The usual charge, against which we want to consider the existence of God, is that if the arguments for God’s existence were, at any point, all shown to fail, then belief in the existence of God would (should) also fail.

This charge requires a lot from the believer, because it is meant to suppose that if logic should cease to be logic, then we should be logical (who knows under which definition) and cease our belief in God.  Let me put the charge in an overly simplistic way.

If it can be shown that 4 + 5 = 10, and not 9, then we should all change our answers to that question from now on.  And not only to that question, but to every question which depends on that answer, and again, to every question which operates by the same mechanics.

In a word, we must question all calculations pursuant to the previously believed 4+5 = 9, and addition itself (how did we make that mistake before?  Have we been making it in more than one place?), and subtraction (is 9-5 no longer equal to 4?), division, multiplication..all of mathematics…and perhaps some logical assumptions besides.

But of course, 4 + 5 will never equal 10.  No amount of special pleading, or question-begging, or emotional appeal could ever change the answer, even if you wanted to sue me for it.

Now, the objection will be that the conclusion “God exists” is never as obvious as “9” is for the arithmetic above.  And that’s the start of another conversation.

As for this conversation, for the believer, it is about that obvious.  My contention in the last post is that logic is not central to one’s belief in God; that logic, in its academic forms, is not necessary for faith.*  Rather, the logical arguments for God are a kind of refuge or platform in a certain context, or an exercise in the breadth and depth of one’s mind, or even a devotional activity of those inclined to love Him with all their minds.

On the other hand, I have never bothered about the logical structure of my experiences with God in any academic sense.  I have tried to understand them, yes, and that with a gasping desperation.  In that case, however, I am more an adventurer than a thinker, more a disciple than a student.**

Those experiences seem to supersede human rationality.  For example, to feel you are in the presence of God is not something arrived at deductively, and so we are not afforded logical certainty.  It is, instead, something received, not arrived at.  If someone brings you a gift, you do not trouble with the logical certainty that the gift exists, nor with the existence of the gift-giver.  You simply receive it, and perhaps try to understand inasmuch as it helps you to appreciate the gift.

Indeed, it is tempting to have these rationalizations, to understand completely.  For skeptical minds, this gives us something to sink our teeth into.  Yet, it is important that the experience retains this flavor of being ultimately indescribable, or else, we are limited to what we can understand.  (This, really, is the downfall of skepticism, and to persist is to be a cynic).

It is better if we take the logic and the poetry together, a balanced meal of spiritual sustenance comforting to the soul.  We want the chicken with the breading, the salt with the asparagus.  This is what the analogy has offered me – it brings together a full meal, one I am still preparing, and often eating.  It seems like elven bread to me, the least nibble filling my stomach, nourishing me for days; better, it is like a multiplication of loaves and fishes.

I don’t promise it will do the same for everyone; this is not a sales pitch.  But if you are heavy on heart, and hungry for the meat of logic, you might find your protein here.  If your mind is weighed down with the complexities of argument, the leaven of a fanciful notion can lighten your spirits.

*Don’t forget the posts on Plantinga for a detailed reflection on this.

**This, of course, is not an unreasoning position, but simply an organic one, a less technical way of reasoning.

If God can be compared with an author, how shall we think of God’s omnipresence?

This may be one of the more difficult “omni-” attributes that we have to think about.  We’ve thought a bit about omnipotence, and we have omniscience waiting in the wings; these two are already “invisible” traits.

That is, if I say to you, “Superman is stronger than any human being,” you don’t have any trouble with that.  His strength is not necessarily apparent, but lies in wait, and we only see it when he’s doing something.  Then, we compare what he can do with what the strongest human beings can do, and we see that he is stronger than they are.

Or take the root of omniscience, intelligence*.  Let’s say I invite you into a room full of Stephen Hawking look-a-likes.  They are chatting amicably, and amid the computerized chatter I ask you to pick out the real Hawking, who is one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world.  You can’t easily tell which one is he – his intelligence lies in wait.  But a good way to find out might be to ask them all to give a quick exposition on whether black holes lead to new universes (they don’t, according to Hawking).

