Comments on: Theistic Critiques of Atheism, part 13

By: Hunt

Hunt — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:43:42 +0000

I don’t think you can say that time has a beginning without paradox, even if you impose some kind of compressed metric that fits an infinite amount of elapsed time into a finite interval. Invariably the question about what happened before that interval will arise. The only way I can think to escape this is to make time cyclical, that is, to make the future the past and the past the future — time as a Mobius strip. You could then, if you wanted, posit God as the grand master of the cycle. This instant of time would then correspond to an infinite number of goes around the cycle, and it wouldn’t matter one bit which it might be.

This, of course, implies that we will all be here again one day, bitching at cl.

By: Dominic Saltarelli

Dominic Saltarelli — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:11:27 +0000

I’ve never seen an actual response to this particular line of reasoning other than “God is mysterious”. Theists run out of epicycles to draw once you start talking “time” and “infinity”. It’s the silver bullet that slays the supernatural as far as I’m concerned.

By: jim

jim — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:39:29 +0000

As a side note, you actually CAN have an infinite time-line, even if we posit the present moment as an endpoint. All you really need is the lack of a ‘beginning’ to make it work. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, as a lot of these discussions do, but I think the whole idea of time ‘beginning’ in the first place is a lot more problematic, for some of the reasons you’ve discussed.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:14:44 +0000

Thank you. That’s one of the better explanations of this topic I’ve read in some time. For some reason, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around these questions of time and beginnings; I usually default to the “universe as absurd brute fact” position and leave it there, not wishing to get lost in the philosophical tall grass.

By: jim

jim — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:10:11 +0000

Duncan:

For some reasons that are too involved to go into here, I happen to have no problem with actual infinities, temporal or spatial. However, you’ve pinpointed the problem with positing these rather enigmatic constructs as proof of God’s existence; namely, that God’s logical existence gets stuck in the same devices. Of course, the way apologists have dealt with this is to propose that God exists outside of time. But what does it mean to say that God exists in ‘no-time’? Both thought and action imply sequence, and sequence, or succession, implies time, so unless God neither moved nor acted ‘before’ the ‘creation’ of the universe, He seems as dependent upon time as anything else. And like you’ve also pointed out, if God exists in ‘Tyme’, the same problems remain.

Coincidentally, I wrote something about this same thing a while back… http://reasonvsapologetics.blogspot.com/2009/01/if-god-forgets-to-wind-his-watch-does.html