Infinity and the Proofs for the Existence of God

About the Book

This book is more than just a set of logical proofs. It shows us who and what God is, and explains how our universe exploded into existence in the Big Bang, some 13.799 billion years ago, in such a way that all other Being in the universe derives its existence and nature — and its capacities for growth, power, moral character, change, and novelty — from God as the Ground of Being. This is a book for people who are interested in philosophy. It begins with a discussion of some of the fallacies into which the concept of infinity has led careless thinkers over the centuries. In particular, Chesnut demonstrates how often the modern defenses of atheism have been based on what are no more than pseudo-infinite regresses. This includes in particular self-delusive attempts to get rid of God by constructing what would be no more than imaginary universe-sized perpetual motion machines. The last half of the book then has as its central focus the set of Five Proofs for the Existence of God formulated by the great medieval thinker St. Thomas Aquinas, where Chesnut begins by showing how each of the proofs was interpreted in the middle ages. But the development of modern science requires that the Five Proofs be reworked for today, so he shows, for example, how the Proof from Motion can be reworded as an Argument from Energy, subject to the laws of thermodynamics, and how the Proof from Gradations in Truth and Value forces us to decide whether we will accept that at least some moral values are real, or instead will become what modern psychologists call psychopaths. This present book, combined with the work Chesnut authored nine years ago — God and Spirituality: Philosophical Essays — sets out an architectonic philosophical system for the twenty-first century, grounded on one side in the classics of the ancient Greco-Roman world and the medieval period, but on the other hand taking seriously the revolutionary changes in western thought produced by the development of twentieth-century science, including relativity, quantum theory, the uncertainty principle, and Gödel’s proof.

About the Author

The author did his undergraduate degree and half of a doctoral degree in physical chemistry and nuclear physics, as well as holding a job as a laboratory scientist at a plant that made rocket fuel, and employment doing experimental work with a subatomic particle accelerator at a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission laboratory. He then changed fields, and earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree in theology from Southern Methodist University. He subsequently won a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University in England, where he did his doctorate in theology. He taught ancient history, medieval history, and religious studies (including lectures on the philosophical issues of those periods and areas of thought) at the University of Virginia and Indiana University. In 1978-9, he won a Rome Prize (Prix de Rome) in Classics and spent a year as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He was later Visiting Professor of History and Theology at Boston University in 1984-5. His earliest book, The First Christian Histories — a major study in ancient Platonic philosophy and the philosophy of history — went through two editions (1977 and 1986), became a classic in its field, and is still in print today. In it he described how the Christian historians of the Late Roman Empire dealt with the pagan historical theories of their time, which saw a universe under the control of implacable Fate and blind Fortune. These new Christian historians revised the western understanding of history to include human free will and creativity, and portrayed human history as the continual struggle between true reverence for a higher power (what Plato had called the Good and the Beautiful Itself), and the mindset of those men and women who had been snared by the hatred of everything that was good, and an actual love of evil and doing harm to other people. After his retirement from Indiana University, he became director and senior editor of a small publishing house, the Hindsfoot Foundation, which prints works by some of the finest scholars in their fields. He divides his time today between Indiana and the San Francisco Bay area.