But Where Is God?

By Mesha Oh

He strongly felt that there must certainly be a Creator of the universe and all that it contained. How else could one account for the sheer existence of things, for the fact of consciousness, for the startling design that was evident in various life-forms, and so on? The only answer that seemed plausible—indeed, compelling—to him was that these must all be the handiwork of a supernatural Creator, or God.

But there were many issues related to God that he was not at all sure of. Different people had different—and often very divergent—notions about these things. One such issue was God’s location, or where God was.

He had given this question much thought. Logically, he said to himself, if God existed (and he was sure that this was indeed the case), there could be just two possibilities as to where God was or God’s ‘location’: God was either everywhere (i.e. omnipresent), or else only in some specific place(s) within and/or outside the universe. He didn’t think there could be a third possibility.

But neither of these two options seemed to satisfy him fully. Suppose God was everywhere, in every particle of the universe, did that mean that everything was God, or a part of God, or a particle of God, or non-different from God? He wasn’t sure what all of these might mean. He didn’t know if any of them were indeed true—and, there was no way he could find out.

The thesis of God being present everywhere posed some other dilemmas to him. If God was everywhere, logically, it meant that God was present in every human being too, in every cell of the human body. He had also heard the claim that God was the Soul of the soul. Now, if all this were really the case and God was within us (as well as without), what was the need, he asked himself, for human beings to worship God? It seemed to him that one could worship God only if God were other than oneself. If God were actually within oneself, the Soul of one’s soul and the life-force present in every of the millions upon millions of cells in one’s body, then how could, and why should, one worship God, thinking of God as someone different from or other than oneself—as many people did? What need would there be to worship God at all if God was inside oneself? Would doing so be tantamount to worshipping oneself? The thesis of the indwelling God seemed to him to obviate the necessity of worshipping God—but that was something that he just could not accept.

There was another dilemma that the thesis of the indwelling God posed for him. If God dwelt inside every human heart, how could one account for the massive amount of evil committed by human beings, down the centuries and all across the world? If God was present in every human being (and in the rest of the universe) and if God was all-good, how was it that human beings routinely engaged in horrific acts, sometimes on an enormous scale? If God was present inside every human being, why did God not prevent them from doing evil? If it were argued that God did not do so because God had given human beings free will, the freedom to choose to do evil or good, and that preventing them from doing evil would be to take away their free will, the question arose, ‘If God is indeed present in every person and allows them free will and does not prevent them from doing evil (or good), then what is the purpose or use or role of God being present in every human being? What function does it serve?” He couldn’t arrive at any answer to that question that could satisfy him.

The idea that some proposed, that the inner voice or conscience that was intrinsic to every human being was the voice of God, and that in this way, God resided in every human being, resonated with him somewhat. But he really couldn’t be sure it was true. In fact, he was aware that other than the fact that God was and that the entire creation owed itself to God, there was perhaps nothing that he knew about God with any certainty. He just couldn’t uncritically take what others claimed about God—and they said so many conflicting things—as inerrant truth.

He instinctively knew that he couldn’t find the answer to the question of God’s ‘location’ simply by speculating about the matter, reading books or consulting other people for their opinions. Since no one whom he knew (including himself) had ever seen God, there could be no guarantee that whatever they might say or believe about God’s ‘location’ was indeed true.

The fact that he could not really know where God was did trouble him for a while. But not long afterwards, he came to terms with it. Like many other things about God, this, he came to recognize, was a grand mystery. For him, maybe it had to remain that way till he departed from this world, after which it might be that he would meet God and get the answers to all his questions about God, including this one. He was happy to wait until then, living with what was at least presently unknowable!