The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
– Psalm 14:1 (KJV)
Why the mind that can calculate infinity still flees its Author, and why the evidence will not let it go
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Introduction: The Safe Infinity and the Dangerous One
Ask a room of educated people about infinity and the conversation will be lively. Someone will mention that there are as many even numbers as there are whole numbers. Someone else will recall Zeno’s arrow that never reaches its target, or Hilbert’s hotel that is fully booked and can still take new guests. A mathematician may explain that Georg Cantor proved some infinities are larger than others. Nobody leaves angry. Infinity, handled this way, is a puzzle, a curiosity, a pleasant vertigo for the mind.
Now change one word. Ask the same room about an infinite God, a Being without limit in power, knowledge, goodness, and existence, who made the world and has a claim on every person in it. The temperature changes. The puzzle has become a person, and a person can make demands. Infinity in a textbook asks nothing of me. Infinity on a throne asks everything.
That shift is the thesis of this essay. The human mind is genuinely baffled by the infinite. We are finite creatures, bounded by the senses, and the infinite overwhelms our categories. Yet the bafflement is not what drives unbelief. People are quite willing to speak of the infinite through mathematics and through the Greeks, because an abstract infinity sets aside a personal God. The real line is drawn elsewhere. It is drawn at authority. At bottom, much modern unbelief is not a conclusion reached at the end of an argument but a refusal made at the beginning of one: nobody is going to be the boss of me.
Scripture diagnosed this long before the modern era. Paul did not say that the Gentiles lacked evidence. He said they suppressed it:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
— Romans 1:18–19 (KJV)
What follows is a case in several movements. First, the Christian basis for studying God’s existence with reason. Second, how the ancient philosophers approached the question. Third, the physical and metaphysical evidence from the order of the universe. Fourth, a close look at the claim that we know God does not exist, and why the word “know” cannot bear that weight. Fifth, a rebuttal of the popular argument that the sheer size of space counts against God. Finally, an account of why arguments against God tend to spiral into a philosophical whirlpool, and what the Bible says lies at the bottom of it.
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Finite Minds and the Infinite
From the Apeiron to Cantor
The Greeks met the infinite early and did not enjoy the encounter. Anaximander proposed the apeiron, the boundless, as the source of all things. Zeno’s paradoxes suggested that the infinitely divisible could make motion seem impossible. Aristotle tamed the problem by distinguishing a potential infinite (a process that can always continue, like counting) from an actual infinite (a completed infinite collection), and he denied that the latter exists in nature. Euclid’s geometry was famously careful to avoid the completed infinite altogether; historians speak of the Greek “horror of the infinite.”
The irony is that when mathematics finally embraced the actual infinite, its pioneer immediately pointed beyond mathematics. Georg Cantor, who built the theory of transfinite numbers, distinguished the mathematical infinities he could study from what he called the Absolute infinite, which he identified with God. He wrote that:
The true infinite or absolute, which is in God, admits no kind of determination.
— Georg Cantor, quoted in “Infinity,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity
Cantor saw what many of his admirers prefer to forget. The infinities of set theory are measurable, ordered, and in principle comparable. In a word, they are manageable. The Absolute is not. It cannot be captured by any set, because it is the ground of every set. Here the finite mind reaches its edge, and it has a choice. It can bow, or it can retreat to the infinities it can control.
Why the Abstract Infinite Feels Safe
An infinite series makes no moral claims. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, in the version most people encounter, thinks only about itself and takes no interest in the world. Even the impersonal “Absolute” of later idealism, or the vague “universe” that some modern writers speak of with near-religious reverence, has this advantage: it does not command, judge, forgive, or call anyone to account. It can be admired without being obeyed.
The God of the Bible is different. He is infinite and personal at once. He is “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2), and He is the One who says to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14), and then gives Moses a law. The infinite here has a voice. That is precisely why the conversation in the room goes cold.
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A Christian Basis for Studying the Existence of God
Faith and Reason as Allies
Some imagine that Christians must choose between faith and reason. The historic Church has rarely thought so. Justin Martyr, a philosopher before his conversion, kept his philosopher’s cloak afterward and argued that Christ is the Logos, the divine Reason in whom every true insight of the pagans had its source. Origen and Augustine saw harmony between revealed truth and the study of nature. The medieval schools called philosophy the ancilla theologiae, the handmaid of theology: a servant, but a real and honored one. The First Vatican Council affirmed that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from created things, and John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio compared faith and reason to two wings on which the human spirit rises to the truth.
Protestant theology says much the same in its own idiom. The word philosophia means “love of wisdom,” and Scripture commands the pursuit of wisdom (Proverbs 16:16; James 1:5). The problem, as Reformed writers have long observed, is not reason itself but fallen reason, reason enlisted in the service of a heart that does not want God. Paul at Athens (Acts 17) did not refuse to engage the Stoics and Epicureans. He quoted their own poets and reasoned with them from creation to the Creator.
Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.
For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;
– Acts 17:22-30 (KJV)
The Starting Point, Not the End Point
There is a further point that changes the shape of the whole debate. The Bible never argues whether God exists. It opens with “In the beginning God” (Genesis 1:1) and treats the knowledge of God as something every person already has. The question Scripture presses is not “Is there a God?” but “Who is God, and will you honor Him?” Kevin DeYoung puts it memorably:
The starting place for human knowledge, not the end point of human deduction.
— Kevin DeYoung, “Theological Primer: The Existence of God,” Clearly Reformed, https://clearlyreformed.org/theological-primer-existence-god/
John Calvin called this inborn knowledge the sensus divinitatis, the sense of divinity. Writing in the sixteenth century, he insisted it could be suppressed but never erased:
That there exists in the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute.
— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.3.1 (Beveridge translation, 1845)
In the twentieth century, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston developed this insight into what is now called Reformed epistemology. Belief in God, they argued, can be properly basic: rational to hold without being inferred from other beliefs, in the same way that belief in other minds or in the reality of the past is rational. This does not make arguments useless. It makes them what DeYoung and the older Reformed scholastics such as Francis Turretin said they were: tools to defend, clarify and confirm a faith that is already reasonable.
So the Christian studies God’s existence not as a skeptic hoping to be talked into belief, but as a creature thinking God’s thoughts after Him. As Augustine prayed at the opening of the Confessions:
Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
— Augustine, Confessions 1.1 (Pusey translation)
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How the Ancient Philosophers Dealt with God
A World Full of Gods
Every ancient culture we know of had its gods and its account of origins. The Egyptians had Ra and Osiris; the Babylonians, Marduk; the Norse, Odin and Thor; the Greeks, the Olympians; the Hindus, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; the Aztecs, Mayans, Celts, Chinese and Japanese, their own pantheons. Almost all these creation stories begin with something already there, usually a chaos of waters or darkness, out of which the gods themselves emerge. The gods are part of the world, not its Maker.
That is what makes Genesis 1:1 so startling. God does not arise from the chaos. He stands outside it and speaks it into order. The world is not divine, and God is not a piece of the world. Later theologians would call this creation out of nothing, and the doctrine is already implied in “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
The Skeptics
Greek thought also produced the first recorded skeptics about the gods. Protagoras opened a treatise with a famous confession of ignorance:
As to the gods, I have no means of knowing
— Protagoras, fragment, quoted in Austin Cline, “Atheism and Skepticism in Ancient Greece,” Learn Religions, https://www.learnreligions.com/atheism-and-skepticism-with-greek-philosophers-248345
Notice what Protagoras did not say. He did not claim to know there were no gods. He claimed that he could not know either way, citing the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of life. That is agnosticism, and it is an honest position about the limits of one man’s knowledge. It is a far cry from the confident “we know” of some modern writers.
Epicurus went further. He held that the gods exist but are indifferent, living in blissful detachment and taking no interest in human affairs. Later writers attached to his school the famous dilemma of evil: if God is willing to prevent evil but unable, He is not all-powerful; if able but unwilling, He is not good. That dilemma is still the backbone of the modern case against God, and we will meet it again below. It is worth noticing, though, what the Epicurean picture offered its followers. A god who does not care is a god who does not judge. The Epicurean was freed from fear of the divine. The motive was not hidden. Freedom from accountability was the point.
The Philosophers Who Reasoned Toward God
Others among the Greeks reasoned in the opposite direction. Socrates and the Stoics argued that the order of nature shows design. Plato, in the tenth book of the Laws, argued that the soul is prior to body and that self-moving intelligence must stand behind the ordered motions of the heavens. He also treated denial of the gods as a moral danger to the city, not merely an intellectual error.
Aristotle produced the most influential argument of all. Change, he observed, is the passage from potential to actual, and nothing passes from potential to actual except by something already actual. A series of things changing other things cannot go on forever without a first source that is itself pure actuality, unchanging and eternal. In the Metaphysics, he concludes:
On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature.
— Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7 (W. D. Ross translation, 1908)
Aristotle’s Prime Mover is not the God of Abraham. It thinks only of itself, and it does not create, love, or redeem. Yet the argument establishes something important: reason alone can reach a necessary, eternal, unchanging First Cause. Centuries later, the Persian philosopher Avicenna refined the argument into his “proof of the truthful,” reasoning from contingent things to a necessary existent, a Being whose existence depends on nothing else.
Philo: Where Athens Meets Jerusalem
The first thinker to bring this philosophical tradition into conversation with Scripture was Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus. Philo read the Bible with Plato and the Stoics in his hand, and he concluded that the God of Moses is the true First Cause the philosophers had been groping toward: utterly transcendent, known by His works, yet personal. Philo had no patience with atheism. He called it the greatest of vices and, in a striking phrase, “the beginning of all iniquity.” For Philo, as for the Psalmist, denying God was not an intellectual misstep. It was the root of moral disorder.
The pattern of the Church Fathers, and later of Augustine and Aquinas, follows Philo’s lead. They took the best of Greek reason, purified it, and placed it in the service of revelation. The philosophers had found the First Cause. Scripture told them His name.
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The Cosmos as Witness: Evidence from Order
The Bible claims that creation itself testifies to its Maker:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
— Psalm 19:1 (KJV)
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
— Romans 1:20 (KJV)
Modern science, far from muting that testimony, has made it louder. Four lines of evidence stand out.
1. The Universe Had a Beginning
For most of history, many thinkers assumed the universe was eternal. Aristotle did. So did most nineteenth-century materialists, who found an eternal cosmos convenient because it required no Creator. Twentieth-century cosmology overturned that assumption. The expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, and the abundance of light elements all point to a finite past, roughly 13.8 billion years ago. It was a Catholic priest and physicist, Georges Lemaître, who first proposed what became the Big Bang model.
The astronomer Robert Jastrow, himself an agnostic, described the scientist’s experience of this discovery with an image that has become famous. After scaling the mountain of ignorance and reaching the summit, he says, the scientist is
Greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
— Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (1978), quoted in David Williamson, “The Cosmos Points to God,” Understanding the Gospel, https://understandingthegospel.org/explore-the-gospel/god/the-cosmos-points-to-god/
The Kalam cosmological argument, developed by medieval thinkers such as al-Kindi and al-Ghazali and defended today by William Lane Craig, puts the point simply. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. That cause must be beyond space, time, and matter, since it brought them into being; enormously powerful; and, since it chose to create a universe with a beginning, plausibly personal.
Some critics respond that physics can explain how a universe arises “from nothing.” Stephen Hawking wrote that because there is a law like gravity,
The universe can and will create itself from nothing.
— Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (2010), quoted in Andrew Drinkard, Inspiring Christianity, https://inspiringchristianity.com/2021/10/15/traditional-argument-from-contingency-the-universe-exists-because-god-exists/
The sentence collapses on inspection. A law of gravity is not nothing. It is a definite mathematical structure describing how existing things behave. And a universe cannot “create itself,” since it would have to exist before it existed to do so. Parmenides saw the principle twenty-five centuries ago: from nothing, nothing comes. Scripture says the same, and more: “the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).
2. The Universe Is Finely Tuned for Life
The second line of evidence is the fine-tuning of the physical constants. Physicists have discovered that many basic quantities, such as the strength of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the ratio of the masses of the proton and electron, and the energy of empty space, fall within extremely narrow ranges that permit stable stars, chemistry, and life. Change them slightly, and the universe would be a thin hydrogen gas, or a collection of black holes, or nothing that could ever produce an observer.
Some of the numbers scientists use to describe the universe are *mind-boggling.
Cosmologist Sean Carroll, who believes nature can be explained without God or supernatural forces, points to two big puzzles. First, even empty space has energy, but the amount we measure is roughly \(10^{120}\) times smaller than what some theoretical calculations predict. That’s a 1 followed by 120 zeros. Second, the early universe began in an incredibly orderly state, something scientists describe as having “low entropy.”
Physicist Roger Penrose estimated how unlikely such an orderly beginning would be: one chance in \(10^{10^{123}}\). That number is so enormous that even if every particle in the observable universe could stand for one digit, there still wouldn’t be enough particles to write it out.
Physicist Leonard Susskind, who also does not support explaining the universe through God, has said that vacuum energy being so close to zero—zero to 119 decimal places—is no accident.
There are three main explanations: necessity, chance, or design. Necessity fails because nothing in current physics shows that the constants had to take these values. Chance on its own is absurd at these odds. So naturalists increasingly turn to the multiverse, the hypothesis that our universe is one of a vast or infinite number with different constants, and we simply find ourselves in one where life is possible.
The irony deserves to be savored. Those who reject God because He is unseen now posit a practically infinite number of unseen universes to avoid Him. The finite mind, uneasy with an infinite God, accepts an infinite ensemble of worlds. The theistic philosopher Richard Swinburne observed that postulating trillions of other universes to explain the features of this one is the height of irrationality when a single, simple explanation is available. The physicist Paul Davies has added that any mechanism generating universes would itself need finely tuned laws. The question is pushed back, not answered. We are back where this essay began: the infinite is acceptable so long as it is impersonal.
3. The Universe Is Intelligible
A third line of evidence is so familiar that we overlook it. The universe can be understood. Its deepest structures are mathematical, and human minds can discover them. The physicist Eugene Wigner wrote of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the natural sciences. Equations written on a blackboard predict the behavior of galaxies and subatomic particles.
Why should this be? If the universe is the product of blind forces and our minds are the product of blind selection for survival, there is no particular reason to expect either the cosmos to be rational or our reason to track it. If the universe is the work of a rational Creator who made human beings in His image (Genesis 1:27), intelligibility is exactly what we should expect. This is why the founders of modern science, Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and others, spoke of “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” The philosopher Pat Flynn makes the point pointedly:
God is required for science to even count as a genuine source of knowledge.
— Pat Flynn, “What Does Science Really Say About the Existence of God?” Word on Fire, https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/what-does-science-really-say-about-the-existence-of-god/
4. The Metaphysical Witness Beneath the Physical
Physical evidence is powerful, but it is not the deepest layer of the case. The classical arguments of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas do not depend on the latest cosmology, or even on whether the universe had a beginning. Thomas Aquinas himself thought that philosophy alone could not prove the world had a temporal beginning. His arguments concern what holds things in existence right now.
Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017) restates these arguments for a modern audience. As reviewers have noted, his proofs turn on what philosophers call a hierarchical causal series, in which each member depends on the one above it at this very moment, like a chandelier hanging from a chain hanging from a ceiling. Such a series cannot regress forever; it must terminate in something that does not hang from anything. Feser’s five routes reach the same summit:
- The Aristotelian proof: the change we observe requires a purely actual actualizer, a cause that has no unrealized potential.
- The Neo-Platonic proof: composite things require an absolutely simple first cause.
- The Augustinian proof: necessary truths, such as those of mathematics and logic, require a divine intellect in which they exist.
- The Thomistic proof: things whose essence does not include existence require a cause that is existence itself, subsistent being.
- The Rationalist proof: the principle of sufficient reason leads to a necessary being who explains the existence of all contingent things.
Aquinas summed up the first of his Five Ways in a sentence that still rewards reflection:
Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 2, a. 3 (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920)
These arguments have a remarkable feature that bears directly on the “vastness” objection discussed below. Because they rest on the structure of existence itself, they are untouched by the size or age of the universe. A cosmos the size of a walnut and a cosmos of two trillion galaxies would both need a First Cause in exactly the same way.
To these arguments one can add others that philosophers continue to develop: the moral argument (if objective moral values exist, they require a transcendent ground), the argument from consciousness, the argument from reason, and the argument from desire made famous by C. S. Lewis. Alvin Plantinga once wrote a lecture titled “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments.” The case for God is not a single thread. It is a rope of many strands, and the strands reinforce one another.
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The Unstable Word “Know”
A Bold Claim
Most atheists today are careful. Sean Carroll ends his essay on whether the universe needs God by conceding that none of his reasoning amounts to a proof that God does not exist, because
Science isn’t in the business of proving things.
