On God and the Universe

Is God Separate from the Universe?' is a word formation made within a subjective linguistic criterion. There are assumptions or presuppositions in the question that are incomplete or undefinable. For instance what is a Universe besides a particular reference phrase derived within the experience of existing?

Separate is another reference term with a given contextual meaning. Do we separate from ourselves, separate from the undefined hypothetical border in time and space, separate or apart from the quark scale size of mass or energy, separate in the past or the future, separate or elsewhere than a given concept reference frame of universing?

Perhaps it is necessary to define what separate or apart from means in the case of the query of God and the Universe? Do we mean separate in the sense that an automobile tire in a tire store is separate from any given car passing on the street in front of the shop? Are the boundaries that define separateness of a universe something that must be recognizable by God and mankind simultaneously? Could the boundaries be rectified, effaced or surpassed and would that comprise a post hoc answer to the question?

We could wonder if God is subjective to any sort of boundary or border that humans might envision as effectively defining beginnings or ends (maybe they are singular) of what could be defined as a universe, the universe, or any given or potential universe?

One may wonder about the relative reference size-scale of the Universe. If it has finite size and is a proverbial drop in the vast infinite non-being of else than is, comparable perhaps to a grain of sand suspended in an ocean the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, must God be pervasively present to the residents living within that grain of sand in order to not be considered to be separate? One might consider the various meanings of separateness such as in an Apartment, a city, a state?

Christians would not regard God as separate in a spiritual sense. Yet the contexts of separateness or complexity, specialization or construction of different existing things requires a phenomenal separateness or contingent being in relation to other being. Light is separate from dark, water in the sea from terra firma.

It is possible to venture into a plethora of ancient and present speculative philosophical and religious ideas about the void, being and nothingness, good and evil and so forth. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and even the Bible present an origin of something from nothing. We discover the same concepts in cosmology-phase transitions and inflations, big bangs and collisions, the formations of matter as a surplus over anti-matter, heat separate from cold. There are process philosophies of change along a Taoist watercourse way perhaps trickling waters of life back to a more natural Brahamanist cycle of change and reoccurrence. Kalpas of fifty billion years are plausible yet proximal too within the modern conception of a 13.7 billion year old Universe moving toward a big rip or a catastrophic transition of uncertain destiny. These comparative paradigms of appearance of mass energy and of its change and destiny are intriguing yet not ultimately the central concern for Christians and Jews. It is the transcending relationship to God that occurs in this world through faith, and of a saving grace to a future or atemporal end that is the fundamental human interest reaching beyond the temporal order.