Where Is God and His Throne? (50:16), (57:4), (11:7), (32:5), (70:4)

God is described as nearer than the jugular vein (50:16), seated on a throne (57:4), whose throne is upon the water (11:7), and the claim adds that 32:5 and 70:4 imply He is between 1,000 and 50,000 years away. The accusation is that these verses give contradictory locations for God.

The false claim: The Quran places God in contradictory locations simultaneously.

The claim combines a genuine Quranic attribute - God's omnipresence - with a misreading of 32:5 and 70:4, and presents the combination as contradiction.

[50:16] We created the human, and we know what his soul whispers to him. We are closer to him than his jugular vein.

God's omnipresence means He is simultaneously closer than the jugular vein and beyond the farthest reaches of the universe. These are not competing locations - they are expressions of a single truth: God is not contained by space. A being who exists everywhere at once is both as near as the closest point within you and as distant as the outermost boundary of existence. The apparent paradox is a feature of the concept of omnipresence itself, not a contradiction in the text.

As for 32:5 and 70:4 - these verses do not say it takes 1,000 or 50,000 years to reach God. This is a misreading imposed on the text. As established in the earlier discussion of time dilation, these verses describe time ratios between different frames of reference - one of God's days corresponding to a thousand human years (32:5), and a specific cosmic event measured in fifty thousand of God's years (70:4). They are statements about the relationship between divine and human timescales, encoding what Einstein would later formalize as time dilation. Neither verse contains any statement about a journey to reach God or a distance separating us from Him.

The description of God's throne upon the water (11:7) and God's establishment upon the throne (57:4) are descriptions of divine sovereignty and authority - the throne being the Quranic symbol for God's governance of creation, not a physical location that places Him at a specific point in space. God's omnipresence, His sovereignty, and the time-dilation passages speak to different aspects of His nature and His relationship to creation. None of them conflict.

For a full treatment of the time-ratio verses, see Contradiction 21.