Now ask either Superman or Hawking – where are you?  The answer will be a single location in three dimensional space.  You can only be in one place at one time.

Presence as an attribute, in other words, does not lie in wait (unless you’re a ninja).  It is the obvious thing about you, that you are somewhere, and only there.  It can be an alibi or a damning piece of evidence – but it can’t be both at the same time.

How then is God omnipresent?

We are often – I am often, even until the present moment – tempted to imagine a vast ghost of a being, invisible to us, perhaps like a really thin gas.  This ghost permeates the Universe, though we have trouble with this, and not just because it’s eerie.

For a start, can this ghost see?  Where are its eyes?  Is it entirely composed of “spiritual” eyes?  Or, are its eyes focused on us, and the long train of its flowing being extends from here out into space?

Or would we insist that God is not in space – therefore not omnipresent – because we don’t have any direct empirical evidence of him?  The opposite is a bit jarring to think about:  Some exterior physical presence existing in such a way that you are always and constantly aware of it.  (I imagine the body of a nondescript white male in 19th century clothes multiplying himself along the streets of, say, London).  This would make us all speak and act as though we were paranoid, no?

If the being has to be imagined “in” space, that is, as part of physical space, then maybe we have the wrong idea.

Rather, I suggest that the author is omnipresent within the context of her story, and we might take our cue from her.

Now, the author is something completely apart from her story and even our human authors are not made of up of the same “matter”  as the content of their stories.  So there is an implicit – shall we say necessary? – separation between the author and her story.

In this sense – as we saw with God – the author does not maintain a “physical” presence in her story.  I am grateful not to have to misconstrue her in such ways (I’m a married man, after all).  Isn’t she, nevertheless, present in her story?  If so, in what way?

*Here I use “intelligence” to mean something like “an ability to know.”  Of course it can also connote “an ability to learn” or something suggesting that the objective of learning has not been achieved, but could be.  This distinction will enjoy (or suffer) more treatment in future posts.

We have said what omnipresence is not; let’s see if we can hone in on what it positively is.

What do we mean, for example, when the person we are speaking to is staring off in the distance and we say, “You look like you’re 1,000 miles away.”  (Or, “Earth to Suzy!” – but this is more obviously out of fashion).

Or again, think of the phenomenon of video conferencing. One party may be in New York, the other in San Francisco (or Tokyo, or Berlin). Yet we see and hear them – are they present? How would you explain your answer?

If so – take it back one step. Imagine you are only able to talk on the phone. Is the other party present to you?

Now both of those require communication, so let’s bring it back yet another step. Say you have an infant, and the child is now fast asleep. You walk in to enjoy the moment (and to make sure the baby is still breathing). Are you present to the child, who is unaware of your physical presence, and is not communicating with you?

So “to be present” seems to include (but not require) communication; it seems to include (but not require) physical proximity, or a representation of one’s self in physical proximity to the other; it seems to include (and perhaps require?) awareness of the other, even a kind of active observation. Perhaps other things besides.

You may even be thinking back to the last post, and saying to yourself: Well, I can be in multiple places at once. I might be in Peoria, and in a video conference with people in Johannesburg, Calcutta, and Detroit.

Perhaps you can; the wider the net, the easier to make my point.

Because we see that, while you can project a representation of yourself all across the world (think of television stars appearing on millions of television screens at once), this is a kind of loophole. Such images do not represent our full presence, our true consciousness. That, almost by definition, is a yes or no question – Are you fully present here? – and if it is “yes” in one place, it is “no” in every other place.

So, presence might be seen as a function of consciousness – whatever your consciousness attends to, there you are present.

