Actual Infinities

[GrandizerII]

It's funny how people who can't imagine this infinite past find it incredibly easy to imagine a god with exactly the same properties.

Of course, they try and make him special by using such nonsense terms as "timeless".

We experience reality, so our ideas about it get constantly challenged. I agree that imagining an infinite past is difficult, because it kind of clashes with our intuition about how things seem to work. Since no one actually experiences God outside of their own head, it never falls under the same scrutiny. People can merrily use whatever words they want to describe it and it can break all the rules that apparently cause these paradoxes in the first place, because it never actually shows up to challenge those claims.

If it did show up, our natural curiosity would be asking all the same questions we ask of the universe.

"Timeless" yet was planning all sorts of things the whole time before creation. Interesting paradox.

[Foxaèr]

Rationality shows up for the challenge.

Granted, those who make these claims either never experience opposition or simply never seek out any type of contradiction.

[robvalue]

Indeed. All these Kalam style stupid arguments follow the same pattern:

1) My simplistic attempts to understand our reality produce a rule R.

2) There appears to be a paradox P in relation to rule R being a full and consistent explanation.

3) Since rule R must be correct, there can't actually be a paradox. So there must be some exception E to rule R which solves the apparent paradox P.

4) ???

5) E is a sentient being, also a god, also the God of my religion, also my specific interpretation of the God of my religion, and I have a personal relationship with it.

[Mudhammam]

As I see it, it's incoherent to suggest that infinity can exist as a complete set - think of infinity as a number. You can always seemingly add to whatever that infinite number "is" - hence, it could not actually be infinite. So, if past time were infinite, the present could not arrive, for it would require an infinite amount of time for every prior successive moment to reach completion, which doesn't appear to mean anything. But if we grant infinite past time, there is no need for God. I'm more interested in granting the logical impossibility of actual infinities for the sake of argument, and then asking how it is that God is also not made logically impossible?

How is the problem of an infinite regress never reaching the present different than the problem of an arrow never reaching it's mark because there are an infinite number of points between where it was shot and its mark? The arrow does reach its mark whether we can describe how it gets through an infinity of points or not.

An arrow travels through physical space, which is not infinitely divisible, whereas mathematical space is. I suppose the theoretical question could be asked, if time is infinitely divisible, but that would seem to be different from whether or not - if we can imagine a series of snapshot moments extending endlessly into the past - the present could ever arrive given an "infinite number" of such "pictures". Time is certainly weird.

I'm still trying to grasp the sense in which a being could be said to possess infinite knowledge - it seems somewhat related to this problem of an infinitely extended past - in that both are incoherent.

[Mudhammam]

It's funny how people who can't imagine this infinite past find it incredibly easy to imagine a god with exactly the same properties.

Of course, they try and make him special by using such nonsense terms as "timeless".

We experience reality, so our ideas about it get constantly challenged. I agree that imagining an infinite past is difficult, because it kind of clashes with our intuition about how things seem to work. Since no one actually experiences God outside of their own head, it never falls under the same scrutiny. People can merrily use whatever words they want to describe it and it can break all the rules that apparently cause these paradoxes in the first place, because it never actually shows up to challenge those claims.

If it did show up, our natural curiosity would be asking all the same questions we ask of the universe.

"Timeless" yet was planning all sorts of things the whole time before creation. Interesting paradox.

That's the problem with cosmological arguments. If God's will and knowledge of creation were timeless, how is creation not timeless? Since the universe could conceivably have been 30 billion years old, or 100 trillion years old, what caused God to will the universe into being at the moment from whence "only" 13.8 billion years have passed? What caused the cause of the will to act exactly when he did? Hence, we're again off to the races of the infinite regress problem.

[Alex K]

I still have my problems with comparing cardinal numbers (concerning the elements of sets) with length measures. They are mathematically not exactly the same. Also, we neither know that space and time are discrete, nor do we know that time started 13.8 billion years ago. Sure, we could assume these things as real possibilities for the sake of an argument, but there is no real scientific data on that.

