To ask where God is may sound like a child’s question. Yet, as with many questions from childhood, it contains a kind of purity we often lose in adulthood. We grow used to theological abstractions or scientific frameworks and forget the immediacy of the question itself.
Where is God, in the world we see, or beyond it? Is God near, or far?
The question has haunted thinkers across centuries, and it continues to evolve. In recent years, scientists and philosophers have begun reimagining God not only as a distant Creator but as a presence within the very fabric of reality, its structure, its creativity, its surprising beauty. At the same time, many mystics have spoken of God as utterly other, beyond names and concepts, unreachable and unspeakable.
This paradox, of God being both within and beyond, stands at the heart of contemporary spiritual and philosophical reflections. Among those attempting to give shape to this paradox is Stuart Kauffman, whose book Reinventing the Sacred challenges many long-held assumptions about science, God, and meaning.
The Creativity of the Universe
Kauffman’s central claim is striking: God can be reimagined as the natural creativity of the universe itself. He invites us to consider the unfolding of life, the emergence of ecosystems, the dynamism of culture, not as random accidents, but as profound expressions of a sacred process.
This creativity, he argues, cannot be reduced to physics or any set of fixed laws. Evolution is not just a deterministic machine. It produces novelty that could not have been predicted or logically derived beforehand. This makes life an open-ended process, full of surprises, and far more like art than algorithm.
Instead of imagining God as a supernatural agent outside the universe, Kauffman asks us to see the sacred in the very becoming of the world. A new species appearing, a child inventing a language of play, a star igniting in a distant galaxy; these are all moments of creative sacredness.
Such a view not only challenges religious orthodoxy but also the rigidity of scientific reductionism. In doing so, it opens a new door: to see science not as a disenchanted dissection of life, but as a participant in a larger, mysterious unfolding.
Whitehead’s God of Process
While Kauffman’s views are fresh and poetic, they resonate with older philosophical currents, particularly the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead, a twentieth-century mathematician turned metaphysical thinker, offered a vision of God that dances between immanence and transcendence.
In Whitehead’s Process and Reality, God is not static or external. God participates in the unfolding of the universe. He speaks of two aspects of the divine: a primordial nature that holds all potential, and a consequent nature that responds to the world as it unfolds. God is both the wellspring of possibility and the witness to all that occurs.
Unlike traditional views that depict God as unmoved and all-controlling, Whitehead’s God suffers, celebrates, and evolves with the world. In this sense, God is never far from creation; God is deeply invested in its every movement. And yet, God is not exhausted by the world. There remains a transcendent aspect that holds all things in potential, untouched by time.
This double vision, a God within and beyond, mirrors the ancient mystical paradoxes and offers a profound answer to the question of where God might be.
The Radical Immanence of Spinoza
If Whitehead allows room for both nearness and distance, Baruch Spinoza draws the divine close, perhaps closer than any philosopher before him. For Spinoza, God is nature. There is no distinction. The world is not a creation of God; it is the expression of God.
This identification, Deus sive Natura, shocked his contemporaries. It dismantled the idea of a personal God, choosing instead to see everything as a mode of the divine. For Spinoza, every movement of a wave, every shift in the wind, every idea in the mind, all of it arises within the one substance that is God.
Such a view leaves no place for a transcendent, external deity. Yet it gives sacredness to every leaf, every thought, every moment of existence. It is a vision of unity, coherence, and profound necessity. And for those who long for a spiritual view of the world without superstition, Spinoza offers a path of rational reverence.
Yet one might ask: if everything is God, is anything sacred? Does the intimacy of this view leave room for awe, or does it flatten mystery into mechanism?
Teilhard and the Journey to Omega
Another voice that attempts to bridge science and spirit is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist. His vision is evolutionary, poetic, and deeply theological. Unlike Spinoza’s eternal present or Whitehead’s ongoing process, Teilhard sees a direction, a journey.
He believes the universe is moving toward a climax of complexity and consciousness, which he names the Omega Point. This point is not merely the result of natural processes, but the drawing force of God, God ahead of us, not only behind us. In this vision, God is both source and destiny.
Teilhard’s writing is filled with reverence for the material world. Rocks, rivers, animals, and stars; all are part of a great unfolding. For him, the incarnation of Christ was not an isolated event, but a sign of the deep unity between God and the cosmos. The sacred is not elsewhere; it is always arriving.
This journey, he believed, was filled with struggle and pain, but also with promise. Evolution, for Teilhard, was the means through which God makes Himself known, not as a being apart from the world, but as the very force that draws it into ever-greater consciousness.
Science Without Reductionism
Across these thinkers, from Kauffman to Teilhard, there is a shared impulse: to reclaim the sacred without denying science. But to do so, they must move beyond the narrow lens of reductionism. That lens sees the world as a machine, made of parts, understandable only through decomposition.
Reductionism has its place. It has given us medicine, technology, and insight into the physical world. But when it becomes the only lens, it strips the world of wonder. It cannot see the emergent, the unpredictable, the relational. It cannot recognize meaning.
Kauffman insists that not everything can be deduced from physics. The adjacent possible, the realm of what could come next, cannot be fully known. Creativity escapes law. Life, then, becomes an open symphony, not a closed formula.
In this way, science becomes less like a cold dissection and more like a sacred practice. A way of watching, listening, and wondering. Scientists, like artists, become attuned to the rhythms of emergence and beauty. And the divine becomes not an answer, but a presence.
Ethics of the Sacred Earth
If God is within the world, then ethics cannot be merely abstract rules. They must arise from our relationship with this sacred earth. This is where Kauffman’s vision becomes not just speculative, but practical.
To see nature as sacred is to treat it with reverence. Ecological care is no longer political; it is spiritual. Forests are not resources; they are cathedrals. Animals are not commodities; they are kin. Climate change is not merely an environmental issue; it is a crisis of meaning.
Teilhard would agree. He saw humanity as a crucial part of evolution, but not its master. The future depends not only on science but on love, a force he saw as deeply divine. For Teilhard, the evolution of the planet requires the evolution of heart.
In this light, ethics is not imposed from above but invited from within. It begins with awe and grows through relationship. It is not a list of commandments, but a way of seeing.
The Language of Mystics
But what of God’s otherness? What of the sense that the divine is not only in all things but also beyond them? Here, the mystics speak, sometimes in riddles, sometimes in fire.
Meister Eckhart, the German Dominican mystic, often wrote as if in paradox. “God is closer to me than I am to myself,” he said, and also, “I pray God to rid me of God.” For Eckhart, God is so near that we cannot see Him, so vast we cannot name Him.
This sense of otherness is not a contradiction to immanence; it is its hidden partner. The closer God is, the more unreachable He feels. The more intimate the divine presence, the more it burns with mystery.
In this way, the mystics do not deny the sacredness of the world. They intensify it. Every moment becomes charged with the possibility of the infinite. Every silence might echo with the voice of the unspeakable.
Between Complexity and Mystery
So where is God? In the complexity of a living cell, in the birth of a star, in the stirrings of love. In the breath of the earth and the imagination of the mind. And yet also—nowhere we can point. Nowhere we can name.
Perhaps the sacred is not a location, but a kind of seeing. Not a being, but a presence. Perhaps God is not above or beyond, but always beside us and always beyond us.
In a time when science and spirit often seem divided, this way of thinking offers healing. It allows us to walk through the world with curiosity and reverence. It invites both precision and awe.
To seek God between complexity and mystery is to return to the old questions with new eyes. And perhaps, in that returning, we find that the question was always part of the answer.
Image by Gini George
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