Is God Space Or Is Space God?

Is God Space Or Is Space God?

Stephen Stern and Steven Gimbel

...As creator of space and time, God must thus exist outside of both. On this standard understanding, God transcends our basic physical concepts.

But this was not the view of the greatest geniuses who wrestled with our basic physical concepts. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both thought that there was a crucial connection between God and space, but saw that relationship in converse ways. Newton thought that space is God, but Einstein thought that God is space...

... God, the standard view goes, is omniscient. God knows everything. How is this so? Newton thought he figured it out. God knows what is happening at every point in space at every moment in time because space is like God’s body. Not that God is material. Space, after all, is not material. But space is God’s sense organ, sort of like God’s physical, but non-material skin...

... Like Newton, this has theological effects. Einstein was asked if he believed in the existence of God, and he famously replied that he believed in the God of Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher and one of the teachers of Gottfried Leibniz. Spinoza was a pantheist, that is, he believed in God, but did not believe in a distinction between God and the universe. God is not separate from the universe, God is the universe. Everything in the universe is a mode of the Divine, an element of the Divine. Further, God is perfect and a perfect thing will be as it has to be because of its own perfection. Hence, God has no free will. God is a slave to logic because logic determines what is perfect and God, as an all-perfect Being, would have to be that way....