Gaitan, Oscar: Where Is God? Suffering, the Present Moment, and the Ground That Does Not Intervene

This essay addresses the question “Where is God?” as a structural rather than rhetorical problem. It argues that the question, as commonly posed, assumes that God should be present as an intervening agent within events. This assumption is examined and rejected. The essay proposes instead that God is not an agent within events but the sustaining ground of the present moment—the condition under which any event, good or evil, becomes actual. By clarifying the ontological status of the present (“the