Pages

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Infinite God and my atheism

I think it likely there exist in the universe alien civilizations with technology far beyond us, who would seem like deities were they to come here, but that doesn't mean they are deities.  I would put Zeus and all similar beings, if they were real, in the same category.  They are powerful and if they demand worship one would be wise to give it, but I would remain at heart an atheist.

How would God differ?  He would not just be a superman with great power.  Now, would he qualify as "God" if he were infinite?  Even then, no.  I can in theory have a stack of books that stretches (assuming space is Euclidean) up infinitely far, and contains an infinite amount of knowledge in them.  But is that all knowledge possible.  No, because I could also have a second pile next to it that contains even more knowledge, again infinite.  The same could apply to a being that knows an infinite amount of stuff -- it would have no way of being sure it knew everything there was to be known -- there could be infinite amounts of knowledge completely outside its ken.

No -- to really be God and cause me to stop being an atheist, this God would have to be all-knowing -- but I just showed that such a state would be impossible.  Even with infinite knowledge one could never be sure there didn't exists realms or even whole universes outside this God's knowledge and impossible for it to reach. 

This is just one of the problems with the idea of a real God.  Of course Christians, when presented with these problems, redefine their God into something more limited, but then all he is is a superman or advanced technology alien.  Not God and I remain an atheist.  Just a little intelligence is needed to see all this and stop the silliness, although in all probability any response I get to this will reflect inability to think about infinity with any clarity.

No comments: