An Atheist's Confession: How Skeptics Got It Wrong for Centuries
The Uncomfortable Truth about God's Infinity
Prepare your minds for a seismic shift in understanding. For years, I have dissected the arguments of apologists and religious thinkers through the meticulous lens of critical thinking and empiricism, often, if not perhaps always, finding them lacking in both intellectual honesty and rigor. However, today, I am stepping onto their turf with a confession that could send shockwaves through the skeptical community.
What if the apologists are correct in their most daring claim—that God is not just theoretically infinite, but demonstrably so, and therefore beyond human comprehension? Before you dismiss this as heresy from a turncoat, hear me out. I have painstakingly examined the core attributes ascribed to God, attributes that are, more often than not, framed in terms of infinity. And what I have discovered is not just unsettling, but downright revolutionary.
To logically prove this, let's first consider the following attributes that are posited by most, if not all, theistic concepts of God:
Infinitely unverifiable
Infinitely vague and ambiguous
Infinitely biased in their entirely subjective interpretations of personal experiences
Infinitely fallible due to human cognition and our finite and unreliable senses
Infinitely self-referential
Infinitely self-refuting
Infinitely tautological
Infinitely circular in reasoning
Infinitely resistant to empirical scrutiny
Infinitely regressive in argumentation
Infinitely divisive in social contexts
Infinitely variable across cultures and time
Infinitely inconsistent in internal logic
Infinitely unfalsifiable
Infinitely presuppositional
Infinitely prone to confirmation bias
Infinitely elastic in accommodating disconfirming evidence
Infinitely vague in providing predictive power
Infinitely incoherent
Infinitely parasitic on human emotions
Infinitely able to inspire violence and division
Infinitely tending toward anthropomorphism
Infinitely noncommittal in providing actionable guidance
Infinitely open to reinterpretation
Infinitely deferred in empirical validation
Infinitely reliant on personal revelation
Infinitely susceptible to cognitive biases
Infinitely demanding of intellectual concessions
Infinitely flexible in ethical benchmarks
Infinitely limiting to critical thought
Infinitely monopolistic in claiming moral authority
Infinitely reliant on tradition and dogma
Infinitely deferential to unverified personal experiences
Infinitely adaptable to pre-existing cultural norms
Infinitely prone to generating ad hoc hypotheses to fend off critique
Infinitely dismissive of alternative explanations
Infinitely selective in applying skepticism
Infinitely utilitarian in co-opting unrelated natural phenomena as evidence
Infinitely resistant to change or adaptation in the face of new information
Infinitely anti-ethical to truth-seeking
Infinitely overlapping and non-exclusive in doctrinal claims
Making such a ‘God’ infinitely synonymous only with non-existence.
**Note: In the preceding list, the term 'infinitely' is used to emphasize the pervasive and unbounded nature of these attributes within theistic concepts of God. It is not meant to imply a literal, mathematical infinity.
Victor J. Stenger offers this scientific argument against the existence of God: "Hypothesize a God who plays an important role in the universe. Assume that God has specific attributes that should provide objective evidence for his existence. Look for such evidence with an open mind. If such evidence is found, conclude that God may exist. If such objective evidence is not found, conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that a God with these properties does not exist. This is basically how science would disprove the existence of any alleged entity and is a modified form of the argument from a lack of evidence: God, as defined, should produce evidence of some sort; if we fail to find that evidence, God cannot exist as defined."
In echoing Victor J. Stenger's rational framework for disproving God's existence, we find an unyielding consistency with the scientific method—a rigorous process that has advanced human knowledge in virtually every domain. If God's purported attributes should produce discernible evidence, yet none can be found, then the logical conclusion is stark: such a God, as defined, does not exist.
This is not merely an absence of evidence, but evidence of absence. In a world where claims are only as good as the evidence that supports them, the God hypothesis fails the most basic test of empirical validity. It's not a question of lack of faith, but a lack of verifiable truth. Therefore, the absence of evidence, when evidence should be present, serves not as a challenge for skeptics to disprove God, but as a challenge for believers to reconsider their foundational assumptions.
In the eloquent words of Carl Sagan, "All claims about reality are scientific claims," we find a piercing illumination of a fundamental truth. You see, the very essence of a claim about the tangible world is its susceptibility to scrutiny, its openness to verification or falsification through empirical evidence. Anything that shies away from this crucible of testability is not merely unscientific; it is, in fact, a non-claim, a vacuous utterance that does not even earn the dignity of being wrong. It exists in the realm of the nebulous and the undefined, a mere whisper in the wind of intellectual discourse, contributing nothing to our understanding of the cosmos.
