An atheist recently asked whether Christians consider the scale of space God would have to occupy in order to know everything. I answered: The question presumes God is contained by spacetime and dependent upon it for existence. But that raises a more fundamental question: what kind of deity are we imagining? A god who exists somewhere within the universe would indeed have to deal with the limitations of space, time and location. However powerful such a deity might be, it would still be a being within a reality larger than itself. This is broadly the sort of deity we encounter in many forms of polytheism.
The classical monotheistic conception is fundamentally different. God is not one entity within the universe, competing for space with other entities. Nor is God simply equivalent to the universe, as in pantheism. Rather, God is the transcendent source upon which the universe itself depends for existence. God therefore does not need to occupy some enormous portion of space in order to know what happens within it. Spacetime is part of creation; God does not depend upon spacetime in order to exist.
The question isn’t really about how large God would have to be, but whether God belongs to the same ontological category as the things we find within the universe.
But Christianity takes this in an unexpected direction. The transcendent God does not remain remote from creation. Christians believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who enters our space and time. Yet Jesus doesn’t reveal God as an infinitely large cosmic being. He reveals God through humility, service, compassion, forgiveness and self-giving love. The God who transcends the universe is encountered within it, not through displays of cosmic scale, but through a human life. The Christian question therefore becomes not simply “How big is God?” but “What is God like?”
That leaves us with a question worth exploring, whatever our religious or non-religious perspective: what kind of deity are we actually talking about? A god contained within the universe? A God identified with the universe? Or the transcendent source of the universe? These are not merely different names for the same idea. They are fundamentally different conceptions of reality. And if Jesus is the Christian revelation of the transcendent God, then perhaps the most surprising claim isn’t that God knows everything, but that the source of everything has chosen to make himself known through love.
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