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Omniscient... Omnipotent... Omnipresent.... these are big words for so early on a Monday Morning.

They are words normally regarded as attributes of God ...all knowing (omniscient), all powerful (omnipotent), and available everywhere (omnipresent).

However, these are also qualities which, unwittingly, we might be coveting for ourselves.

The thought came to me last week when I read of how Britons on average check their mobile phones every 12 minutes.

These gadgets have almost become appendages of our bodies, so essential to life that we keep checking that they are there. I often travel on the magnificent Glasgow Subway (magnificent because unlike in London, you never get lost, you just get dizzy... it goes in a circle). On every journey I make, I count at least seven out of ten passengers staring at a rectangular screen.

And what is the screen doing? It is opening up Omniscience – worlds of information and knowledge at the press of a button. It is giving a taste of Omnipotence, enabling the user to send an instant message which might end up being read on Radio 4, or with equal facility he or she could order a Calzone to be delivered to their door ten minutes after they arrive home. And on top of that it lets people experience Omnipresence – for we can be directly in touch with people or breaking news across the world, all from the comfort of a shoogly underground train.

You would think this instant connectedness to all things would bring with it a state of wellbeing normally associated with Nirvana. Instead – according to research and personal testimonies - it can make us more stressed, irritable and frustrated... like the teenager I heard of last week who felt fearful and endangered because her smart phone couldn't get a signal in one of the blessedly remote parts of Scotland.

Did she feel that the world would collapse, her parents might die, or her friends abandon her because she couldn't make instant contact?

I love the often maligned story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in Garden of Eden. It has nothing to do with nudity or sex, but it has to do with how as mortals we have an inbuilt desire to be all knowing, all powerful and always available, unaware that by dint of us being human, we are not godlike. And to live comfortably with our limitations rather than constantly frustrated by them is not a bad thing.

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