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To: MeganC; BraveMan
You already answered your question when you acknowledged that God is everywhere.

You seem to have a particular conception of omnipresence — namely, pantheism — that does not comport with Divine Revelation.

If He is omnipresent then the difference between Creator and creation is semantic.

It's hardly semantics. Distinguishing the modes and operations of God and His creatures is important if we are to avoid having erroneous ideas about our Creator, for they could easily lead to false implications (such as: if everything is part of God, then God is also the author of sin and moral evil), or to render things explicitly revealed by God into utter nonsense (such as the world's necessity for a Redeemer; if Creation is already part of God, did He therefore redeem Himself?).

These sorts of questions require distinguishing between such various things like essence, being, nature, accidents, presence, and so forth, and what it means to be everywhere to begin with: "Space, like time, is one of the measures of the finite, and as by the attribute of eternity, we describe God's transcendence of all temporal limitations, so by the attribute of immensity we express His transcendent relation to space. There is this difference, however, to be noted between eternity and immensity, that the positive aspect of the latter is more easily realized by us, and is sometimes spoken of, under the name of omnipresence, or ubiquity, as if it were a distinct attribute. Divine immensity means on the one hand that God is necessarily present everywhere in space as the immanent cause and sustainer of creatures, and on the other hand that He transcends the limitations of actual and possible space, and cannot be circumscribed or measured or divided by any spatial relations. To say that God is immense is only another way of saying that He is both immanent and transcendent in the sense already explained. As some one has metaphorically and paradoxically expressed it, "God's centre is everywhere, His circumference nowhere." That God is not subject to spatial limitations follows from His infinite simplicity; and that He is truly present in every place or thing — that He is omnipresent or ubiquitous — follows from the fact that He is the cause and ground of all reality. According to our finite manner of thinking we conceive this presence of God in things spatial as being primarily a presence of power and operation — immediate Divine efficiency being required to sustain created beings in existence and to enable them to act; but, as every kind of Divine action ad extra is really identical with the Divine nature or essence, it follows that God is really present everywhere in creation not merely per virtuten et operationem, but per essentiam. In other words God Himself, or the Divine nature, is in immediate contact with, or immanent in, every creature — conserving it in being and enabling it to act. But while insisting on this truth we must, if we would avoid contradiction, reject every form of the pantheistic hypothesis. While emphasizing Divine immanence we must not overlook Divine transcendence."

I think Thomas Aquinas would provide clarity on the exact nature of what you're trying to grasp at, per Question 8 of his Summa: "The existence of God in things."

He is indeed everywhere, in the sense that all created beings require God as their efficient cause, and therefore cannot exist without Him. It does not follow, however, that creatures — being corporeal beings — therefore retain the essence or attributes that are proper to God simply because they were created by Him.

Your ideas, insofar as they've been presented, are not new. They've been reviewed, analyzed, debated, and categorized long before you or I were born.

130 posted on 03/31/2023 9:05:24 AM PDT by Ultra Sonic 007 (There is nothing new under the sun.)
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To: Ultra Sonic 007

Pantheism is the worship of all gods. I never said any such thing. May as well accuse me of fascism while you’re at it.


131 posted on 03/31/2023 9:25:27 AM PDT by MeganC (There is nothing feminine about feminism. )
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