RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
July 12, 2023 at 4:19 am
(This post was last modified: July 12, 2023 at 4:22 am by Belacqua.)
(July 11, 2023 at 6:54 pm)Angrboda Wrote: I'm not sure that you're right there. I believe it was Giordano Bruno who got in hot water for claiming that he thought the universe was infinite. I'm told his thinking was that if the universe didn't go on forever, then it would stop somewhere and then the question is, what is on the other side of that boundary. He could not contemplate that the universe was finite and unbounded spatially because, naturally, he trie to imagine the universe 'within' space rather than the universe being space itself. It's possible that the temporal dimension of spacetime is similar, and that people err in trying to situate the time the universe has existed 'within' a larger timeline. But there is no need to do so for time any more than it is necessary to do so for space. It makes just as much sense that the temporal dimension of spacetime is also finite and unbounded -- rather than being 'in' time, it simply 'is' time.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) pointed out before Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) that the universe might well be infinite. And in that case the earth isn't the center, because an infinite space has no center. He was a mathematician and a theologian and did original work on what infinity would mean, in math and in space. And he never got in trouble for it -- he was a valuable employee of the Vatican until the end.
Bruno was executed because he wanted to overthrow the Catholic Church and replace it with his own original religion based on fake Egyptian tablets. He would have been fine if he'd stuck with speculation about infinity, or if he'd stayed in the Protestant countries where he'd been welcome. Coming back to the Papal States with the announced intention of overthrowing the ruling authorities was impolitic. If you announced all over social media that you were going to overthrow the US government and then flew into Washington airport, you wouldn't get burned at the stake, but things were tougher in those days.
Augustine, in his Confessions, concludes that it doesn't make sense to talk about time before God made the world, because there couldn't be time without a world. So he's apparently OK with finite time.
As always, we have to remember that for theologians eternity is not the same as infinite time.
