Does God have an Actually Infinite Amount of Thoughts? (Does God Think Sequentially?)

Revealed Apologetics iconRevealed Apologetics

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No, first off, I'm going to start off, I'm not in the military, it's just an army fatigue. Just in case anyone asks.
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I've actually been stopped in the street and told, you know, thank you for your service. But I am not a military person, so don't mean to be misleading, it's just the style of the jacket.
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Anyway, in this video, I want to address an interesting question in regards to the thoughts of God.
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Okay? Now, there is a popular argument for God's existence called the
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Kalam Cosmological Argument. And it tries to demonstrate that there is a cause of the universe, and upon a philosophical analysis of what it means to be the cause of all space, time, matter, and energy,
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God is kind of the best explanation of what a cause would be for the material universe.
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Okay? So I'm not going to defend that argument here. I'm going to go through it real quick, and then I'm going to kind of transition into how this relates to the issue
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I want to talk about in regards to the thoughts of God. Okay? So the Kalam Cosmological Argument is an argument that is set in a deductive form.
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A deductive argument is an argument that is set with a logical structure where you have premise one, premise two, step one, step two, that if true, the conclusion of the argument follows logically and necessarily.
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Okay? So the Kalam Cosmological Argument goes like this. Premise one, whatever begins to exist has a cause.
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Premise two, the universe began to exist, conclusion, therefore, the universe had a cause.
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Okay? So whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause.
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Okay? And from that conclusion, what does it mean for, you know, what would it look like?
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You know, what would a cause of the universe have to be? What characteristics would that cause have to be? It'd have to transcend the material universe.
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You know, it has to be eternal, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. All these things that apologists who use this argument kind of, you know, describe.
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Now the second premise of the argument, this is very important because when we state an argument, stating the argument doesn't prove the conclusion.
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You have to defend each of the premises. Okay? So for example, if the unbeliever, the atheist, for example, you're talking to an atheist, doesn't like the conclusion, the universe has a cause, he has to challenge the truthfulness of the premises.
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Premise one, whatever begins to exist as a cause. Does he agree with that? If he agrees with that, you move to the next.
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The universe began to exist. Does he agree with that? Well, if he doesn't like the conclusion, he's going to disagree with one of them or maybe both of them.
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And in which case, you're going to have to engage in defending either of those premises. Okay? Now typically, premise one, whatever begins to exist has a cause is basically saying things don't just pop into existence uncaused out of nothing.
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Okay? And generally speaking, people agree with that. Okay? It's kind of commonsensical.
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It's in line with everyday human experience. But you do have people who challenge it. For example, in quantum physics, they talk a lot about subatomic particles coming into existence and fluctuating into existence out of the quantum vacuum.
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If you know a little bit about quantum physics and quantum mechanics and all those sorts of related issues.
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And so this is a way in which they challenge that first premise. Well, in some cases, we know that subatomic particles can fluctuate into existence out of nothing.
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Well, first, that's not the case. It doesn't actually fluctuate into existence out of nothing.
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If subatomic particles come into being, they come into being out of the quantum vacuum, which is a sea of fluctuating energy.
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And it's not nothing, right? There's something there, this vacuum, is a sea of energy out of which these subatomic particles fluctuate into existence.
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Okay? So that's the first premise. There's issues there that people debate back and forth.
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That's not what I want to get at. I'm just kind of laying it out so you can kind of follow along here. Now, the second premise is usually the one that is most vigorously attacked.
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Okay? The universe began to exist. Most people today, most physicists today, believe the universe began to exist.
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That itself is not as controversial as the explanation as to what brought the universe into existence.
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Okay? If the first premise of the argument is true, for example, whatever begins to exist as a cause and the universe began to exist, then there must have been something that brought the universe into existence.
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And you have a bunch of different things that people posit as to what might be the cause of the universe or perhaps our universe is part of an ensemble of universes.
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You have the multiverse theory and stuff like that. But when Christian apologists defend the second premise, the universe began to exist, it is usually defended by using four lines of evidence and arguments to firm up that second premise, namely that the universe began to exist.
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And these arguments to support that second premise are usually broken up into two categories, right?
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One, two, or sorry, four. One, two, three, four. For the Star Trek fans, right? The premise that the universe began to exist is typically defended by using two scientific arguments and two philosophical arguments.
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Two scientific, two philosophical. Okay? I'm not going to go over the scientific in detail, but the two scientific arguments that are used to defend the premise that the universe began to exist would include appeals to the
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Big Bang. So you have the expansion of the universe, there's empirical evidence that the universe is expanding.
