(September 2, 2012 at 3:31 am)genkaus Wrote: First of all, your question is incorrect. "Always existed" means "existed for all time". So you are basically asking "has time existed for all time"? The answer is always yes. The statement is tautologically true. It says nothing about its existence being finite or infinite. For example, I might ask, for the entire period of existence of earth, has earth always existed? The answer is yes, but that doesn't mean that any aspect of that existence is infinite.
Secondly, even of it were infinite, your swimming analogy is incomplete. Since the past stretches back to infinity, then Aquaman would take an infinite amount of time to reach the present wall. And he does have the infinite amount of time since he is starting infinitely in the past.
All right, let's see if the ol' brain is still working at this point. First, of course time has existed for all time. Time obviously can't exist before or after time. What I was asking is if time had a starting point, or does it extend backward infinitely?
Next, the analogy is meant to put this issue into perspective. The reason I have the guy start from the present wall is because we have a fixed point in the present moment, something we lack in the infinite past (IP). I couldn't say "let's start from the IP and work our way to the present moment" because there is no "point" in the IP to start from. It's infinite. Even if AquaMan had an endless amount of time to reach the IP he doesn't actually reach it. If he were to reach it, it wouldn't be infinite (endless; without end).
