Tuesday, March 15, 2016

On conceptualizing the degree of the Presence of God

With regard to the shechina - the "Divine Presence of God, I have noticed that some grapple with the concept of how God can be more or less present in a given place or time.

A scalar field is a function that assigns a value to every point in space. One way to picture an approximation of this is to imagine a three dimensional grid overlaying the scene in your mind's eye, and place a small LED at each juncture of the lines of the grid. The larger values of the function can be indicated by a brighter light.

To extend this visualization to the shechina, one can identify the degree of the presence of God with the intensity of the light in the above visualization.

However, I have not discerned a satisfactory interpretation of this model with regard to the underlying theological question - of what God being more or less present means - or if it a thing entirely internal, not having an existence in our Universe at all.


1 comment:

  1. Interesting, Aryeh!! I have to learn about scalar fields before I can discuss. But this is very interesting!!!

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