Immanent God

God's immanence is usually contrasted with god's transcendence. Immanence is the spiritual and philosophical tradition which declares that god is present in everything we are and do and see - he is omnipresent, literally, not only everywhere, but in everything. God manifests himself in and by the existence of the material world. Immanence is compatible with pantheism, panentheism, and many traditional monotheistic religions (including Christianity) which put value in the idea that god is always there, that his presence is felt throughout the universe and permeates our everyday experience of the physical world.

In Christianity, the primary way immanence is employed is with Jesus representing god incarnate, and through the holy spirit (two of the three entities of the holy trinity).

Transcendent God

All of the major world religions have explored the area of divine transcendence - that the human view of god is limited and finite, that god is so much larger in both scope and dimension that we have no hope of comprehending him. Our conception of him encompasses no more than a fraction of his essence, which transcends the mere physical. Or even more, we see nothing of his essence but can only perceive him indirectly through his actions in the physical world, because he exists outside and beyond it.

As Karen Armstrong put it when describing the Spanish philosopher, Ibn Saddiq,

"God was not simply another being - one of the things that exist in our usual sense of the word. If we claimed to understand God, that would mean that he was finite and imperfect. The most exact statement that we could make about God was that he was incomprehensible, utterly transcending our natural intellectual powers. We could speak about God's activity in the world in positive terms, but not about God's essence, which would always elude us.

Similarly Erigena argued that God is more than existence. God does not exist like the things he has created and is not just another being existing alongside them. What that is which is more than being it does not reveal. In fact, God is nothing. God is not an object; he does not possess a being in any sense that we can comprehend. His mode of existence is as different from ours as our being is from an animal's, and an animal's from a rock. But if God is nothing he is also everything. Because this super-existence means that God alone has true being, he is the essence of everything that partakes of this. Everyone of his creatures, therefore, is a theophany (a sign of God's presence).

In this view, he is the Ultimate, the absolute infinite, beyond being, but the essence of being itself. What a statement like that actually means is debatable, and I would say that anyone who claims to understand it is confusing their opinion and emotions with fact. The quotes Armstrong provides fall short of expressing anything very specific or even comprehensible. There is a sort of internal consistency in Ibn Saddiq's and Erigena's commentaries. But one comes away from their writings thinking they have experienced some clever sophistry rather than a real explanation, having a similar affect on me as when I contemplate Anselm's ontological proof of god.

The school of "negative theology" in the middle ages dealt with this inability to describe god in positive terms by instead describing what he was not. For example, we should not say "god is wise" because wisdom is a human attribute that falls short of describing any attribute of god. Instead we would say, "god is not unwise". Similarly it should not be said that "god exists", but that "god is not non-existent". This was somehow supposed to help, though I am not sure how.

Clearly, this is beyond logic, and is intentionally so. If it doesn't make rational sense, well, that is by conscious design. It would be futile to attempt to use reason to try to either prove it or to overturn it because it's defenders have already conceded that it is fundamentally beyond logic and is, by definition, unreasonable. The transcendent god transcends, among other things, logic, consistency, and reason. If this type of god doesn't make sense, that is not a problem. That is the essence of transcendence - it is beyond explanation and concrete description. There can be no debate or even real discussion about this type of god. There is no middle ground - one either participates in the subjective experience of his wonder and awesomeness, or one does not.

Einstein's god

Albert Einstein disclosed his views on religion, morality, ethics, war, and numerous other topics unrelated to his special area of expertise (physics) in his autobiography, The World As I See It. His view of religiousness and God are best captured in a few key quotes:

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. "

"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."

All of these are expressions of a sort of pantheistic concept of godliness - that what we call god is present in the "logos", wisdom, and emergent order of the universe. He does not ascribe its origin or operation to any sort of willful being or anthropomorphic intelligence. He stands in rapt awe of that which cannot be expressed in words or thought of by our limited human capacity.

Spinoza's God

Another monist, Baruch Spinoza defined "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, and that matter and thought were the attributes of this thing that human beings could experience. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable (after the first and second kinds of knowledge, random experience and reason).

In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that we are all part of an infinite interdependent cosmic "organism". Spinoza used the analogy of waves in an endless ocean, and that what happens to one wave will affect other waves. Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way.

For Spinoza, the universe was a manifestation of two attributes: Thought and Extension (i.e., the material aspect of reality). God has these two attributes, and infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. The most common interpretation of Spinoza is that he did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence or constant and divine presence in the world. In this sense, it could be argued that Spinoza was a Panentheist (God exists and interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond it as well).