Infinite in His Being
Dr. Osborn did not like to talk about infinity. Whenever someone happened to use the word in our Freshman calculus class at Georgia Tech, he would poke fun at them. “You mean that funny looking symbol that looks like an 8 on its side?” he would say and then quickly change the subject. His attitude puzzled me at the time. What was he hiding, I wondered? Later, I began to understand.
Undoubtedly, Dr. Osborn had read Zeno, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century before Christ. Zeno is famous for his paradoxes. One of them shows that “you can’t get there from here.” In fact you can’t get anywhere from here. Suppose I’m standing on the goal line of a football field. I want to get to the other goal line on the other side of the field. According to Zeno, to get there I first have to traverse half the distance, namely, to the 50 yard line. But before I can get to the 50, I’ve got to go halfway to it: namely, the 25 yard line. But to get to the 25, I have to traverse 12.5 yards. But to get there I have to….
You get the point: to get anywhere I have to journey a succession of intervals each of which is exactly half of the one that follows. How many “half-intervals” of this type are there? Infinity. There, I’ve used the word. So if each half-interval takes a finite amount of time to traverse, and there are an infinity of them, it will take infinite time to reach the other side. QED: I will never reach the other side.
Obviously, Zeno’s paradox is paradoxical because we know that we can get somewhere from here. (Although in some places it harder than others. Just try to go around the block in Pittsburgh, Pa.) Yet it took about 20 centuries of human history before men like Isaac Newton would “solve” the paradox using their newly invented mathematics of The Calculus.
Writing before Newton invented calculus, the Westminster Divines had no trouble using the concept in their definition of God. God is infinite in His being, they said. What exactly did they mean?
Because they said that God was also eternal and unchangeable in His being, it seems to me that they must have thought of infinity in terms of purely spatial parameters. God is infinite in space. Just as a straight line extends indefinitely in space, so also is God infinite in His spatial dimensions. But what does it mean for a “spirit” to occupy “space”? A spirit is intangible. How can an intangible thing even exist in space, much less occupy all of it?
Whether we appreciate it or not, we use this concept of an intangible thing occupying all of space routinely. Whenever we use our cell phone, for example. One of the great triumphs of classical physics is its description of something we call the electric field. Take a positively charge particle—say a proton. If it sits stationary in space, it is surrounded by an intangible, but very observable, electric field. How far does that field extend away from the proton? Answer: infinity. Of course the farther away you get the smaller the magnitude of the electric field (it falls off inversely with distance), but it is still non-zero as far as your mind can conceive of. In the real world where nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, you may have to wait awhile to “see” the electric field where you happen to be. In fact the act of “seeing” literally is an observation of the electric field, since eyesight is nothing more than having certain cells in our eyes having their molecules jiggled by an oscillating electric field. Likewise, our cell phones work because the electric field—along with its cousin, the magnetic field—produce motion in the electrons of the antenna of the phone which gets amplified and demodulated into a signal that we can hear with our ear.
So, two of the things we are most familiar with: human vision and cell phone calling are the result of intangible things occupying infinite space. Are the new new atheists opposed to the concept of an infinite God because they can’t picture something they can’t see or touch? Yet surely they know that their physics is full of such things, such as the electric field, the magnetic field, gravity, quantum particles, etc. Do they refuse to believe Einstein who showed that matter (which we can touch) is equivalent to energy (which we can’t) through his magical equation E = mc2?
We need to address one issue about infinity that may be confusing. Is “infinite in His being” the same as omnipresence? Omnipresence is being everywhere all the time. But a thing can be infinite without being omnipresent. For example picture two lines hanging in space but not intersecting. They are both infinite, but there is a huge region of the remaining space that is not filled by these lines. And being on one of the lines means not being on the other line. Each of these lines consists of an infinity of points. But a plane, defined by two (infinite) intersecting lines contains a much larger infinity than the two lines themselves. Likewise the 3-dimensional space inhabited by our colossal universe contains an even larger infinity of points. Following Francis Schaeffer (who liked to use double adjectives to make a big point) the space we inhabit is an infinite infinity of points, even if the universe turns out to have a boundary.
So I take it that when the Westminster Divines said that God was infinite in His being, they were thinking that He was omnipresent—i.e., there is nowhere in the universe where He is not. I imagine that the Divines had Psalm 139 in mind:
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
The psalmist believed that God was everywhere, even in Sheol.
The great French theologian John Calvin said that in knowing something about ourselves we know something about God, because we are created in His image. A less famous theologian (apparently unknown) is purported to have said: “there is a God, and you are not Him.” Combining these two ideas around the concept of the infinite, we conclude that one of the most important things we learn when we say that God is infinite in His being, is that WE ARE NOT!
