Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Infinity Makes Us Nothing: The Eternal God
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
The Eternal God
Christians believe that God is eternal. He lives forever, has lived forever in the past and will live forever in the future. He is always living. His life span is infinite. Yet in this infinite life, He chose a particular moment to incarnate Himself as a human being to save humanity from its sins. In His infinite life span He could have chosen any time to create mankind, and having done so, any moment to incarnate Himself since He thought it was necessary to do so, although, being almighty, nothing could be necessary to Him or He would not be almighty. Now any finite time is nothing compared with infinite time, so the extent of human existence in God’s life span is zero, and the moment of incarnation of God in that is even less! Any finite fraction of infinity is nothing.
Our own lives are finite. That is what Christians do not like, and so pretend that they have the formula for an infinite life like God, but an infinite life has its own disadvantages. To be conscious thoughout an infinite life would require an infinite brain, any thought of which would be infinitesimal. The whole idea of the almighty God believed by the Christians is couched in problems, but they simply shrug them off. That God chose one moment in an infinite time to incarnate on earth is flattering to humanity, in that God must be incredibly concerned for these witless creatures that can do little to help themselves, but it all is simply human conceit. It is the vanity that the incrnated God warned about when He repeatedly said that His followers must be humble. No Christian is. To imagine that an infinite God bothers about an infinitesimal speck is vanity. That discounts them from salvation. The Christian message is plain, though all Christians cannot bare to face it. It is that self-abnegation and service to others is all that gets the blessing of God. It is a narrow gate not a broad one!
Could a being supposed to be perfect and almighty knowingly make a creature that required saving from some imperfection that He could have made perfect? Christians must satisfy themselves of such matters, admittedly not a difficult task, but also those they would persuade, that God is not an idiot. Though almighty and perfect, He deliberately made some imperfection that required Him to incarnate Himself as one of His own creatures to suffer death to save them from the imperfection He had anticipated. Was this plan for the benefit of the hapless creature or the God? After all, 2000 years and about ten billion dead creatures later there still seems no sign that this salvation is working. The world is worse than ever it was, and among the worse criminals are Christians. The idea that God is such a moron that He has to atone for something He already knew about says something about those who believe it. If there is an almighty God, He is by definition almighty, and not an imbecile, so the imbeciles must be the Christians themselves.
Only idiots could believe that a God who is capable of making the universe, or so we are told, could only think of doing a feeble conjuring trick to impress gullible people in a gullible place in a period of history when ordinary people were indeed particularly gullible. Since then, even though people are much more sophisticated and less gullible, God has seen no good reason to repeat His trick or produce a genuinely impressive one. The Christian tale has all the hallmarks of confidence trickery. God does His trick and it is not reported by reliable witnesses but by witnesses that even the bible describes as halfwits.
The accounts they give tell us that Roman soldiers actually were on the spot when the miracle happened and must have been genuine eyewitnesses had they seen it and come forward, but they did not, and the excuse is that they were asleep. God, the almighty being, contrived to let the soldiers sleep while His world salvific trick could have been carried out before their very eyes. Not only that, but beside Jesus, who was really God and not a proper man, many more saints, ordinary men albeit of upright character, who had been dead were revivified by God, according to one of the witnesses, and walked the streets of the Holy City. Yet not one of these immensely unique and utterly remarkable witnesses came forward to add an account to the others presented. No one could possibly have denied such evidence, but not one of these dead men seems to have impressed anyone at all! Where are they now? Were they resurrected with God to be carried up to heaven with Him. Why are they not mentioned, and why does this notion counter the idea that once raised, the dead saints lived in incorruptible bodies, and so they ought still to be available as unchallengeable witnesses if they chose to come forward. None do!
Instead we have to rely, if we are a Christian, on halfwitted “witnesses”, who by any standards of evidence are unreliable or cannot be considered witnesses at all, in any legal sense. An apologist argues that if he has long hair in March and short hair in April, we can reliably deduce that he has had his hair cut in between. A Jesus dead in March who is walking around in April must have been resurrected. That is the extent of the Christian evidence. The resurrection is therefore hearsay evidence, and not anything witnessed by eyewitnesses. Indirect evidence is plainly unreliable. The apologist’s hair might have fallen out with alopecia, or after radiation treatment for cancer. It is not a simple matter to make an obvious deduction at all. Jesus is said by the Moslems not to have died because someone was substituted, and the gospels hint at the same thing through the appearance of Simon of Cyrene. Mary Magdalene thought Jesus was the gardener, but perhaps she thought the gardener was Jesus. The appearances, if they were not made up or illusions, could have simply been mistaken identity. No biblical account of them is satisfactory, and there is no confirmation elsewhere. An empty tomb is no evidence that the corpse that was meant to be in it was resurrected. The fact is that God did not make His trick unquestionable, and instead used another trick, namely that people had to have faith in the lousy accounts to be saved. That is contrickery not the work of a Good God.
Ultimately, Christian belief in God acting as a man and dying, resurrecting Himself and appearing to various unreliable witnesses is belief and that is all. It does not depend on evidence because none of it is admissible. The accounts are unbelievable, and unreliable, and the witnesses are depicted as fools even in the gospel accounts. That ought to give Christians pause for thought, but it never does. Their belief is conditioned by things other than evidence—psychological things. Christians need to believe, and that is why they do it. It does not matter to them whether their belief is well founded, they are happy that lots of others have the same delusion.
One can accept, if one accepts that God exists and is almighty, that He can make a man who is really dead come back to life. The trouble is that God knows, since His almighty powers include omniscience, that quite simple stage tricks can do similar things and give similar impressions. Gullible people will be amazed by sleight of hand conjuring tricks. How amazing then is sawing an assistant into two, then producing her alive again. Why then should an infinitely intelligent God, assuming that intelligence is among His almighty powers, think that sophisticated people would believe his trick of coming back to life, especially when it is so terribly badly reported, and the really impressive witnesses are forgotten. Is this really how a truly almighty God would behave. The Jewish scriptures suggest otherwise when they warn that only God—the unrepresentable God of the Jewish scriptures, not any apparent man—saves humanity. The writer of this was concerned to stop tricksters from pretending to be God. Yet that is in essence what then happened. The Jews, who believed their own scriptures would not accept it, but gentiles, ever ready to have some trickster taking advantage of them, believed!
