• New Books in Secularism Interview

     

    As I am sure you are by now aware, I edited and published James A. Lindsay’s Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly on my Onus Books skeptical imprint. It has received some great reviews and received a foreword by Victor Stenger.

    New Books in Secularism is part of the New Books Network which interviews authors about their books. Their piece on this:

    In the depths of the internet there is many an article discussing the infinity of God.  Its authors argue that God is infinite and endless and knows no bounds (what the difference is among those attributes is not usually explained).  Imputing infinity to God is nothing new – one rarely (if ever) hears of a god that is deemed finite.  In his new book,  Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly (Onus Books, 2013), James Lindsay argues that declaring God to be infinite is no help to the arguments of believers.  Infinity is a concept that almost everyone except mathematicians misunderstands, which doesn’t stop apologists from using the adjective to label their god.   Arguing against Platonism, Lindsay explains that infinity is an abstraction, and that abstractions are not equal to reality.  He has no objection to the notion of God as an abstraction, but decries the point of view that this necessarily implies existence.  Words and numbers are abstractions which we use every day, but no one would argue that they are real they way that a table is real.  Human beings, Lindsay argues, invented these abstractions in order to make sense of the universe, and they are limited to the human mind.  Apologists who use the concept of infinity as a way to argue for their god are, as the author puts it, “confuse the map for the terrain.”

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    Category: God's CharacteristicsInterviewsMathematics

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    Article by: Jonathan MS Pearce