There is no 'outer' space

A Christian Science perspective.

October 28, 2009

There are some concepts of God that put Him into the universe He created – somewhere perhaps far away. He is said to have wound up the universe and mostly left it to run by the laws of physics like an immensely intricate clock.

However, the former slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth had a different idea. She once said, "God is the great house that holds all His children; we dwell in Him as the fishes dwell in the seas." So rather than God living somewhere in the universe, all the universe was rather in God.

One way that Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, described God was as infinite Mind, filling all space. She wrote, "It would require an infinite form to contain infinite Mind. Indeed, the phrase infinite form involves a contradiction of terms" ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," p. 257). The universe, then, is spiritual, the expression, the ongoing creation, of infinite Mind. Since Mind includes all, there is no "outer" space to God.

How does infinite Mind manifest itself? Through ideas. The creation of the ideas that constitute the universe is the expression of the Creator, and the ideas created by Mind cannot have any distance between them. God does not have to wait for one of His ideas to cross the universe to be near another of His ideas. How can there be any distance between the ideas in a mind? So, in God's true creation, there can be no distance, no separation, no loss, or no loneliness. God's ever-presence precludes any of these.

A man once asked Christ Jesus to come and heal his son; he apparently lived about a day's travel away. Jesus assured him, "Go thy way; thy son liveth." And the Bible records, "The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken ... and he went his way." And when the man got home, his son had indeed been healed – at the exact time Jesus had said he was healed (see John 4:46–53).

This was but one of several times when Jesus demonstrated the ever-presence of his Father, God. Jesus knew that the seeming distance between material objects was not real in the presence of the spiritual fact that God fills all space. And he was able to prove this in what we might call "remote" healing, which didn't require his physical presence or touch. He showed that we can never be remote from God's love and healing presence.

So as we explore the universe of God's ideas, we can know that God fills all space. This means that there is no distance between His loving care and all of us. That any of God's ideas could be separated from one another, or from God, is impossible. We can travel in the freedom of knowing that we can never leave God's presence or ever be outside His loving Being and care – whether we're going next door, to another country, or even to other planets someday.

Writing centuries before Sojourner Truth, the Psalmist described God's all-presence in a similar way: "And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever" (23:6). He, too, understood that our universal home is in God, and that we can never leave it.