Immensity

As William Lane Craig has laid out in one of his Q&As, there have traditionally been two views of God’s omnipresence in the Christian tradition: that God’s essence transcends space or that God is present everywhere in space. On the former view, God’s omnipresence would be spelled out reductively- basically, God can be counted as being present everywhere in space via his exhaustive and immediate knowledge and his exhaustive and immediate power – so that his omnipresence is nothing above and beyond these two attributes. On this view, the answer to “where is God’s essence?” is “nowhere, for his essence isn’t in space.” I’ve always preferred this story. But Francis Turretin forcefully rejects the reductive view in his systematic theology - and I’m keenly feeling the force he’s applied.

Turretin argues that omnipresence is a secondary, consequent property of God, that it follows from God’s immensity. “For out of immensity arises omnipresence, which supposes immensity as its foundation. God is therefore omnipresent because he is immense.” This seems to easily avoid some possibly heretical notions held by Isaac Newton that space was either a necessary effect of God or an aspect of him - for on Turretin’s view, neither omnipresence nor the universe is a necessary attribute of God, rather God spills into the universe upon creating it given a deeper characteristic of his, his immensity.  Turretin primarily rests his argument for God’s immensity on perfect being considerations - it’s better for God to exist everywhere, fully and without separation, than for him to not exist anywhere in space.

But there are problems for understanding God to be present spatially everywhere by his essence.  First, if God is in space, doesn’t this imply that he’s a material being?  Second, wouldn’t God’s essence have to be non-simple for him to be present spatially? Some of him here, some of him there?

For the first objection, Pruss provides a nice account of material beings that can simultaneously hold that God is in space without being material – to be material, one must be possibly capable of occupying a proper part of space.  But God cannot possibly occupy just a proper part of space, so does not count as material.  I like this answer.

For the second objection, the answer is more difficult.  As Craig says, “[God] would have to be wholly present at every place in space. Since God is not made of parts, He can’t be extended throughout space as the universe is, part here and part there. Rather He has to be wholly here and at the same time wholly there.”  This is definitely a weird and difficult concept to grasp, but perhaps not incoherent.  The Scholastics, and Turretin after them, termed this type of presence “repletive” presence, as opposed to definite and circumscriptive presence.  Circumscriptive presence is had by bodies who are commensurate with parts of space (normal bodies?).  Definite presence is had by things that are limited to a certain part of space (souls?).  Repletive presence is had only by God, in which he occupies all parts of space wholly, and yet is not contained in any part of space.  Difficult concept for sure, but perhaps not incoherent.  

I might want to opt for this more traditional view of God’s omnipresence.  I dunno.

Bonus:  The traditional take on omnipresence is the one required by my defense of the Causal-Likeness Principle.

I didn't know about this Inman paper until after I wrote this post, but it's super relevant and very good:  https://philarchive.org/rec/INMRDI