.
Second, God is present by knowledge. Think about someone looking into every room of a house from a single vantage point, knowing instantly what is going on in each room. God, Aquinas believed, knows everything in the universe with that kind of immediate awareness. Nothing is hidden; everything is exposed to God’s mind.
Third, God is present by essence because God is the cause of everything’s existence. The very being of every rock, star, and person depends on God right now. In that sense, God is closer to things than anything else could be.
Aquinas was careful to say that the word “present” is used analogically when applied to God. It isn’t exactly the same meaning as when we say a chair is present in a room, but it isn’t completely unrelated either. It’s like how we call a person “strong” and a bridge “strong”—the meaning overlaps but isn’t identical. This analogical approach has stuck around. Some critics, like Nicholas Everitt, have complained that this just redefines omnipresence away and that it’s clearer to say God isn’t present in any literal sense. Defenders reply that an analogy is the only honest way to talk about a being that is totally beyond matter.
Notice one consequence: on Aquinas’s picture, God is only strictly present where some physical thing exists, because God’s power and knowledge engage with things. Anselm had already suggested something similar, saying it is more precise to say God is in all existing things than merely in all places.
Is the Universe God’s Body?
A more daring idea appeared in the 20th century. The philosopher Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) looked at the concepts of immediate knowledge and direct power in a new way. When you move your own hand, you don’t need to send a signal through wires; you just move it. You also know your own thoughts and feelings instantly, without having to figure them out from clues. Hartshorne said that this kind of intimate connection is exactly what it means for a mind to have a body. Since God has that same kind of immediate knowledge and direct control over every part of the universe, he concluded that the universe is God’s body.
Richard Swinburne, a 20th–21st century philosopher, started out friendly to a mild version of this idea—calling it “limited embodiment”—but later backed away. He decided it is less misleading to say God has no body at all, because God doesn’t need to act through any physical thing.
Many philosophers were uneasy with the body idea. Charles Taliaferro pointed out that when humans move their bodies, an enormous amount of physical machinery is involved—nerves, muscles, brain activity. God’s action has none of that physical complexity, so the world doesn’t function as God’s body the way your body functions for you. Edward Wierenga added another problem. On Hartshorne’s view, God’s knowledge and power would extend in exactly the same way to empty regions of space as they do to regions filled with planets or people. But it doesn’t make sense to say a patch of vacuum is part of God’s body just because God knows and controls that patch. So many thinkers concluded you can accept the power-and-knowledge picture of omnipresence without calling the world a body.
God Filling Space Without Spreading Out
Not everyone stuck with the power-and-knowledge approach. Some recent philosophers have gone back to the drawing board and asked a stranger question: could God be literally located in space after all, but in a way no ordinary object is?
The contemporary philosopher Hud Hudson has explored a technical concept called entension. Ordinary objects, like your desk, are spread out. A desk occupies a region of space by having one part here, another part there. Philosophers call this “pertending.” But Hudson describes a different relation: an object that entends a region is wholly and entirely located in that region and also wholly located in every proper subregion of it. That means the whole object is in the big region, and the whole object is in every tiny corner at the same time. If God entends the whole universe, then God is completely present at every single point, without being split up into pieces.
This gives a precise, literal meaning to the ancient claim that God is “wholly present everywhere.” Hudson is willing to say that any being that occupies space in this way is a material object—so God, on his view, would be material. Ross Inman, another philosopher, likes the entension idea but not the material conclusion. He has argued that medieval thinkers had several ways to draw the line between material and immaterial things, and God could entends space while still counting as immaterial by those standards. The debate is lively and ongoing.
Why a Letter from 413 Still Matters
You might wonder why anyone today should care about a bishop’s letter written over 1,600 years ago. The puzzle of omnipresence isn’t just about God. It forces us to ask what it really means to be present with someone at all.
The philosopher Eleonore Stump has added a fresh layer to the old discussion. She thinks that mere knowledge and power aren’t enough for personal presence. You can know what someone is doing and be able to affect them without truly being with them. Stump says that genuine presence requires shared attention—two people aware of each other and aware that they are aware of each other. If God is omnipresent, she argues, that means God is always ready for that kind of second-person connection with any creature willing to pay attention.
This turns omnipresence from a distant cosmic fact into something much closer to friendship. Augustine, hunched over his letter, was trying to describe a God who is, as he put it, “wholly in himself everywhere.” But he was also trying to describe a God you can actually relate to. Whether you’re religious or not, the questions his letter sparked—about bodies, space, knowledge, and togetherness—are still alive every time you wonder what it takes to really be there for someone.
Think about it
- If you could be present everywhere at once but had no physical body, would you still be you? What might change?
- Some philosophers think the universe is God’s body. If that were true, would every scientific discovery be a discovery about God? Why or why not?
- Is it possible to be fully present with a friend through a screen, or is something lost without a body in the same room? What does that tell you about what “presence” means?