Philosopher Karl Popper posited that falsifiability is a cornerstone for any claim to be considered scientific and logically coherent. When one posits the existence of a God, particularly a God that interacts with or influences our physical universe, that claim inherently becomes a scientific one, subject to empirical scrutiny. As Popper noted;
"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality."
The venerable concept of falsifiability, first articulated by Sir Karl Popper, serves as a rather indispensable starting point in the quest for truth. While it may not be the terminus of our philosophical journey into the realms of science and empiricism, it undeniably offers a rigorous initial filter for separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Any claim that dares to assert its truth about the very architecture of our reality must first pass this crucible. If it fails, it's relegated to the intellectual wasteland of the untestable and the unfalsifiable—a place where idle speculations roam free but contribute nothing to the edifice of human knowledge. To neglect this first stop is to risk embarking on a perilous voyage that could, if its conclusions are universally accepted, wreak havoc on the entire landscape of epistemology.
In the crucible of scrutiny, the concept of an infinite God melts away, leaving behind nothing but a smokescreen of semantic contortions and epistemic evasions. Let's not mince words: when every facet of God claims is infinitely open to question, infinitely flawed in reasoning, and infinitely shielded from the rigors of empirical proof, what we are truly left with is not a testament to divine omnipresence, but an indictment of human gullibility.
This infinite list is not a hymn of glory to an all-powerful deity; it's a litany of our own intellectual shortcomings, our eagerness to abdicate reason for the comfort of a celestial lie. It's an archive of cognitive failures, each 'infinite' an epitaph for a question and critical thought abandoned, a doubt suppressed, an inquiry scorned.
So, when apologists proclaim that God is Infinite, this does not mean that God exists. It simply means that the concept of God is incoherent and meaningless. Remember: the only thing truly infinite here is our capacity for self-deception. The claim doesn't elevate God; it demeans us. The only plausible conclusion one can draw is as straightforward as it is unsettling: if God is indeed Infinite in all these respects, then God is infinitely indistinguishable from pure, unadulterated fiction. This is not an invitation to belief, but a dare to think critically. The 'infinite' nature of God, upon close examination, becomes nothing more than an infinitely recurring mirage, ever receding from the oasis of truth.
And if the apotheosis of this 'infinite' concept is its non-existence, then perhaps it's time we admitted that in talking about an infinite God, we've been talking about nothing at all. This is simply incomprehensible to believe such presuppositional and assumptive assertions to be true; proving the apologists right - their infinite God is beyond human comprehension; which then begs the question, how can apologists know anything about it at all?
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson aptly stated in his book, ‘Astrophysics for People in a Hurry’: "The ‘god of the gaps’ is a theological cop-out. It's a way of saying, 'I don't know how this works, therefore god did it.' But that's not an answer. It's just a way of avoiding the question. The only thing that science has ever done with the god of the gaps is to make it smaller and smaller. As our understanding of the universe expands, the gaps in our knowledge shrink, and the need for a supernatural explanation becomes less and less. The God of the Gaps is a sign of ignorance, not of knowledge.
Is that how you want to play it? Are you sure? Because you're using your god to explain things you don't understand. What happens when someone comes along and explains things in a way you do understand? Your god just gets pushed back. When it happens again, your god just gets pushed back a little further. When you use your god to explain things you don't understand, you're turning your god into an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that can only lose power as time goes on."
Following Neil deGrasse Tyson's poignant observation, we arrive at an unsettling yet liberating insight: the concept of an infinite God, one that eludes empirical scrutiny and logical coherence, is not a testament to divine majesty but rather a glaring indicator of its own untenability. In the quest to elevate God beyond the realm of human comprehension, apologists have inadvertently banished Him into the realm of the nonsensical, the absurd, and the non-existent.
When God becomes the ultimate refuge for all that is not understood, He also becomes the ultimate casualty of all that is understood. In this ironic twist, the apologists are correct: God is beyond human comprehension, not because He is infinitely complex, but because the concept is infinitely flawed.
It's a self-defeating paradox: the more indefinable and incomprehensible God is made to be, the less likely His existence becomes. Thus, by setting God beyond the boundaries of space, time, and reason, believers have not safeguarded Him; they have negated Him. This is not a divine paradox; it's a human contradiction. And it's high time we recognized it for what it is: an intellectual dead-end on the road to genuine understanding.
Therefore, we can conclude such a god is in fact, an infinitely receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
Most if not all of us skeptics have been looking at it wrong for centuries. God IS infinite, and beyond human comprehension, due to absurdity. It's conclusively proven. By trying to define their deity in such a way that avoided scrutiny, outside the very bounds of space and time in which reality exists, theists have defined it out of existence.