This book began life as the intended first part of a larger work with the provisional title God and Infinity. While it will still be used by me as a starting point for further work in the philosophy of religion, the book has grown into a final product that is more or less entirely independent of that starting point. What it does is to explore various issues about the infinite that emerge in many different areas of philosophy and whose resolution ought not to be tied to the details of those particular areas of philosophy in which particular versions of those issues arise. For those who are not interested in philosophy of religion, this is all that you need to know by way of introduction; you can now happily proceed to the book proper. However, those who are interested in philosophy of religion may like to know a little bit more about the reasons that I had for starting to work on this book. The remainder of this Preface is for you.

When I completed my book on ontological arguments (Oppy 1995c) I immediately commenced work on the next stage of the larger project announced in the preface of that earlier book: an examination of cosmological arguments for and against the existence of various deities. My plan was to follow the structure of the discussion that I provided of ontological arguments in Oppy (1995c), namely, to obtain an exhaustive taxonomy of cosmological arguments discussed in the philosophical literature and to use a thorough discussion of all of the key concepts that are used in those arguments as a basis for criticism of those arguments.