Anyways, I was going to say something else - imagine the universe were deterministic. This could still be true in a quantum world if there are some mad hidden variables underlying it all, or in a many worlds interpretation - who knows. Anyways, imagine that it is deterministic. In that case, knowing the state of the universe exactly at one point in time gives you knowledge of the universe at all times. In fact, one could argue that philosophically, a snapshot at one point in time + the laws of physics is equivalent to the whole timeline, because the rest of it can be obtained using a uniquely determined procedure - the future and the past are more or less the same as the present, viewed through a different filter (and those who know how the Heisenberg picture in quantum mechanics works, might understand better what I mean).

So, time does not exist, and doesn't pass. All that exists is a static snapshot of the universe in what we would call the distant future, in which all that you and I call time, and events, and experience, is encoded.

I hence propose last-tuesdayism on steroids

Cheers + Happy Halloween week

[robvalue]

What theists are really describing is God having his own timeline, they just won't/can't call it that. It would make perfect sense that our computer programmer has an independent timeline to that of this simulation we are in (for example).

Then we have all the same apparent problems with this guy and his reality. He may well be all powerful regarding our simulation. But theists often want to make out he is all powerful in every possible version of reality, and that he is a walking paradox solver who cares particularly about a few bits of grit scurrying around a virtual rock for a relative moment or two.

[I_am_not_mafia]

A popular claim made in conjunction with the Kalam argument for God's existence is something like the following: past time cannot terminate in an infinite regress because it would take an infinite amount of time to arrive at the present moment, and one cannot reach the end - which would be the present - of an actual infinity.

You can argue that if you cannot have an infinite regression then you also cannot have an infinite progression. Infinity is infinity. If you divide it you get infinity. If you subtract a number you still get infinity.

Saying that you can have infinity in one direction only is like saying that you can travel around a circle for infinite time even if you cut half that circle away.

So I turn the argument around and tell the person that they are effectively arguing that God, Heaven and eternal life cannot exist.

Ultimately though I think infinities are just a concept that we use to reason about the world. Actual infinities are impossible to measure.

[Mudhammam]

I still have my problems with comparing cardinal numbers (concerning the elements of sets) with length measures. They are mathematically not exactly the same. Also, we neither know that space and time are discrete, nor do we know that time started 13.8 billion years ago. Sure, we could assume these things as real possibilities for the sake of an argument, but there is no real scientific data on that.

Anyways, I was going to say something else - imagine the universe were deterministic. This could still be true in a quantum world if there are some mad hidden variables underlying it all, or in a many worlds interpretation - who knows. Anyways, imagine that it is deterministic. In that case, knowing the state of the universe exactly at one point in time gives you knowledge of the universe at all times. In fact, one could argue that philosophically, a snapshot at one point in time + the laws of physics is equivalent to the whole timeline, because the rest of it can be obtained using a uniquely determined procedure - the future and the past are more or less the same as the present, viewed through a different filter (and those who know how the Heisenberg picture in quantum mechanics works, might understand better what I mean).

So, time does not exist, and doesn't pass. All that exists is a static snapshot of the universe in what we would call the distant future, in which all that you and I call time, and events, and experience, is encoded.

I hence propose last-tuesdayism on steroids

Cheers + Happy Halloween week

Setting aside the fact that physics rather conclusively points towards an indeterminate universe, if time doesn't exist, in what sense am I experiencing it pass from one moment to the next though? Does this static block of being contain "tunnels" of consciousness in which the illusion of motion occurs? And what causes it to have this quality of a continuous, seamless flow in one direction?

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

What if time were just an illusion given by chemical reactions?
Seriously,think about it,imagine earth where no chemical reactions are taking place.Time would have stopped right?
Maybe time really isn't a *real* and complicated thing as how we built it up to be.Maybe and most probably it is just an illusion that chemical reactions give us

just saying..
okay,continue.