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If you go back in time, it's contracting to the point where you get to nothing, right? Then you have the issue of thermodynamics that appeals to entropy, that the universe is running out of usable energy, but if the universe always existed, why hasn't it run out of usable energy by now?
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Okay? So those are the two scientific arguments. Again, much more to cover there. The two philosophical questions,
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I'm sorry, defenses of the second premise. The universe began to exist. You have one, which
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I want to focus on, which is the impossibility of forming an actual infinite. Now, if the universe existed from all eternity, then it would also be the case that there have been an actually infinite number of past events that lead up to the present day, but you cannot cross an infinite.
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You can't have an actually infinite number of things, and so again, that would push for the idea that the universe has in fact existed.
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That's a philosophical way that that premise is defended. Now, getting to the question that I want to address, kind of to set up the context there.
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Some people have posited that if God, who is omniscient and knows all things, how is that possible?
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If there's a God who knows all things, he's omniscient, because if he knows all things, then he knows all specific facts, and God has a train of thoughts that he reasons, he knows, and you have this issue that if God knows all things and he has a succession of thoughts, does
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God have an infinite number of thoughts? Is God thinking an infinite number of things? If so, how can that be, since you cannot traverse an actual infinite, okay?
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This is an attempt at what I would call an internal critique. Let's assume that God has the qualities that he does, and let's assume that God is a knowing being and a thinking being.
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Now, does God have an infinite number of thoughts if he knows all of these facts that can possibly be known?
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Now, the problem with that is that when we say that God is infinite, for example, we speak in Christian theology and philosophy of the infinity of God.
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That is not a quantitative infinity, it is a qualitative infinity, okay?
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And what that means is, or what that doesn't mean, rather, is that when we speak of the thoughts of God, God does not have numerically an infinite number of thoughts that he reasons to sequentially, okay?
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We do not believe in Christian theology that God reasons sequentially. To reason sequentially is to assume that God is in time.
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Now, again, that is another philosophical issue that people discuss, whether God is in time or not. But when we say that God knows all things,
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I would argue that God knows all things in one fell swoop, as kind of this eternal intuition of every fact that can be known, okay?
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God does not think in sequential order as we think, as we are time -bound creatures, okay?
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So the criticism that there, or the attempt, rather, to, well, let's run with the idea that you can't have an actually infinite number of past events leading up to the present day.
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Well, that's the case, and then God can't have an actual infinite number of thoughts, okay?
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And then there's kind of the assumption that God is thinking sequentially there, and that's not the case when we're thinking about God.
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God does not think sequentially like we do, okay? So again, you might be wondering at the end of this video, well, why did
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I just talk about that? Well, this is a, believe it or not, an interesting attempt to internally critique the concept of God.
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Now, you have to understand something. Whether I've sufficiently explained, and I know I'm kind of going fast here, but whether I've sufficiently explained this or not,
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I think the real important issue to keep in mind is that what we want the unbeliever to do is to attempt to internally critique our worldview, okay?
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Because that's the proper way to criticize a worldview. You don't criticize a worldview from within your own worldview and then foist upon a different worldview standards that are inherent within your worldview.
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You don't do that. Grant hypothetically the truth of a perspective and show that it is absurd on its own standard, on its own basis.
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And when you do that, I think you successfully internally critique the worldview. So when unbelievers do this,
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I think that's correct, okay? There's an attempt at internally critiquing. But the internal critique doesn't work if it's not properly argued and applied, right?
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There are assumptions within the critique that is not itself an internal critique, a true internal critique, because it is not the position within Christianity that God thinks sequentially.
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We do not think of God as being a being who thinks in the way that we do. God is omniscient.
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He knows all things simultaneously and notwithstanding all of the debates, in -house debates, over the relationship between God and time.
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So these topics can be super, super fascinating and intricate. And again, I'm sure I haven't done justice to the topic.
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But if anything, hopefully this will help you think a little bit more about how does
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God think and how is God different in the way that we are? I mean, are us being time -bound creatures?
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So I think it's interesting, it's fascinating, and if anything, it's intellectually stimulating and perhaps enlightening if you could make certain connections, kind of see the value of understanding what
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I would call the creator -creature distinction. If you're a Christian listening to this, yes, we are creating the image of God.
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We are similar to God in certain ways. But there are what we call the incommunicable attributes of God, those attributes of God that are not shared with the creature.
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There are things that God has in his attributes that are not things that we have or we can have as created and finite human beings.
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So I hope this is interesting. I'm kind of going fast here, but I hope you find it helpful and intellectually stimulating.