Don't bother reading this unless you love theology

While my Aunt (the one with all the cats) was over for Christmas, she said something to me that was deeply offensive and I’d like to relate some thoughts about it.

She bought me a Christmas ornament this year. I don’t know what it is about my Aunts, but each of them buys me a Christmas ornament every year. I don’t keep them, of course. They just go into the general ornaments boxes with the rest of the family’s decorations, but for some reason, they keep purchasing them.

When I made some side comment about my indecisiveness about decorating my own home (at some future date) for Christmas, my Aunt off-handedly responded with "Oh, I know. You’re just going through a phase where you don’t believe in God. When you come back, you’ll have all these ornaments for your home."

I found this deeply offensive. I am, both by nature and education, a philosopher. I am someone who thinks about difficult questions and plays with ideas instead of toys. You will be hard pressed to find a philosopher who holds ideas lightly, believes in unsupportable conclusions, or is unwilling to change his mind in the face of new arguments. It flies in the face of how we deal with the world. Most philosophers will even, as I do, accept conclusions that fly in the face of our cherished intuitions if the argument is persuasive enough.

As such, I do not come to my conclusions lightly. Her characterization of my beliefs as a simple ‘youthful indiscretion’ which I will overcome in time is quite hurtful. It is no less shocking to the conscience as if she had turned to a gay person and told them that they should just be gay when they are young and ‘get it out of their system.’ My belief that the existence question concerning deities is ultimately unanswerable is based in statements about the nature of knowledge, how humans come to know things, and how the world operates. All of these statements have been hard-fought, hard-won, and not the product of youthful whim or fancy. I’ve never gone through a phase where I had a desire to shock people or be unconventional just to be different.

Some of my arguments concerning the existence question are as follows. As a philosopher, I’ll try to present them logically so that they are rebuttable if one cares to argue them.

First, we must deal with the possibility that God does not exist. For the purposes of this particular argument, I will consider the Christian description of God to be correct. God is usually described as transcendent, which means that God is a supernatural entity, not bound by the rules of the universe. God is without time, without space, and wholly unconstrained by the natural laws which normally constrain immanent beings. ‘Existence’ is a predicate which I can apply to various objects in the world. The content of the predicate is what concerns me here, though. If I say that "snow exists," I have said that the object ‘snow’ exists. What do I mean by ‘exists’ though? What else could I mean but that ‘snow’ has some referent in the universe (or in layman’s terms, that the term ‘snow’ points to an object in the universe which is identifiable in terms of space and time)? To say that unicorns do not exist is to say that there are no objects in the universe such that ‘unicorn’ matches one of them.

But if this is what is meant by ‘exists,’ then what does it mean to say that God exists? It would mean that God must have a physical location, somewhere, and be located both in space and time. Christianity holds God to be transcendent, hence, God cannot exist within the normal meaning of the term.

While this argument makes a good amount of semantic sense, many will be unconvinced by semantics. They ought to be convinced by this, however, but most will not be.

My second argument is one for which I have never found any sufficient answer. I have never seen any version of this argument in a text, but it seems so obvious to me that I am forced to explain the argument even to those who trade in arguments over the existence of God.

This argument is based in epistemology. First, I tried to understand how it is that people learn of various things in the universe. This first step seemed easy. An infant does not come into the world possessing knowledge of dogs. An adult only knows about dogs because he or she has encountered dogs in the world previously in his or her life. To know of a dog, the person must have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched a dog at some point in their life. Let us imagine that there is an alien civilization on some distant planet. These aliens have in their world a substance called ‘blastiffir.’ Although we may now have the word, the meaning content of the term is empty, since we have never experienced this substance. We, as humans, do not know if it is a food, a plant, or even a rock. We have no idea what it is made of, what it is used for, or anything else about ‘blastiffir’ at all.

Experience of something gives us knowledge of this thing. This appears to hold true for all objects, like ‘snow,’ ‘dog,’ ‘cat,’ ‘man,’ or ‘Topeka, Kansas.’ Even abstracts can be created in this way.

What if, instead of referring to a particular dog, I refer to dog-ness? Such a concept is a composite of all the dogs which I have experienced in my lifetime. Let us imagine for a moment that a person lived in such a way that they never experienced dogs of any color other than black. The person had never seen a non-black dog, nor seen photographs of non-black dogs, nor heard tell of any dogs which were not black. Would there be any doubt that the person’s concept of dog-ness would include the predicate ‘black?’

Emotions can be found in this way as well. We know of love, hate, contentment, sorrow, jealousy, and pride because we have experienced them.

But there is one particular term for which I have no explanation. The term is ‘infinity.’ Infinity is not something for which man may have an experience. We cannot sense infinity in any manner. We do not emote infinity. We cannot cobble together an abstract of ‘infinity’ based on previous experiences with particular instances of infinity.

No matter what we experience, it can never be infinity. No person has ever seen an infinity of people. There has always been a finite amount. No person has ever found an infinite quantity of grains of sand on a beach. In theory, if we could cut the beach off from the introduction or loss of sand grains, they would ultimately be countable. Even when we gaze into the blackness of space, we cannot see infinity. The photons we see began their journey to our eyes from a discrete location within space-time, and traveled in their journey for a fixed amount of time over a discrete distance.

So ‘infinity’ much like ‘blastiffir’ is a word for which there is a vacuous meaning content. We may have a word, but we have no actual concepts which can be plugged into the word to provide us with meaning. Because of this, when an object (say ‘space’) is said to be infinite, we have predicated infinity to space. But without having any meaning for ‘infinity’ we have predicated nothing of space.

God is often described as having qualities which are infinite. God is omnipresent (having infinite presence), omnipotent (having infinite power), omniscient (having infinite sight and knowledge), and omnibenevolent (having infinite love). Yet, we have just seen that predicating infinity of something is an empty predication. Thus, none of the predications just listed have a cognitive meaning. None of them can be thought in a coherent way. If we think that something is infinite, and picture the infinite thing in our mind, then what we have thought cannot be the infinite thing, for we constructed the picture in our mind using non-vacuous concepts.

As it turns out, I have yet to come across a predication of God which does not incorporate infinity.

All objects must be predicated. Snow is cold. Dogs have ears and noses. Jon Stewart is hilarious. For an object to be thinkable, we must have non-vacuous predicates which we can ascribe to the object. But for God, there are no non-vacuous predicates. Absent non-vacuous predicates, God is actually unthinkable.

One of the Church fathers back in the early days of the Christian Church (it might have been Tertullian in the first few centuries CE, but I’m too lazy to look it up) actually had a similar thought. He said that if we can think of God, what we have thought is not God.

While Tertullian (I’ll just say it’s him for now and try to find out later) took this as evidence that God must be greater than the human mind’s possibility to know, to me it simply says that until we can come up with predicates which do not place God in the realm of the infinite, we must refrain from answering the question of God’s existence.