Can God Make an Infinite Number of Souls?
A Student Asks a Dangerous Question
Imagine drawing a straight line on a piece of paper. Now imagine dividing that line in half, then in half again, and again — forever. Would there be an infinite number of pieces? And if so, could an infinite number of real things exist in the universe? A young Irish scholar at Oxford named Richard FitzRalph (born around 1300) asked exactly these questions. And his answers shook the medieval university.
FitzRalph arrived at Oxford as a teenager. Ireland had no university yet, so he crossed the sea to study. He was clever, curious, and drawn to the hardest puzzles of his day. By 1331 he had earned a doctorate in theology, and a year later he became chancellor of the whole university. Yet the debates he started in a single lecture hall would ripple across Europe for centuries.
His most famous question came from a simple but enormous idea: could God create an actual infinite — an infinite number of things all existing at the same time, not just one after another?
Infinity Is Not Just a Number
Most people in the 1300s thought “infinite” simply meant something God could do one step after another forever — adding one soul, then another, with no end. But FitzRalph went further. He said God could make an actual infinity all at once. Why? Because, he argued, actual infinities already exist inside ordinary objects. Every body contains an infinite number of proportional parts — pieces you get by dividing again and again, like the halves we imagined on the line. Each part is fully real and distinct from the others. If that is possible, then God could just as easily create an infinite number of souls, angels, or entire universes in a single moment.
This was not idle speculation. FitzRalph was responding to a debate with a fellow Oxford thinker, Richard Kilvington, who insisted that an actual infinite was impossible. FitzRalph turned to the ancient philosopher Aristotle and his commentator Averroës, who had claimed that any continuous line is made of infinitely many points. FitzRalph took them at their word: in any line there is an infinite number of points, in any surface an infinite number of lines, in any body an infinite number of surfaces. Each one is distinct. So infinity is not just a useful idea in mathematics — it is woven into the physical world. And if that is true, why should God not be able to make an infinite collection of anything?
His contemporaries were stunned. Wodeham, a fellow Oxford theologian, changed his own views on infinity after hearing FitzRalph’s arguments. Others, like Gregory of Rimini, repeated them even when they disagreed. The debate over actual infinity became one of the hottest topics in fourteenth-century philosophy.
What If God Told You Your Future?
FitzRalph did not stop at infinity. He also tackled an even thornier puzzle about future contingents — statements about the future that are true right now but could still happen otherwise. If God knows today that you will become a painter when you grow up, then it seems that fact is already settled. But does that mean you must become a painter — that you have no real choice?
Some thinkers said yes: God’s knowledge makes the future necessary. Others tried to soften the problem by saying God’s knowledge is like watching a film; seeing it doesn’t cause it. FitzRalph took a different route. He was the first scholar to write an entire book chapter devoted to a single question: can God reveal the future to a person without destroying that person’s free will?
He listed fourteen arguments against the idea. For example, suppose God tells a good person they will end up being damned. Should that person still pray for help? FitzRalph answered that the revelation does not force them to act in any way. They could still freely make different choices at every step. The future is known, but it remains open because the person’s own will is the cause of their actions. What God reveals depends on what the person will freely do — not the other way around.
To make this work, FitzRalph distinguished between two kinds of necessity. A future event is contingent — it will happen, but it could not happen. If I choose cake instead of fruit, my choice is real even if God already knew it. This idea, subtle as it sounds, aimed to protect both God’s perfect knowledge and our everyday sense that we are in charge of our own decisions.
His lengthy treatment — some twenty thousand words — marked a turning point. Later thinkers like Holcot practically copied his arguments, and Wodeham devoted five whole questions to responding to him. The problem of future contingents has never really gone away. Philosophers still ask: if all your choices were perfectly predictable, would you still be free?
The Archbishop and the Beggars
FitzRalph’s life took a dramatic turn. He became Archbishop of Armagh in 1347 and found himself leading a church in a land where the Gaelic Irish were often treated unjustly by the English‑speaking settlers. He preached against this mistreatment. Around the same time, he plunged into a bitter fight with the Franciscan friars, who claimed that owning nothing was the holiest way to imitate Christ.
FitzRalph disagreed. In his book De pauperie Salvatoris, he argued that Jesus had worked as a carpenter and was poor but not destitute — he never begged. For FitzRalph, poverty was morally neutral; being needy was not a badge of holiness. The friars, he insisted, could not truly give up dominium — the natural right of ownership that every human being has. You can renounce using your property, but you cannot erase the basic right itself.
This idea of natural ownership became his most lasting political legacy. Years later, the Spanish thinker Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1485–1546) read FitzRalph and was horrified. Vitoria saw that if only grace (God’s favor) gives a person the right to own land, then Christians could claim the right to take the Americas from the native peoples — because the natives were not Christians. Vitoria used natural law theory to argue against this, insisting that all humans, regardless of religion, have genuine rights to their homes and property. FitzRalph himself would almost certainly have been appalled by any attempt to use his ideas to justify stealing. His own writings show a deep care for justice, not conquest.
Why Does It Still Matter?
FitzRalph died in 1360, at the papal court in Avignon, while still pursuing his case against the mendicant friars. He probably never imagined that his Oxford lectures would be read in Bohemia, Vienna, and Salamanca. His name was remembered, sometimes twisted, but always discussed.
The questions he raised are yours now, too. Did an actual infinity exist before you thought about it? If a supercomputer could predict every move you will make tomorrow, would that mean you are just a very complicated domino falling over? And who gets to say what is fair — the powerful, the holy, or every human being simply because they are human?
FitzRalph did not leave us tidy answers. He left us better questions. And in philosophy, that is the most exciting gift of all.
Think about it
- If a scientist invented a machine that could perfectly predict every choice you’ll ever make, would it still be fair to praise you for good decisions and blame you for bad ones?
- Imagine a line you keep dividing forever. Do you think the pieces ever become truly infinite, or is “infinite” just a way of saying we can keep going without end?
- Should people who are not “good” (whatever that means) lose their right to own things? Who gets to decide what “good” looks like?
