In Him We Live: God as Everything, and Why You Are Not God
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
The claim on the table
God is everything, in the sense that nothing exists except from Him, through Him, and within Him. But that does not mean everything is God, and it certainly does not mean you are God. The difference between those statements is the difference between Christianity and the most attractive spiritual alternative of our age.
I recently listened to a video summary of Alan Watts’s 1966 book, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Watts, the English-born popularizer of Eastern thought, argued that the separate self is an illusion. In his telling, all things — people, animals, plants, rocks, stars — are one being wearing different masks, and each of us is God playing hide-and-seek with Himself.
This idea deserves a serious answer, not a dismissal. Many thoughtful people find it compelling, perhaps because it contains an element of truth. My purpose here is to illuminate its truth and show how the Scriptures offer a fuller form.
What Watts gets right
Watts is right that the modern West has an inflated view of the independent individual. The picture comes largely from the Enlightenment. John Locke described persons as bearers of rights to life, liberty, and property, and his individuals resemble Newton’s atoms: self-contained units that bump into one another but are not inwardly joined.
That picture has real virtues. It protects conscience, property, and due process from the tyranny of kings and crowds. But taken as a complete account of what a person is, it is false. No one makes himself. A man receives his body from his parents, his language from his community, his knowledge from teachers living and dead, and every breath from an atmosphere he did not create.
Watts makes the point well with the example of an ant. To describe the ant you must describe its soil, its food, its colony, its predators, its weather. Eventually you must describe the whole world, because the ant does not exist apart from it. Watts’s summary phrase is worth keeping: distinction is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but they are not separate.
He is also right that our culture places people in a double bind. We tell a child to be himself and to conform, to be free and to obey, and to want to obey. A society that worships autonomy cannot easily explain why anyone should yield to anyone else.
None of this is foreign to Christian teaching. Paul wrote that we are members one of another “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” (Romans 12:5). The isolated, self-made individual is not a biblical idea; it is a modern one.
Where the picture breaks
Watts moves from “we are not isolated” to “there is no self,” and from there to “you are God.” Each step is larger than the one before, and the evidence for the first does not carry the second or third.
First, his God is not a Someone. Watts says plainly that he does not mean God in the religious sense, but the single whole of existence, close to what Spinoza meant. A whole of that kind does not love, speak, promise, grieve, or judge. It simply is. Yet the deepest thing in human experience is that we are persons who love and are loved. A source that is less than personal cannot account for persons. The stream does not rise higher than its spring.
Second, the self disappears just when it is needed. If my sense of being a distinct “I” is a hallucination, then so is my responsibility. Scripture treats each person as answerable for himself: “the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:20), and “every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:12). Watts rightly rejects the isolated self, but he throws out the accountable self with it. Christianity keeps both truths. We are joined to one another, and each of us still stands before God by name.
Third, “you are God” confuses the part with the whole. A wave is of the ocean, from the ocean, and in the ocean, but a wave is not the ocean. When a creature says “I am God,” he has not discovered his true identity. He has repeated the oldest temptation in the record: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5).
Fourth, the game has no stakes. Watts concludes that life should be played as a game with nothing to win or lose, and with conflict as part of the fun. That may be a tolerable outlook for a comfortable man at leisure. It is not tolerable to the parent of a murdered child, or to the child sold into slavery. If cruelty is only God hiding from Himself, then it is not ultimately wrong. A philosophy that cannot call evil evil has not risen above morality. It has fallen below it.
In Him we live: the biblical picture
The Bible does not teach that God made the world from some second material already lying around. There is no second principle. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). Paul told the philosophers of Athens that in God ” For in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He told the Colossians that in Christ “all things consist” — that is, hold together (Colossians 1:17). And he described “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:6).
Together, those verses form a clear picture. Everything comes from God. God holds everything in being, moment by moment. Everything exists within God’s sustaining presence. In that sense, God is everything: there is no place to stand outside Him, and nothing is ultimately not His.
But the same verse that says God is through all and in all also says He is above all. Philosophers use two words for the difference:
- Pantheism means “all is God.” The universe and God are the same thing, so God is exhausted by the world and exists no more than it. This is Watts’s position.
- Panentheism means “all is in God.” God holds all things within Himself, yet He is more than all things and remains distinct from them. He is the author, not merely the sum of the characters.
I hold the second view, and I believe Scripture does. (Some Christians prefer to avoid the word panentheism because others have used it loosely. The word matters less than the three truths it is meant to guard: God is the source of all, present in all, and greater than all.)
This view gives Watts everything he wanted, and more. We are really joined at the root because we all come from and live within the one God. But the root is not an impersonal flow of energy. It is a Father who knows each of His children by name, numbers the hairs of their heads, and notices the fall of a sparrow (Matthew 10:29–30).
A physical picture
Watts leans on quantum physics to support his view: particles that seem to have no definite state until they interact, and “entangled” particles that behave as one object across great distances. He is right that modern physics has dissolved the old picture of matter as tiny independent billiard balls. But physics alone cannot tell us whether the unity beneath things is a blind flow of energy or a living Mind.
For some forty years I have been developing a physical model I call Conscious Point Physics. It starts with the idea that matter is not the bottom layer of reality. Beneath every particle are what I call Conscious Points: tiny, non-material units of awareness, each of which perceives its surroundings, responds by a fixed rule, and moves. Particles, forces, and space itself are the large-scale patterns that emerge from countless such points acting together. (The technical work is published at www.hyperphysics.com for anyone who wants to test it.)
What are these points? I understand them as loci of God’s sustaining attention — the places from which God, in effect, looks back at His own creation. The rules they obey are not arbitrary. They are God’s declared order, His word holding all things together moment by moment, just as Colossians says.
If this picture is right, it explains why reality feels so deeply connected. Everything is connected because the one God upholds everything with one attention. It also explains why that unity does not erase distinctness. God’s attention is not a fog; it is precise, and it gives each thing its own place, its own rules, and in the case of persons, its own will.
I offer this as a model to test, not as a doctrine to believe. The theological point stands on Scripture without it. But I find it helpful to picture “in him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17) in physical terms, and to see that the picture leads to a personal God rather than away from Him.
Evil, freedom, and why life is not a game
If God is everything, where does evil come from? This is the hardest question for any view that places all things within God, and Watts answers it by denying that evil is finally real. War, cruelty, and conflict are all part of the game.
Scripture gives a different answer. Evil is real, but it is not a second power standing beside God, and it is not an expression of God’s nature. It arose within creation, from creatures God made genuinely free. God is not the author of evil; He is the author of freedom, and freedom includes the possibility of saying no to Him.
That distinction lets us hold two statements that would otherwise contradict each other. At the level of origin, everything comes from God, including the rebel and his capacity to rebel. At the level of alignment, the rebel stands against God’s nature and grieves Him. A father who allows his grown son to walk out the door does not thereby will the son’s ruin. He permits what he does not prefer, because forced love is not love.
This is why life is not a game in Watts’s sense. A game is something you can walk away from with nothing lost. Our choices are not like that. They shape who we become, they wound or heal real people, and they will be weighed. The stakes are high precisely because the persons are real and the God who made them cares what happens to them.
Watts is not wrong that there is a kind of joy available in life — the ease of the man who has learned to ride a bicycle and no longer fights the road. Scripture knows that joy too. But it comes from trusting a Father who holds us, not from discovering that nothing matters.
A member, not a mask
Watts offers the image of a tree: each of us is a leaf, distinct but joined to branch, trunk, and root. Paul offers a better image because it is living. The church is a body in which “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Corinthians 12:21). The members differ in function, depend on one another, and share one life — yet the eye remains an eye and the hand a hand.
This changes how we treat other people. Watts says we should not see our opponents as enemies to be eliminated, because the game would be dull without them. Jesus asks more and gives a better reason: “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44), because your enemy is a person made by God, upheld by God, and loved by God. The reason is not that the conflict is unreal. The reason is that He is real.
It also changes how we understand our own lives. Our consciousness is not God’s consciousness, but it is held within His. When we look on creation with gratitude, wonder, and love, we are not God enjoying Himself in disguise. We are His children, giving Him back the delight He gave us and sharing in His joy as He shares in ours.
Finally, it answers the most striking phrase in the Watts summary: that you are God pretending to be human. Christianity makes the reverse claim, and it is far more astonishing. God did not pretend. In Jesus of Nazareth, God actually became human — not a mask, but a man who was hungry, wept at a friend’s grave, and died (John 1:14; John 11:35). He did this not to remind us that we are God, but to bring us, as ourselves, back to Him.
Conclusion
So, is God everything? In one sense, yes. Nothing exists apart from Him, nothing is made of anything but what He gives, and nothing continues for a single moment without His sustaining attention. The modern picture of the self-made, self-contained individual is a fiction, and Watts was right to say so.
But God is not only everything. He is also Someone — above all, distinct from all, and personally present to each. That is why we can be joined without being dissolved, accountable without being alone, and humble without pretending that we are nothing.
Watts invites us to wake up and discover that we are God. The gospel invites us to wake up and discover that God knows us and loves us. Both are true, and I stand in awe of this miracle: God created a world where love can be known, pursued, and found. I stand in awe that He could begin from nothing, or exist forever, be the One who is All, and create a world of palpable separation, where we desperately need, want, and seek to love each other. A world where we can fulfill both His longing and ours for love. We live in a remarkable world. A world where meaning and purpose center on love.