— Sean Carroll, “Does the Universe Need God?” https://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/
The atheist blogger Tom Harper agrees that “Science has not and can not disprove the existence of God,” and even calls fine-tuning probably the best argument for theism. Joop Beris, in a list of ten reasons God does not exist, admits he cannot be absolutely sure. Richard Dawkins, on his own famous seven-point scale, places himself just short of the position of the person who says, “I know there is no God.”
Against this background, Gary J. Whittenberger’s essay “We Know That God Does Not Exist” in Free Inquiry (2025) is unusually bold. Whittenberger, a retired psychologist who studied under the philosopher William Rowe, describes his own journey from believing God “very probably” does not exist to claiming to know it. He calls himself a “gnostic atheist.” Don Cameron of AtheismUK similarly claims to have proved God’s non-existence beyond all reasonable doubt. These writers deserve a careful answer, because the word they lean on cannot hold them up.
What Does It Mean to Know?
Whittenberger defines knowing as near certainty, a conclusion established “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard of a criminal court. But this is a lowered definition of knowledge, adopted precisely so the conclusion can clear the bar. A jury verdict is a practical decision under uncertainty, not a demonstration. Juries are sometimes wrong, which is why we have appeals courts. To borrow the courtroom standard is to admit, in the very definition, that one has a strong opinion rather than knowledge in the full sense.
More importantly, the claim is a universal negative about the whole of reality. To know that there is no God anywhere, in any mode of being, one would need to have surveyed all of reality, including whatever lies beyond the physical universe. Only an omniscient being could do that. The claim to know there is no God, taken strictly, requires the knower to possess the very attribute he denies exists. Psalm 14:1 is not merely pious name-calling; it is epistemologically exact: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”
The Argument from the Holocaust
Whittenberger’s main argument is a version of the logical problem of evil. He offers a “standard definition” of God as the greatest imaginable possible person, and reasons by modus tollens: if such a God existed, horrible harms like the Holocaust would not occur; the Holocaust occurred; therefore such a God does not exist. To support the first premise, he argues that an omnipotent God could have achieved any good without permitting the Holocaust, so He could have no morally sufficient reason for allowing it.
Logically, the argument is valid. The trouble is the first premise, and it fails in at least four ways.
First, it is an argument from ignorance. The premise depends on the claim that God could have no morally sufficient reason. But how would we know that? The philosopher Stephen Wykstra called this kind of reasoning a “noseeum” inference: because I cannot see a reason, there must be none. That inference works when the thing searched for would be visible to me if it existed, like an elephant in my kitchen. It fails when the thing searched for is the reasoning of an infinite mind about the whole of history and eternity. Whittenberger anticipates this answer and calls it burden-shifting, but it is he who has claimed to know. The burden is his. Scripture is direct about our position: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8). The book of Job, the Bible’s great meditation on suffering, ends not with an explanation but with a question: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4).
Second, the argument borrows the morality it cannot ground. To argue that the Holocaust was wrong, and not merely unpleasant to us, Whittenberger needs an objective moral standard. He supplies one, which he calls CUE-P, “Correct Universal Ethics for Persons,” a code binding on all persons, including God. But on his naturalism, where does a correct, universal, and objective moral law come from? Not from physics, which has no “ought.” Not from evolution, which selects for survival, not truth. Not from culture, which varies. He has declared the concept of evil “obsolete” and replaced it with the language of “harms,” yet his whole argument depends on the Holocaust being not merely harmful but horribly wrong. The moral argument for God starts exactly here. If there is a real, universal moral law, there is a Lawgiver. The atheist who argues from evil must first stand on ground that only theism provides.
Third, the argument defeats itself through determinism. Against the free-will defense, Whittenberger embraces strong determinism, citing Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky. Our choices, he says, are entirely the product of causes and randomness, with no contribution from a sovereign self. But if this is true, then his own belief that God does not exist is also the product of prior causes and randomness, not of rational insight. So is the belief of every theist. Neither can be praised or blamed. Neither has reasoned in any meaningful sense; each has simply been caused. C. S. Lewis and, later, Plantinga pressed this point: a mind that is nothing but the outcome of non-rational causes has no grounds to trust its own conclusions, including the conclusion that it is nothing but the outcome of non-rational causes. And without free agency there is no moral responsibility, which empties the indictment of the Nazis, and of God, of its force. The very framework he uses to escape the free-will defense also cuts the ground from under his claim to know anything.