I have one grizzly challenge to this idea, which may only serve as a distinction.  Let’s say you are stationed at a military base in a foreign country.  You are on the phone with your spouse, and so “present” to your spouse.  Your consciousness attends to that person, and not, say, to the grumbling person behind you waiting to use the phone.

Suddenly there is an airstrike, and you are killed.  How can we maintain that you were present somewhere else, yet vulnerable to death here, at the base?

It would seem that your body is the “host” of your consciousness.  Your consciousness might attend to anything at all – a person across the ocean, a person across time (if you are reading the biography of Alexander the Great, for instance) – but it depends, in the ordinary sense, on your body for its function.  The body is an “accident” of your consciousness, in the philosophical sense, and so is vulnerable to physical “accidents” of time and space.  (Your body is, itself, the “base” of operations for your consciousness).

The distinction here shows us how the author is free to be omnipresent; and it becomes all the more clear, I think, how this can be possible for God.

This helps us understand, at least as a start, how the author is present in her story. She brings her consciousness (complete with talents and passions, ideas and shortcomings) to bear on the story, and therefore is present in it. Can we extend her presence throughout the story? Is she indeed omnipresent?

It would seem that she is, and we won’t stop there; it would seem she is necessarily omnipresent in her story.

What does this mean? Let’s assume that she wrote a book with 32 chapters, and didn’t skip any numbers. We can start by saying – as she tells the story, perhaps – that she is present in the context of the story, during Chapter 11. After all, her consciousness is directed toward the telling of the story, and the story does not tell itself. Nothing happens unless she speaks.  If Chapter 11 was told, she was necessarily present as it was told.

Now, could she possibly skip Chapter 25 – just not tell it – and nevertheless have it exist? Of course she couldn’t, not in the context of her story. And so if Chapter 25 does not exist, she would not have been present for it. (We can’t, therefore, demand that she should be present to something which does not exist).

Conversely, if she does not speak Chapter 25 into existence, then it simply does not exist. Our imagined Chapter 25 depends entirely on the author for its existence, if it is to exist at all. (We, existing on the same plane of reality as the author, realize she has “skipped” Chapter 25. But in the context of her story, there simply is nothing there that was skipped).

Or, let’s consider the claim more closely. It seems to me that the challenge to omnipresence is not in location, but in time. That is, how can any consciousness – God’s or otherwise – not only be everywhere at once (easy to imagine, even for ourselves, if time stands still) – but everywhere at once, at every moment?

That is, I can imagine myself – if time could actually stand still – moving about and inhabiting every possible location in space. Then, when I’ve visited them all, we move forward one moment, and I make another circuit through and among all those same points. This, at least, is what we might imagine for the author.

Indeed, let’s slow down, so that later we can “speed it up.”

JRR Tolkien, for example, is omnipresent in Middle Earth. That is, he is present at every location where The Lord of the Rings is taking place, and wherever he is absent, that place simply does not exist. (If there is a location in Frodo Baggins’ mind – the Shire, for example – which Frodo might think about even if he can’t visit it, then it is Tolkien who permits and facilitates that thinking – so that the Shire exists inasmuch as Tolkien permits it to exist, and Frodo can no more imagine it existing than Tolkien permits).

We might say that, when the Fellowship is broken up, and Frodo and Samwise travel separately from the rest, that Tolkien might seem to have a hard time following them simultaneously. But he doesn’t; it need not stress the limits of his consciousness any more than telling a single storyline. And why not?

Because time itself, in Middle Earth, is subject to him (to his will, we might say). He may write Book One and then take a year off, in our time; this will not affect Frodo on his journey. When Tolkien picks up his pen again, not a moment will have elapsed in Frodo’s time (unless Tolkien wishes it to be so – but it need not be so).

Let’s try to lay this out clearly: An author may take 10 years to tell a story which lasts 10 minutes. In the context of her story, that author does not need to delay her characters or their sense of time one bit. Her characters will have no idea, none at all, that it took the author 10 years (in her time) to tell their story; for them, only 10 minutes have passed, and that is all. They are only 10 minutes older.