I become acutely aware of my finitude whenever I go out biking. To me riding a bicycle (not a motorbike) is the finest experience of the man/machine interface ever invented. The bike becomes an extension of oneself. The feeling of speed as your legs are able to propel yourself much faster than mere walking. The stabilization due to the conserved angular momentum of the spinning wheels giving you a sense of balance, and yet gracefulness as you lean into a turn. The whishing of the wind in your ears and in your face—filling your lungs with oxygenated air at a much higher level than mere breathing while stationary. And the play of gears as you continually adjust them based on the terrain, using the lower gears along with a higher revolution rate on the pedals as you ascend, and then the incredible sense of acceleration as you descend while using the highest gear to input even more energy into the machine as you reach unimaginable and even dangerous speeds. And all of this done noiselessly, so even the pedestrian sharing the walkway with you is unaware of your presence until you go shooting by them on their left side, perhaps startling them as your sudden and unexpected presence and equally fast disappearance into the distance sets them wondering as to what had just gone past them.
But the very act of traveling on a bike is a reminder that when I’m here, at this mile marker which I’ve just passed, I’m therefore not at the previous one, or yet to the one ahead. By going from point A to point B, I’m reminded that I can’t be at both points at once. I am finite in space.
Sometimes, to try to picture what it might be like to be less than finite, I visualize a clone of myself riding on an identical bike, but 180 degrees ahead (or behind) me on the 3.3 mile park loop that I daily traverse. Suppose my clone and I could share a single consciousness. So, simultaneously, while he dodges a pedestrian on the downhill slope on the north side of the loop, I’m gazing at the dam on Rowlett Creek on the south side. And we/I see and experience both events as one. It would be like the times TV networks split the screen to show two live events going on at the same time. Except, even in these cases, our eyes dart back in forth from one image to the other. In the hypothetical case of my clone & I, there is no darting. Both events are present and apprehended as one.
Now suppose I multiply the clone analogy by 2, so there are four of “us” riding around the loop. And then I double that so there are 8 of us, and the single conscious “me” simultaneously experiences 8 different events, and keeps track of them without interference or confusion. Impossible you say. Of course you are right. It’s hard enough for my finite mind to keep track of even one event, much less 8. Multi-tasking, a skill much in demand in today’s business world, is really not the parallel processing I’m speaking of, but rather the ability of some individuals to rapidly go from one task to another, presumably by efficiently storing information about event 1 in their neurons, and then equally efficiently retrieving stored data about event 2, acting on it, and then going on to event 3, and so on.
In the clone thought experiment above, I’m attempting to get at what it must be like for a Spirit that is infinite in space. I’ve stopped at eight clones, and already it’s boggled my mind attempting to think how the simultaneous experience of 8 events or places could be realized by a sentient being. For the God of the Westminster Divines, ALL places in the universe are simultaneously present to Him, because He is everywhere (omnipresent).
So as I zoom by a grassy field on my bike, and pick out a single blade of grass to think about, God is aware (more fully than I) of all the blades of grass in the field. In fact all the blades of grass in all fields in all countries and in all places on the face of the earth. And if there are other blades of grass somewhere else in the universe, He is aware of these also. And suppose I begin to think of the interior structure of the single blade that I’ve chosen to focus on. I think of the interconnected web of molecules that make up that blade, and then the individual atoms of those molecules, and then the individual electrons and protons and neutrons that make up those atoms. In my finite mind I can focus on say a single proton in one of the hydrogen atoms that are part of the molecular chain of high complexity that makes up the blade of grass. But God knows simultaneously all the protons (and all the elementary particles as well) in all the molecules in all the blades of grass in all the grassy fields in the universe SIMULTANEOUSLY. His awareness of any one is equal to His awareness of any other. Like Peter encountering Jesus after the miracle of the catch of fish, I say, “away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Or as the psalmist in Psalm 139: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high, I cannot attain it.”
To the new new atheist all the above is preposterous. No such Being exists. Who could conceive of such a One?
Yet what does the data say. Over the history of humankind, our understanding of the size of the material universe itself has expanded immensely. From the original idea of the ancients, with the earth as the center of the cosmos, and sun, moon and stars being stuck on some firmament that rotated around the earth every 24 hours, we have been led by scientific discovery first to the idea of the earth in a solar system, and then to the fact that the sun itself as an ordinary member of a galaxy of 100 billion stars (the Milky Way), and then finally to the realization that there are at least 100 billion of such galaxies each with a hundred billion stars reaching over distances so large that we have to measure them in units of light-years. At the same time in the realm of the microscopic, we have come to realize that a single teaspoon of the air we breathe consists of a trillion trillion molecules of oxygen and nitrogen. Both in the very large and the vary small the numbers we encounter are enormous. For all practical purposes, to our finite minds they are “infinite” . Doesn’t such an infinity give us a clue that their Creator is also Infinite in His Being?