{"id":1208,"date":"2013-04-02T10:02:56","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T10:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/?p=1208"},"modified":"2013-04-03T09:50:56","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T09:50:56","slug":"can-god-count-to-infinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/2013\/04\/02\/can-god-count-to-infinity\/","title":{"rendered":"Can God count to infinity?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Consider the following two premises that are accepted by several theistic philosophers:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.<\/li>\n<li>An actual infinite is logically absurd.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I contend that if one wants to accept Premise 1, then one must reject Premise 2 (along with any argument that relies on it). \u00a0Why? \u00a0Well, I think that if Premise 1 is true, then God can count to infinity. To see why, let&#8217;s suppose that Premise 1 is true.<\/p>\n<p>Now, if there was a limit to the speed at which a certain being could think or speak, then I could conceive of a greater being &#8212; one that could think or speak faster. \u00a0Therefore, since we are assuming Premise 1 is true, there is no limit to how fast God could think or speak. \u00a0So now consider the following scenario:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>At one minute to midnight, God says &#8220;one&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Half a minute later, he says &#8220;two&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>A quarter of a minute later, he says &#8220;three&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>An eighth of a minute later, he says &#8220;four&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>And on, and on&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>For good measure, at midnight he says &#8220;infinity&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>By midnight, he would have counted through all the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, &#8230;&#8230; and got to infinity. \u00a0Not a single number would have been left out. \u00a0Even if God did not <em>actually<\/em> <em>carry out<\/em> such a task, the fact remains that he\u00a0<em>could<\/em> do it if he wanted to. \u00a0It follows that an actual infinite (which would supposedly have been completed if someone spoke the name of all the natural numbers) is\u00a0<em>logically\u00a0<\/em>possible. \u00a0And this implies that Premise 2 is false.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Consider the following two premises that are accepted by several theistic philosophers: God is a being than which no&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,13,14,19],"tags":[189,28,193,197,199,217,202,204,215,216],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmological-argument","category-god","category-humour","category-infinity","category-ontological-argument","tag-atheism","tag-atheistic-arguments","tag-cosmological-argument","tag-god","tag-infinity","tag-logic","tag-mathematics","tag-ontological-argument","tag-philosophy","tag-theism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}