Is God Infinite?
This post is from my friend James A. Lindsay, a PhD mathematician and counter-apologist. I edited his book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly and really enjoyed it. The book is concerned with the nature of God and his claimed infinite properties. He has recently released another book called Everybody Is Wrong About God, which I also consulted on the manuscript for - another quality book about the psychology and function of religion and God. Over to James:
I was recently asked to give some explanation for why we must insist that a monotheistic god is infinite. The thing is, I don't think we have to make the insistence that God is infinite, but I think it's at the bottom of a theological slope that is remarkably slippery. This was a central theme in my 2013 book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly.
When you've got one God that's supposed to account for everything, it's already automatically got to be pretty powerful. And here it's important to point out something about the ancient, superstitious world—something John Loftus makes a good point of in his book Why I Became an Atheist.[1] When you have competing theistic systems in close proximity, as we had in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Eastern Europe when Judaism started up and later when Christianity took hold, there was a lot of belief that having the gods on your side meant victory and safety. [2]
That's why the Romans required people to profess allegiance to the Emperor's favorite god. The history of choosing apparently winning deities is written all over the ancient world. In fact, a decent argument could be made that this issue is the main theme of the Old Testament. In that book, various tribes frequently go back and forth between gods repeatedly (and Yahweh gets mad about it).
In reality, of course, it seems all of that apparent reliance on more powerful deities was hardly more than luck running good or bad, often measured by weather and, especially, whether battles were going your way or not. What we can conclude from this is that in the superstitious milieu that defined when the major monotheisms arose to have a following, you needed bigger, better gods.
The other theme of the Old Testament, of course, is the contraction from Yahweh being a tribal god among many into the only one the Jews were allowed to honor (“no other gods before me...”) to the only one there is. In other words, the Old Testament also chronicles the contraction from polytheism to monotheism as the Jewish people adhered to a single deity and then elevated it to a greater and greater stature.
The interesting part relevant to the question of the infinite and the deity is the escalation. It really isn't that surprising how it goes. Eventually, to be sure your deity wins, it has to be some kind of maximum God, where the capital-G becomes relevant. How this happened is probably multifaceted and dependent upon all I just said, and so we can almost imagine an argument between neighboring religions playing out like this: My god is bigger; well, mine's bigger than that; no, mine's even bigger than that; yeah, well mine's infinite! It's a kind of arms race for bigger deities. You can't have a low-energy deity and win converts, after all.
Of course, it may not go that way. The arms-race hypothesis on the increasing magnitude of a deity has some plausibility but may not represent the whole story, or even any of it. Maybe it's just math, or bad philosophy applied to math. Maybe it follows that when theologians thought about their one Supergod, the one that seems to be able to account for everything, they were simply forced to conclude that it must be greater than any other possible thing. Certainly Anselm thought things like that—God is the thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. A god is only worthy of being God if it is maximal.
Well, how good is the best? It doesn't take almost any mathematical sophistication to realize that if God is only some amount of awesome, any finite quantity, then we could easily conceive of something greater. God plus one is bigger than God. That won't work! It's low-energy, lacks stamina. Clearly, then, God can't be finite. Infinite is all that's left. If you start with the swelling of a deity to bigger than all the others, follow Anselm to “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” and know a little arithmetic, the only conclusion you can reach seems to be an infinite deity.
Ironically, the same “bigger than” problem applies there, but no one knew that until the late 19th century, so “infinite” it was. In math-speak, if we adopt the Axiom of Infinity, which essentially is what gives infinity meaning, then the existence of one infinity implies the existence of a bigger infinity, ad infinitum—rather like with integers. Various theologians, including the mathematician credited with making this discovery, Georg Cantor, wrestled with these ideas and often conclude that a theological “Infinite” describes God and is bigger than all the infinities, but at this point, things really just start looking silly and, as I argue in my books, God starts looking less and less like an entity and more and more like an idea.
William Lane Craig wastes a lot of breath and ink and time trying to square his refusal to accept actual infinities (so he can defend the Kalam Cosmological argument for God's existence) with an infinite God. It's a huge waste of time and effort trying to squeeze nonsense hard enough to get some sense to come out of it.
[You can grab a copy of Lindsay's book by clicking on the image here, or by perusing the sidebar over there>>>>>]
Notes:
[1] Footnote: Loftus, John W., Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008, Chapter 7.
[2] Footnote: Needs for a sense of a control in life are a primary motivator for religious, thus theistic beliefs. For more information, see my book Everybody Is Wrong About God.