bahman wrote: ↑Sat Dec 21, 2019 12:44 am
No. I am saying time has a beginning since it is impossible to reach from infinite past to now. Why is it true? Because you cannot reach infinite past from now too, the reverse process.
That's not quite the right explanation, I would suggest. While it is true you can't reach the infinite past from the present, it's also true that you can't reach last week from the present...but last week was, presumably, real.
The real reason is if time is viewed as a necessary and causal sequence, meaning "X must happen before X1 can happen," and "X1 must happen before X2" can happen, and so on. If that's the sequence of time, then X
- ∞ is lost in the infinite past, and can never have actually happened, because infinity (
∞ ) isn't any point in time, but is an infinite regress into the past. If that's how things were, no X actions can ever take place.
So, to illustrate, you could not be born, because your parents weren't born before you, because your grandparents weren't born, because your grandparents weren't born...because the "being born" point for anything is lost in the infinite past, --- IF indeed the past is infinite.
But it's not. And the absolute proof is that you are here.
What is missing?
That kind of explanation.
Do you agree that the act of creation is temporal?
Well, it cannot possibly be, if, as you insist, "time" is a created entity. There cannot, then, have been anything like "time" before this point at which "time" was created.
If what you're saying is right, then the act of time coming into being cannot "take any time," because there's nothing yet in existence for it to "take."
Non-temporal act does not exist.
Not for human beings, of course. However, we don't quite know what to say about the state (if it was anything we can call a "state") that existed prior to the creation of "time" -- if, as you say, time is a created entity.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2019 10:02 pm
Okay, but here's the problem again: you're using "time" to refer to that which we normally call "time" (i.e. what's going on now, for example) and also to refer to the situation as it was PRIOR TO "time" existing at all (i.e. to eternity past). But that's incoherent. And the problem is not in "time" itself, but in the explanation you're giving. You're amphibolizing the word "time."
It is incoherent if there could be only one time. It leads to regress if there could be more than one time.
I suggest you clear up your language, then. If "time" is a created property, then what came before "time" is not "time" at all, but something else, something not imaginable to human beings from within "time."
I suggest the old placeholder "eternity past," as the most easily grasped option, but you can call it something else, if you like, like "the pre-chronological," or something.
Just don't call two very different things by the same name, "time." That just confuses any logic, because it makes what's called "the fallacy of the shifting middle term" in any syllogism you try to create from it.
I am talking that there are at least two different points, 1) God only and God and the creation. One point follows another one.
But this is the problem. You're treating both situations as "points," as "times" as governed by the same kind of chronology and the same kind of existence. You're generalizing from your own point
within time, to a situation in which the concept "time" simply does not exist or apply, as if things were always the same...but it's got to be quite evident that they're not, because
in this pre-chronology situation, there is no "time" yet!
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2019 10:02 pm
The act of creation of former time is temporal so the only way to create former time is to have another time and so on.
Ah! Eureka! I've found your problem!
In a strange way, you've stumbled on the right problem, namely that infinite regress
of causal relations is impossible. But you've just moved the problem over to "time," and that's causing you to confuse your language. We can simplify that, and make the problem much clearer and much more pressing, if you move to speaking about "causes" not of "time."
I am saying that any cause is temporal, there is a before and after, otherwise, there is no change.
Right, that's what you're saying. But it contains a mistake, namely, that the term "change" implies the pre-existence of something, the thing-changed-from, and the later existence of another thing, the thing-changed-to. Biblically, we speak of creation as having been produced "
ex nihilo," from the Latin meaning "out of nothing." This implies that there was no pre-existing "substance" out of which the universe (and with it, time) were formed. And no time passed in the doing of it, because it was a creation-ex-nihilo, NOT a "change" at all.
In both cases, we are dealing with a logical problem which leads to the fact that there is no God, the creator.
The opposite is actually true: it means that without a
creation-ex-nihilo,
nothing would exist. In other words, only a First Cause capable of doing what is traditionally attributed to God would be capable of making it so that anything existed.
But stuff exists.
The events in our reality are not laying at one point since the events are not simultaneous.
Right: in our created, time-bound reality, that's what is the case. But that already accepts the existence of time, which you have said had a beginning -- so therefore, there was a pre-chronological situation of some kind. That you cannot find ways to describe it doesn't even surprise; let alone count as a reason to think no such situation could exist. (Here, we have to be very careful even how we use the word "exist," since all "existence" that we happen to understand is
causal and
temporal...but God is not bound by these things, since they are created states.)
Do you think that God created the universe and if this act is temporal?
Yes to the first clause, and no to the second. By definition, this "act" has to have been pre-temporal and transcendent of time, not subject to it or governed by it. If it were not, then we could not speak of "time" being created at all. But then, neither would anything post-time and post-causality exist at all.
Yet it does.