Fourth, the argument mistakes the God it attacks. Whittenberger claims that God would not work in mysterious ways and would explain His reasons, even enhancing our minds so that we could understand. That is a projection, not a definition. The God of the Bible has told us that “the secret things belong unto the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29), that He sometimes hides Himself (Isaiah 45:15), and that He has acted at the deepest level of suffering by entering it in the person of His Son. The Christian answer to evil is not a formula. It is a cross and an empty tomb, and the promise that God “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).
Many philosophers, including some atheists, have concluded that Plantinga’s free-will defense refuted the logical problem of evil: it is not contradictory to say that a good, all-powerful God permits evil for reasons we may not fully grasp. Whittenberger’s attempt to revive it requires determinism, an imported objective morality, and a claim to know the mind of God. That is a great deal of weight to put on a premise.
A Word About Tone
One more feature of the essay deserves comment. Whittenberger suggests that theists who reject his argument may be engaged in a new form of Holocaust denialism and may even be antisemitic. This is not an argument. It is what logicians call poisoning the well, an attempt to make disagreement morally shameful before it can be heard. It is especially strange given that the Jewish people, who suffered the Holocaust, gave the world the Psalms of lament and the book of Job, and that countless survivors kept their faith in the God of Abraham. His essay closes with the words “Spread the Good News!” The borrowing is revealing. Even the announcement of godlessness reaches for the language of the Gospel.
“Absence of Evidence”
Cameron’s claim that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” fares no better. Sometimes it is, when we would expect evidence if the thing were there. But the whole case above is that the evidence is present: in the existence of the universe, its beginning, its fine-tuning, its intelligibility, the moral law, the reality of consciousness, and, for the Christian, the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. To say there is no evidence is not a finding. It is a decision about what will be allowed to count.
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Big Space, Small Argument: The Newsweek Fallacy
The Argument
In 2017, Newsweek republished an essay by the Durham philosopher Emily Thomas arguing that the vastness of space counts against God. Drawing on Michael Martin and Nicholas Everitt, she reasons that the Bible presents God as “human-oriented”: humans are made in His image (Genesis 1:27), crowned with glory (Psalm 8), and loved so much that He gave His Son (John 3:16). If that is so, she asks,
Wouldn’t you expect him to create a universe in which humans feature prominently?
— Emily Thomas, “Can Science Prove God Doesn’t Exist? Vastness of Space Indicates He Might Not,” Newsweek (3 Nov. 2017), https://www.newsweek.com/science-prove-god-doesnt-exist-vastness-space-indicates-700688
Instead, she notes, the observable universe is some 93 billion light-years across and holds perhaps two trillion galaxies, while humans have existed for only around 200,000 years in one tiny corner. Space, as Douglas Adams put it, “is big, really really big.” The article concludes that atheism is the simplest explanation and that modern science lowers the probability of theism.
Why the Argument Fails
The argument has rhetorical force, but logically it commits several errors at once.
It confuses size with significance. The argument assumes that if something matters, it will be physically large or numerically dominant. But we never reason this way elsewhere. A human brain is small, yet it is the most complex object we know. A newborn is tiny, yet worth more than a mountain of gold. Importance is measured by value, not by volume. To infer insignificance from smallness is a category mistake, mixing up physical quantity with moral and personal worth.
It smuggles in its own expectations. The argument depends on a premise about what God would do, and that premise is the author’s, not the Bible’s. Scripture never says the universe exists only for human beings. It says the heavens exist to declare God’s glory (Psalm 19:1), and that all things were created “by him, and for him” (Colossians 1:16). A God whose purposes include displaying His own infinite power and beauty might well make a cosmos too vast for us to measure. Isaiah thought exactly this: “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things” (Isaiah 40:26). The size of the heavens is presented as evidence for God’s greatness, not against His care.
It ignores the Bible’s own reasoning. The very psalm cited as evidence of God’s human-orientation is built on the contrast the argument thinks is a problem:
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?
— Psalm 8:3–4 (KJV)
The Psalmist knew the heavens were vast and man was small. That is the wonder he is celebrating: that the God who made the stars should care for so small a creature. The argument does not reveal a tension the biblical writers missed. It restates their point and draws the opposite conclusion.