The converse could be done, as well – an author might, in 10 minutes, tell a story which endures for 10 years. That is, her characters will experience 10 of their own years passing during the course of the story, while the author has scribbled down the whole tale in a mere 10 minutes of her own time.

And back to that original challenge of being in multiple locations at once:  Tolkien could tell us about simultaneous events because he had control over time.  He could tell us about one event, then tell us about another, and simply explain that they were happening simultaneously; and exactly because he willed it, it would be so.  When those characters all meet in the same space and time, they will relate their stories and realize (and not suspect any disruption in the space-time continuum of their world) that their stories were occurring simultaneously.

This shows us how the author can bend and manipulate space and time in her story, and at least one way in which they seem to be related.  The author has existential control over all things in her story; nothing exists without her permitting it.  Moreover, she has control of all “space” in her story, in part, because of her control of time.*  In the next post, we will begin to “speed up” this analogy of space and time, and see how God might do likewise in our Universe.

*The interesting thing about our restrictions on time is that we typically expect time to pass in a story just like it does in our world.  That is, we borrow the mechanics of “our” time, and translate them to any story we read (unless we are otherwise instructed).

But we are seldom, if ever, instructed to completely abandon our sense of time.  An author may have her characters traveling through time, or traveling at warp speeds (which is the same thing), and yet the duration of their travel is supposed to have elapsed just as we expect time to elapse on our world.

I suspect there is too much work to be done in constructing a completely new sense of time, to facilitate the adoption of that new time by the readers, and then to make the whole gimmick useful and satisfying enough that the readers will have appreciated the expense of their efforts.  And so we borrow time, which makes my work with this analogy easy:  The author could create a whole new sense of time, but they typically use ours.  In that way, we can see how the author transcends that time (in the context of her story) and how she might compress and expand it, relative to our time, in order to serve her purposes.

In the last few posts I drew from the thought of philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who has worked in epistemology (study of knowledge) and metaphysics (study of the things that undergird reality, or ultimate reality), among other areas.

In other words, he thinks and writes about what we know, or at least what we think we know.  In fact, it’s that latter clause which is, in a sense, the whole reason that “epistemology” exists.  We might say that Plantinga has tried to figure out what we know, or can know, about the ultimate reality.

And what do you do for a living?

Plantinga began his work when western philosophy was not very friendly to theists – he says that any philosopher who was also a Christian was careful to conceal the fact, and kept his nose buried in his work.  It seems to me that such an environment must have been a kind of crucible for a Christian philosopher, who would have to make his beliefs stand up in a rigorous and hostile world.

He did ultimately reveal his Christian faith, whether or not he ever hesitated in doing so – God and Other Minds, Warranted Christian Belief, Faith and Rationality, among others, comprise his philosophical output.

So what do I want with the man?  A private audience, for a start.

In the meantime, I want to borrow his notion of belief in God as “properly basic.”  Whereas I have borrowed the Kalam Cosmological Argument from William Lane Craig in preceding posts, and dwelt on the implications of the argument, Plantinga offers that we can know God exists without ever having to “prove” it by argument.  He argues that no argument is needed to rationally believe in God.

Indeed, he notes that most people who believe in God seem not to arrive at that belief by argument, by carefully constructed syllogisms.  Rather, it is as if they have another sense, another cognitive faculty which responds to the proposition, “God exists”, as though it were evident without any other support.

You can read Warranted Christian Belief to really dive into Plantinga’s thought; else, stay tuned, and I’ll give you the backwash version.

We have investigated the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, and likewise the notion that belief in God may not require an argument at all, but might be properly basic. The former does not address God’s goodness, per se; the latter assumes it, for the purpose of demonstrating the model, and deals with objections relating to God’s goodness.

