RE: Is there really any problem with an infinate regresion of universes?
April 4, 2015 at 1:27 pm
(This post was last modified: April 4, 2015 at 1:34 pm by Mudhammam.)
(April 4, 2015 at 12:49 pm)Chuck Wrote:(April 4, 2015 at 12:17 pm)Nestor Wrote: Do you mean that each individual universe has a beginning but that the substratum from which one comes, whether we think of such an entity as physical or not, simply "is" in a way that eliminates "was" and "will be"? If motion is without beginning or end, won't we have on our hands something like eternal recurrences where all possibilities that can be exhausted are in fact so, ad infinitum?
Basically.
That's a pretty mind-blowing concept. Is it in a sense correct then, as on the many-worlds interpretation, to view each "chronon" of time, as eternal? That literally, everything I am doing at this "moment" (which is probably divisible to billions upon billions of units of time, if they exist) is always happening in some region of being? And, does it mean, if there is the possibility, that flying spaghetti monsters exist in some world?
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(April 4, 2015 at 12:56 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote:Theism basically takes the philosophical concepts of a deity and personalizes it through revelation. Everything god does, at least according to how I was taught, occurs over all time. So, why pray for divine intervention? Well, some would probably say that everything, including a person's prayers, was foreknown by god, so while he didn't directly cause every event per se (which makes no sense to me, but they posit some incoherent notion of each individual "soul" being an unmoved mover, that is, possessing free will), he acts, based on his foreknowledge of events in time, eternally. It's a lot more convoluted than that, of course, with divisions that don't make much sense and solutions that must ultimately just be rendered "mysterious."(April 2, 2015 at 11:12 am)Nestor Wrote: 1. Infinite regress is no more of a problem for a universe than it is for a deity. In both cases we're speaking of an unmoved mover that underlies change as an unchanging substratum. The difficulty is connecting the unmoved to the moved in such a way that change has not occurred, otherwise the unmoved is moveable. The elephant in the room is time. What is it?
2. I don't see it as logically impossible, though it would seem logically inconceivable.
It's difficult for Christians to have a personal relationship with a God who is an "unmoved mover" IMO. I wonder if the Christian philosophers ever considered that problem?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza