Only God can naturally produce the idea of omnipresence
Evidence
While real punishment is perfectly capable of producing, as its own appearance, the idea of punishment, the only real thing or reality capable of producing the idea of omnipresence, as its own appearance, is God. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 39
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the theoretical constraint Bentham must engineer around: omnipresence is a divine attribute no ordinary human reality can project.
- XREF: Connects to the Foucault/Bentham panoptic model in the reader’s thesis — this sets up why the panopticon must fabricate a God-like observer. — connects to: The idea of God derives from our need for an absolute unobserved observer