It assumes the size of the universe is a modern discovery. It is not. In the sixth century, Boethius wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy that astronomers had shown the whole earth to be a mere point compared with the heavens. Medieval readers knew Ptolemy’s estimate that the earth was negligible against the sphere of the stars. C. S. Lewis noted that the vastness of space was a commonplace long before modern astronomy, and believers were not troubled by it. As the theologian Andrew Davison has observed, theologians have long known the universe is vast. The discovery that the universe is even larger than the ancients guessed does not introduce a new problem; it enlarges a wonder they already confessed.
It overlooks the physics of fine-tuning. Here is perhaps the sharpest reply. A universe that produces life must be old enough to forge carbon and oxygen inside generations of stars and to let those elements spread and cool into planets. In an expanding universe, age and size go together. A universe old enough for us is necessarily a universe vast enough to seem to dwarf us. The vastness is not evidence that we were an afterthought. It may be part of the price of our existence.
It begs the question about simplicity. The claim that atheism is the “simplest explanation” assumes the very thing in dispute. A universe that exists without explanation, begins without a cause, and is finely tuned by unexplained luck or by an infinite array of unseen universes is not simple. A single, necessary, personal First Cause is far simpler. Even the article concedes several theistic responses, that God’s purposes may be mysterious, that He may value beauty, that He may not be exclusively human-oriented, before dismissing them as “unsatisfying.” But “unsatisfying” is a report on the author’s preferences, not on the logic of the case.
The vastness argument, then, is a classic fallacy dressed in impressive numbers. Its conclusion does not follow from its premises, and its key premise is imported from outside the faith it attacks. As Feser’s reviewers have pointed out, the classical proofs do not even depend on the size of the universe at all. Big space makes for a small argument.
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The Philosophical Whirlpool
There is a pattern in the arguments against God that becomes clear once it is seen. Each one, followed to its end, does not land on firm ground. It spirals.
The argument from evil requires an objective moral law, which requires a Lawgiver, which is the conclusion it set out to deny. The appeal to science requires that the universe be rational and our minds reliable, which naturalism cannot guarantee. Determinism, invoked to defeat free will, also dissolves rational inference and moral responsibility, and with them the argument itself. The multiverse, invoked to defeat fine-tuning, requires an infinite, unobservable reality, which is precisely the kind of thing the skeptic said we should not believe in without evidence. The demand for a God who explains Himself presumes that finite minds can comprehend infinite purposes, which is what the argument from the infinite began by denying.
This is what it means to say that anti-God arguments descend into a philosophical whirlpool. The deeper one goes, the faster one spins, and there is no bottom to stand on. Reason, logic, and moral judgment are all used to argue against God, yet none of them can be grounded without Him. Cornelius Van Til called this the argument from “the impossibility of the contrary”: the very tools used to deny God presuppose Him. As an old apologetic saying puts it, the atheist must sit in God’s lap to slap His face.
William Lane Craig has traced the existential consequences of this spiral. Without God, he argues, there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose. Many atheist thinkers have been honest about this. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus spoke of absurdity. Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman asked how we could drink up the sea and wipe away the horizon. Bertrand Russell, in a famous essay of 1903, concluded that a life without God must be built
Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair
— Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903)
Russell at least saw where the road led. Many modern unbelievers want to keep meaning, morality, human dignity, and rational inquiry, all of which flourished on Christian soil, while cutting the roots from which they grew. Francis Schaeffer called this living in a two-story universe, with facts below and values floating above, unsupported. It is the condition Paul describes: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22).
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The Biblical Witness
God Revealed in Creation and Conscience
The Bible gives a coherent account of everything surveyed so far. God is the eternal Creator who made all things from nothing (Genesis 1:1; John 1:1–3; Hebrews 11:3). He is distinct from creation and sustains it moment by moment: “by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17), and He upholds “all things by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). His eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen in what He has made (Romans 1:20). His law is written on the human heart, so that even those without Scripture show its work (Romans 2:14–15). He has set eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), the very restlessness that reaches toward the infinite.
Paul’s speech at Athens brings all these threads together. To an audience of philosophers, he declared that the God who made the world does not live in temples made with hands, needs nothing from us, gives life and breath to all, and determined the times and places of every nation:
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.
— Acts 17:27–28 (KJV)
Here is the classical First Cause and the personal God in a single breath. The One in whom “we live, and move, and have our being” is the ground of existence that Aristotle and Aquinas reasoned toward. The One who wants us to “seek” and “find” Him is the Father who calls His children home.
