Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly

by James Lindsay

Infinity and God have been close bedfellows over the recent millennia of human thought. But this is James A. Lindsay’s point. These two ideas are thought, mere concepts. Lindsay shows in a concise and readable manner that infinity is an abstraction, and shows that, in all likelihood, so is God, particularly if he has infinite properties.

This book is about math. It is about God. It is about stressing the importance of not confusing these two ideas with reality. Never the twain shall meet.

“A short and engaging read on the meeting of two huge ideas, infinity and God, that leaves us seeing both as abstract notions that may have nothing to do with reality. Honest and accessible, Dot, Dot, Dot is a great little book to stretch your thinking.” - Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists

"Timely, important and very readable, this book pulls the rug from under theists’ feet." - Jonathan MS Pearce,The Little Book of Unholy Questions

“Read this to avoid making any more cardinal sins and learn how much math is an amazing human endeavor.” - Aaron Adair, PhD, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View

Genres: Nonfiction

218 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 5, 2013

About the author

James Lindsay is an author, internationally recognized speaker, and the founder and president of New Discourses. He is best known for his relentless criticism of "Woke" ideology, the now-famous Grievance Studies Affair, and his bestselling books including Race Marxism and Cynical Theories, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. In addition to writing and speaking, Lindsay is the voice of the New Discourses Podcast and has been a guest on prominent media outlets including The Joe Rogan Experience, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and NPR.

Reviews

[Steve]

This book is a must read for anyone interested in arguments about the existence of God that are based in any way on the concept of infinity. Lindsay does a fantastic job of making some extraordinarily complex mathematical ideas (relatively) simple to understand. It's a challenging read but it is very enlightening to see how some of the arguments put forward for the existence of God (any form of god, really) by apologists like the Christian, William Lane Craig, sound persuasive on the surface but, when examined more closely, are complete nonsense. This book won't be for everyone. But, as I said above, for people interested in this issue, it's a significant book to read.

[Max Moore]

Some excerpts that give an idea of the content :

"The applications of the notion of infinity to discussions about God force the deity further out of the realm of the real, the natural, the physical, and into the realm of the abstract, the mental, the imaginary."

"God cannot be infinite, unless believers would also accept he must also be abstract—that is, mental stuff. Though apologists may defend this idea of God, a majority of believers do not accept an unreal philosophical deity of this kind. Theirs is a living, breathing, acting agent who will one day judge the living and the dead, and this is a fact too easy to lose sight of when talking with apologists.

Of course, the believers don't care much either. They are content to have plausible-sounding theological arguments that provide the appearance of an intellectual shield that protects their nonsense beliefs."

[Justin Powell]

Overall, this is a short and easy read. The content and topics of this book are in relation to blog posts of his and content from his first book. I recommend this book for anyone interested in William Lane Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument. I'm not certain of much of a wider appeal it would, or will have to those that aren't interested in these specific topics, or mathematics.

[Pierre A Renaud]

http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundat...#