Abstract
In this article, we evaluate various responses to a noteworthy objection, namely, the infinite God objection to the kalām cosmological argument. As regards this objection, the proponents of the kalām argument face a dilemma—either an actual infinite cannot exist or God cannot be infinite. More precisely, this objection claims that God’s omniscience entails the existence of an actual infinite with God knowing an actually infinite number of future events or abstract objects, such as mathematical truths. We argue, however, that the infinite God objection is based on two questionable assumptions, namely, (1) that it is possible for an omniscient being to know an actually infinite number of things and (2) that there exist an actually infinite number of abstract objects for God to know.
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Notes
By way of the conceptual analysis of the argument’s conclusion, the proponents of the argument attempt to illustrate that the cause of the universe must possess various God-like properties, such as being beginning-less, space-less, immaterial, changeless, personal and extremely powerful.
Since we are writing from a Christian perspective, we are concerned exclusively with investigating the KCA and the IGO from within a Christian context. Thus, unless otherwise indicated, ‘God’ refers to the Christian God and ‘theology’ refers to the Christian theology.
For example, Millard J. Erickson (2013, p. 243) writes: ‘God is infinite. This means not only that God is unlimited but that he is illimitable. In this respect, God is unlike anything we experience. … The infinity of God … speaks of a limitless being’. Here, Erickson suggests that God’s infinite nature distinguishes God, who is limitless, from Creation, which is limitable.
A proposition may be defined, very simply, as the content of a sentence (or statement); thus, various sentences may express the same proposition. For example, the two sentences ‘Grass is green’ and ‘Das Gras ist grün’ (in German) express the same proposition.
Although this concrete/abstract distinction is controversial, we offer it for the sake of simplicity. However, regardless of how one should understand the concrete/abstract distinction, we are merely presupposing that propositions and mathematical entities are abstract objects.
The KCA presupposes the A-theory of time which holds that the past, present and future are objectively distinct with things coming into being and going out of existence as time passes. According to the A-theory, then, future events do not exist and nor have they existed; a future truth value is not a concrete event that has occurred but it is rather an abstract proposition expressing a potential future event that will occur.
Bergmann and Brower (2006, p. 359) define Platonism as ‘a thesis involving two components: (1) the view that a unified account of predication can be provided in terms of properties or exemplifiables, and (2) the view that exemplifiables are best conceived of as abstract properties or universals’.
We may understand logical priority as follows. If an object a is logically prior to an object b, then, a does not depend on b for its existence, yet b depends on a for its existence. For example, the thinker is logically prior to the thought because the thought depends on its thinker, while the thinker’s existence does not depend on the thought.
(F1) seems obvious because to be unable to know what cannot be known is no violation of omniscience.
A more technical definition is as follows: For any person S, S is omniscient iff for any proposition p, (i) S can comprehend p, and (ii) if S consciously thinks about p, S will either accept p as true iff p is true, or accept p as false iff p is false.
This objection was brought to our attention by an anonymous referee.
We see no reason to think that, for any true proposition p, God knows p only once God has thought about p. If God’s divine intuition enables Him to identify the truth value of p immediately, then, whether or not God has thought about p before makes no difference to God’s knowing p, since it is God’s divine nature, not His previous considerations of p, that enable Him to immediately identify the truth value of p.
There seems to be a contradiction here about the temporality of God although there have been significant attempts to overcome this, especially from a trinitarian perspective. Verhoef argues, for example, that ‘Trinitarian theology… has the ability to accommodate the tension between God and time/eternity in a relational way’ (2011, p. 105).
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Erasmus, J., Verhoef, A.H. The Kalām Cosmological Argument and the Infinite God Objection. SOPHIA 54, 411–427 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0460-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0460-6