The Name of God
When Moses asked God’s name, the answer was “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Aquinas and many theologians after him heard in this name the deepest metaphysical truth: God does not merely have existence, as creatures do. He is existence itself, subsistent being. That is the summit of Feser’s Thomistic proof, and it is also the name revealed at the burning bush. Philosophy, climbing by reason, and revelation, descending by grace, meet at the same place.
Faith and the Seeker
Scripture also tells us what kind of response God seeks. “Without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). Faith in the biblical sense is not believing without evidence. It is trusting the One whom the evidence reveals. The arguments can show that God is. Only faith receives Him as Lord.
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The Boss of Me: The Root of Unbelief
The Fool of Psalm 14
We return, finally, to the thought with which we began. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1; cf. 53:1). As the New Testament scholar Craig A. Evans has shown, the fool of the Psalms is not primarily a philosophical atheist who has examined the arguments and found them wanting. He is a practical atheist, a person who lives as though God will never call him to account. The ancient Aramaic paraphrase of the psalm, the Targum, renders it this way: “There is no rule of God in the land.” The fool’s denial is not about metaphysics. It is about rule.
The same theme runs through Scripture. The wicked man “will not seek after God” and says, “God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it” (Psalm 10:4, 11). Others say, “How doth God know?” (Psalm 73:11). In Zephaniah, the complacent say in their hearts, “The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil” (Zephaniah 1:12). Each statement is a claim of independence. Each says, in effect, no one is the boss of me.
The Oldest Temptation
This is the oldest temptation of all. In Eden, the serpent did not try to persuade Adam and Eve that God did not exist. He persuaded them that they could “be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The desire was not to escape a false belief. It was to become one’s own authority, to define good and evil for oneself. Every subsequent rebellion is a variation on that theme.
Romans 1 traces the pattern step by step. People know God, but they “glorified him not as God, neither were thankful” (Romans 1:21). They exchange the glory of the Creator for images of creatures, and they serve “the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). The intellectual darkness follows the moral refusal, not the other way around. Paul’s diagnosis is not that people lack evidence, but that they “did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Romans 1:28).
This is why the infinite of mathematics is welcome, and the infinite God is not. An infinite series can be admired from a safe distance. The Greek apeiron, the impersonal Absolute, the multiverse, the vast and silent cosmos, all can inspire awe without requiring obedience. The God who is “I AM” requires surrender. The real dividing line was never between the rational and the irrational, or between science and faith. It runs between the will that bows and the will that will not.
Grace for the Rebel
Yet the Bible’s last word on the fool is not condemnation. The God who is infinite in power is also infinite in mercy. The early Christians were themselves called atheoi, “atheists,” by Rome, because they would not bow to the gods of the empire. Before they knew Christ, Paul reminds the Ephesians that they had been “without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12), using the same Greek word. The distance between the fool and the saint is not cleverness. It is grace. Christ came not to crush the rebel but to reconcile him, and His authority, once feared, turns out to be the authority of a Father.
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Conclusion: The Throne Behind the Infinite
The finite mind will always be baffled by the infinite. That is no embarrassment; it is what it means to be a creature. But bafflement is not the real obstacle to belief. The evidence is abundant: a universe that began, laws tuned with breathtaking precision, a cosmos that yields its secrets to mathematics, a moral law that binds every conscience, and the metaphysical structure of existence itself, which points to One who simply is. The ancient philosophers reasoned toward Him. The prophets and apostles named Him. The arguments against Him, pursued to the end, either borrow His gifts or spiral into a whirlpool with no bottom.
The claim that “we know God does not exist” collapses under its own definitions. The argument from the vastness of space mistakes size for significance and overlooks the very psalm it quotes. What remains, when the smoke of argument clears, is the question Scripture has asked from the beginning: not whether God is, but whether we will let Him be God.
The heavens still declare His glory. The heart is still restless until it rests in Him. And the infinite we were content to calculate turns out to have a face, a name, and a voice that says, “Come unto me” (Matthew 11:28).
Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
— 1 Timothy 1:17 (KJV)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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A NOTE ON AI ASSISTANCE
This essay was prepared with research and drafting assistance from Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, working as a research collaborator. The author supplied the thesis, the source list, and the editorial direction, and retains full editorial authority over the final text. All sources listed above were consulted directly or supplied by the author. Quotations from modern copyrighted works are kept brief; Scripture is quoted from the King James Version, and classical texts from public-domain translations. Readers should verify citations against the original sources before republication.