(See Part 1 for the beginning of this discussion.)

Puzzling aspects of infinity

We can compare the sizes of two sets of numbers by finding a one-to-one correspondence between them, but in the case of infinitely large sets, strange things can happen. For example, compare the set of positive integers I = {1, 2, 3, 4, …} with the set of squares S = {1, 4, 9, 16, …}. Every element n in I has a corresponding n² in S, and every n² in S has a corresponding n in I. Here we find that a subset of the set of integers (a subset which has omitted an infinite number of integers) has the same size as the set of all integers.

Playing with the same paradox, Hilbert’s Hotel imagines a hotel that can hold an infinite number of guests. Suppose you ask for a room but the hotel is full. No problem—every guest moves one room higher (room n moves to room n + 1), and room 1 is now free.

But now suppose the hotel is full, and you’ve brought an infinite number of friends. Again, no problem—every guest moves to the room number twice the old room number (room n moves to room 2n), and the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms become free.

Infinity is best seen as a concept, not a number. To understand this, we should realize that zero can also be seen as a concept and not a number. Consider a situation in which I have three liters of water. I give you a third so that I have two liters and you have one. I now have twice what you have. I will always have twice what you have, regardless of the number of liters of water I start with except for zero. If I start with zero liters, I can’t really give you anything, and if I “gave” you a third of my zero liters, I would no longer have twice as much as you.

Craig has argued there is no actual infinite (to avoid an infinitely old universe), but he needs one for himself. His god is supposedly infinitely good, infinitely powerful, and so on. And since the universe has a finite age, for God to be either infinitely old or timeless, he must’ve crossed an infinite number of moments of time before he created the universe. Perhaps Craig is hoist by his own petard.

Not all infinities are the same. Let’s move from integers to real numbers (real numbers are all numbers that we’re familiar with: the integers as well as 3.7, 1/7, π, √2, and so on).

The number of numbers between 0 and 1 is obviously the same as that between 1 and 2. But it gets interesting when we realize that there are the same number of numbers in the range 0–1 as 1–∞.

The proof is quite simple: for every number x in the range 0–1, the value 1/x is in the range 1–∞. (If x = 0.1, 1/x = 10; if x = 0.25, 1/x = 4; and so on) And now we go in the other direction: for every number y in the range 1–∞, 1/y is in the range 0–1. There’s a one-to-one correspondence, so the sets must be of equal sizes. QED.

(Note that this isn’t a trick or fallacy. You might have seen the proof that 1 = 2, but that “proof” only works because it contains an error. Not so in this case.)

The resolution of this paradox is fairly straightforward, but resolving the paradox isn’t the point here. The point is that this isn’t intuitive. Use caution when using infinity-based apologetic arguments.

More from William Lane Craig

Let’s conclude by revisiting Craig’s example from last time.

Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting from eternity and is now finishing: . . ., –3, –2, –1, 0. We could ask, why did he not finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before? By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished by then.… In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will have already finished.

The problem is that he confuses counting infinitely many negative integers with counting all the negative integers. As we’ve seen, there are the same number of negative integers as just the number of negative squares –1², –2², –3², …. Our mysterious Counting Man could have counted an infinite number of negative integers but still have infinitely many yet to count.

Or, imagine catching the Counting Man at any point in his project. He’d tell you that he’d already counted an infinite number of numbers. So where’s the problem?

For a more thorough analysis, read the critique from Prof. Wes Morriston.

And isn’t the apologist who casts infinity-based arguments living in a glass house? The atheist might raise the infinite regress problem—Who created God, and who created God’s creator, and who created that creator, and so on? The apologist will sidestep the problem by saying (without evidence) that God has always existed. Okay, if God can have existed forever, why not the universe? And if the forever universe succumbs to the problem that we wouldn’t be able to get to now, how does the forever God avoid it?

This post is not meant as proof that all of Craig’s infinity based arguments are invalid or even that any of them are. I simply want to ask apologists who aren’t mathematicians to appreciate their limits and tread lightly in topics infinite.