In fact, at the end of the last chapter, the quality of “goodness” figures as a defining attribute of God, one that would not be doubted even in the face of terrible evil. From a certain distance, this might be seen as an incoherence; then again, from a distance, a car might look like a cow. If one keeps the distance, but merely circles, one might constantly confuse whether they are seeing a cow, or a car. But if we drive right up, the view should become clearer.

First, the argument, again from William Lane Craig:

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

As WLC notes, the argument itself does not say that God, then, is the basis of objective moral values and duties; however, “such a claim tends to be implicit in premise (1) and emerges in the defense of that premise against objections.”

To illustrate the point – wait for it – the analogy of the author seems to serve rather well. Consider: Begin with an author, a composite of body and mind, and nothing else. Take away the body. All that remains is the mind. [This is like God, “in the beginning”].

Now, if anything in this scenario is “good,” what is it? Of course there’s only one thing it could be, and that is the mind. [If anything is good, God is good].

The author begins her story, and the various things she brings into existence are good or bad depending on their cooperation with her [Whatever God wills is good] and their implicit participation in her goodness [We are made in the image of God, and good inasmuch as we reflect that image].

In this way, we can see how God would be the basis of objective moral values and duties. The argument, then, essentially works backwards to this point. That is, do we observe objective moral values and duties?

(Not going to lie, it took me three tries to type out that subject.  You might really be in for it this time).

In our last post, I compared God to a common author, and applied the analogy to the classic riddle, “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”  This, of course, is a challenge to the coherence of a property like “omnipotence” (being all-powerful).

William Lane Craig gives us more to think about, however, than omnipotence alone.  If the KCA is successful, it also gives us a God who transcends space, time, matter, and energy.  Furthermore, God is the “First Cause” of the Universe, the one who brought it into being.

How does this comport with our analogy?  ”Nicely,” it would seem.

Who or what else, for example, can be said to bring a story into existence except its author?  The story does not write itself…

We quickly run into a kind of obstacle, perhaps only a matter of scope.  In our world, it is obvious that any given author is not THE first cause, but has a prior cause (the author’s parents, for a start).  So, for the purposes of our analogy, we are speaking of the author and her story as a kind of closed system.  In the closed system, the author simply exists.  Then, she begins a story, and she is indisputably the first and only cause of that story.

So the author speaks (or writes), and with mere words, a new world comes to exist.

And she may write of men and women, for example, animals of all kinds, trees and rivers and mountains.  Her story may follow the passage of a few moments, or days, years, even eons.  It may take place within a single building, or span continents, planets, galaxies – even other dimensions.  The driving forces of her story may be merely physical (the classic “man vs. nature” kind of story), or else she may tell of great movements in human civilization, or hitherto impossible technologies, and have in motion all manner of interests and objects.

That is, she speaks into existence the kinds of matter, time, space, and energy she wishes.  (And she might create other realms as well).

Does she not, then, transcend all of this?

To borrow some biblical ideas – are not 1,000 days like a single day for her, and a single day like 1,000?  Can’t Chapter 1 take place over the course of a single minute, and Chapter 2 the course of a century?

Hasn’t she called the sun into existence and commanded it to shine?  Whatever animals exist – hasn’t she also called them all up?  And the characters – hasn’t she fashioned them herself and, we might say, in her own image?  (Can an author ever create a character she cannot, in some part, relate to?  A good psychologist might have something say about this).

Is it any actual effort at all for her to be present at all places of her story at once?  (She does not even need to multi-task – after all, the story goes nowhere without her, and by necessity must wait until she attends to it).

This is enough to set the mind reeling, and perhaps your mind is doing better than mine in seeing the potential usefulness of the analogy.  But come humor me and my tortoise’s pace.   You may have noticed, for example, that I give a few examples of omnipotence, which we have already introduced as an attribute of God, and here at the end I switched to the attribute of omnipresence (being present everywhere).

The KCA does give us the impetus to think of God as transcending – rising above or going beyond the limits of, says Webster –  the Universe.  This would seem to get us started on omnipresence; we’ll consider it at greater length in the next post.