Of course, if the apologist’s goal is simply to baffle people and win points by intimidation, this may be just the ticket.

When the answer is known, science knows it.
When science doesn’t know it, neither does religion.
— Paraphrase of AronRa

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/13/12.)

I’m preparing a presentation for the Atheist Alliance of America conference in Seattle, August 7–10. I’ll be posting less often for a week. Thanks for your patience.

The topic of infinity comes up occasionally in apologetics arguments, but this is a lot more involved than most people think. After exploring the subject, apologists may want to be more cautious.

William Lane Craig scatters tacks on the road

Philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig walks where most laymen fear to tread. Like an experienced actor, he has no difficulty imagining himself in all sorts of stretch roles—as a physicist, as a biologist, or as a mathematician.

Since God couldn’t have created the universe if it has been here forever, Craig argues that an infinitely old universe is impossible. He imagines such a universe and argues that it would take an infinite amount of time to get to now. This gulf of infinitely many moments of time would be impossible to cross, so the idea must be impossible.

But why not arrive at time t = now? We must be somewhere on the timeline, and now is as good a place as any. The imaginary infinite timeline isn’t divided into “Points in time we can get to” and “Points we can’t.” And if going from a beginning in time infinitely far in the past and arriving at now is a problem, then imagine a beginningless timeline. Physicist Vic Stenger, for one, makes the distinction between a universe that began infinitely far in the past and a universe without a beginning

Hoare’s Dictum is relevant here. Infinity-based arguments are successful because they’re complicated and confusing, not because they’re accurate.

One of Craig’s conundrums is this:

Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting from eternity and is now finishing: . . ., –3, –2, –1, 0. We could ask, why did he not finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before? By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished by then.… In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will have already finished.

More on infinity

Before we study this ill-advised descent into mathematics, let’s first explore the concept of infinity.

Everyone knows that the number of integers {1, 2, 3, …} is infinite. It’s easy to see that if one proposed that the set of integers was finite, with a largest integer n, the number n + 1 would be even larger. This understanding of infinity is an old observation, and Aristotle and other ancients noted it.

But there’s more to the topic than that. I remember being startled in an introductory calculus class at a shape sometimes called Gabriel’s Horn (take the two-dimensional curve 1/x from 1 to ∞ and rotate it around the x-axis to make an infinitely long wine glass). This shape has finite volume but infinite surface area. In other words, you could fill such a container with paint, but you could never paint it.

A two-dimensional equivalent is the familiar Koch snowflake. (Start with an equilateral triangle. For every side, erase the middle third and replace it with an outward-facing V with sides the same length as the erased segment. Repeat forever.) At every iteration (see the first few in the drawing above), each line segment becomes 1/3 bigger. Repeat forever, and the perimeter becomes infinitely long. Surprisingly, the area doesn’t become infinite because the entire growing shape could be bounded by a fixed circle. In the 2D equivalent of the Gabriel’s Horn paradox, you could fill in a Koch snowflake with a pencil, but all the pencils in the world couldn’t trace its outline.

Far older than these are any of Zeno’s paradoxes. In one of these, fleet-footed Achilles gives a tortoise a 100-meter head start in a foot race. Achilles is ten times faster, but by the time he reaches the 100-meter mark, the tortoise has gone 10 meters. This isn’t a problem, and he crosses that next 10 meters. But wait a minute—the tortoise has moved again. Every time Achilles crosses the next distance segment, the tortoise has moved ahead. He must cross an infinite series of distances. Will he ever pass the tortoise?

The distance is the infinite sum 100 + 10 + 1 + 1/10 + …. This sum is a little more than 111 meters, which means that Achilles will pass the tortoise and win the race.

Some infinite sums are finite (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … = 2).

And some are infinite (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + … = ∞).

(And this post is getting a bit long. It will be concluded in part 2.)

To say that that having a degree in theology
makes you qualified to say that God is real,
is like claiming that having memorized all the Harry Potter books
makes you qualified to say that unicorns exist.
— Unknown

Photo credit: Wikipedia

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/12/12.)