Bad Arguments against Actual Infinity #Apologetics #Chrisianity #Atheism #Islam

[robindude]

One other thing I like to point out is that any proposed 'ender' to such a thing doesn't, and can't, end it anyway. Theists quite often suggest an 'eternal god', meaning that the god _itself_ is infinite... and meaning the god _itself_ is an infinite series. To show this, just ask what 'god' did before making the universe, before doing that, before doing _that, _ and so on. You get to the same problem, the same infinite chain, even if 'did nothing' was the answer at some point, with 'nothing' continuing in that same infinite chain.
I find this useful, because it uses the same concepts of 'before' that theists are familiar with, and if they're willing to _abandon_ the notion of a 'before', such that it be considered incoherent to ask 'what did god do before making the universe', then we can apply that _exact_ same reasoning to the universe itself, and state that it is incoherent to ask 'what happened before the universe'.

[ethanthompson]

I've never thought about that rebuttle. Thanks

[corazthesupremepotentate]

Godel's addition to mathematics was that no system can be completely proven and that there will always be true unprovable statements.
Stating that the alleged line of events could explain itself is thus demonstrably false, as a set cannot contain itself.

[emeraldedge]

On the first argument, I kinda agree, but with the second not at all, it's just a composition fallacy.
Not only that, but one could actually use the successive addition argument against the infinite explanatory chain, since it really starts somewhere (unlike the eternal universe).

[HarryNicNicholas]

another reason i like pensrose CCC model is that it's both finite - the universe has a beginning and an end, but infinite, this goes on forever, and has done, and what's more, each iteration is the first iteration. does anyone know if the guys at hamzas den realised their mistake over the sniper paradox? everytime jack said "there's no reason why the order can't be given" they fell about, but never gave a reason why "it was impossible" ?

[charlievaughan]

I seem to have difficulty. getting through.

[bananabreadman]

the first argument also assumes the A theory of time where events actually successively pass, but it's clearly logically possible for this to be false. So the argument doesn't establish that there's any logical impossibility in an infinite chain of past events. If you think an infinite chain of past events is merely metaphysically impossible then there is much room for disagreement

[iljuro]

Infinite discrete events also begs the question that events are fundamentally discrete and can be counted.
A continuous process can, as far as the math goes, be infinite in many ways.

[anarchords]

Oh, my. This is a real pointer to the English educational system here.
I live in the mountains in Scotland here and I definitely remember, in high school maths, learning the many different types of infinity.
Also, the basics of logic seem to have alluded him too.
Throwing the words involved in logical falacies around, hoping the syllables will confuse your listeners doesn't make a viable arguement.
Also, also, this is high-school physics/maths from 40 fucking years ago now, (pardon my language).
Seems to be 'in one ear and straight out the other' with these folks eh.

Also, also, also, if you've gotten this far - considering the size of his pupils compared with the very bright light pointing into them. Too much MDMA?
I think we should be told.

[josephusrivero]

I encounter these kind of apologetics a lot. Excellent and succinct response. Very well done sir 👍

[HarryNicNicholas]

i think the only practical way to colonise space, to make space travel viable, and to over come the distances is to give up on physical bodies. terraforming mars probably won't happen, any atmosphere will be stripped away. we have robots there already, we have AI on the way, and prosthetics has been around for a long time, it will be easier (!) to modify humans than to terraform planets. musk has his neuralnet.

also, to over come the distances star travel poses i think we'll have to crack hyperspace, so in fact we won't be physical at all, and i think this is why we aren't seeing alien life - it's not here, it's _there_ in other dimensions. the point i'm getting to is that i don't think we will ever know if the universe itself is infinite, even if we have the means to travel the distances involved.

sean carroll was talking to antonio padilla about infinities just the other day (they invited me but i couldn't make it) and padilla said something interesting that kinda makes the multiverse redundant, which was if you travel far enough away from the milky way, the numbers suggest that eventually you will encounter another part of the universe that is identical to our own, so never mind "it looping back" or "it's dougnut shaped" if it is indeed infinite, it will eventually repeat itself and you won't know where you are.

[lowbarbillcraig]

if WLC (with his low bar) were living in an eternal universe, at every day he would say it's impossible for me to be here.

If he were immortal, he would spend an infinite time
1. complaining there can be no real infinities.
2. trying to get his low bar lower.

(posted as user "low bar Bill Craig")

[racsooj]

Hey Nathan, why do you reject an infinite past?

[stetsonscott]

The idea is that God is timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. Eternity means no beginning or end, but sans time dimensionality. So the better argument is one of logical priors, not temporal priors. Given that spacetime is a thing, where did that this originate? Most theists have abandoned the time issue in favor of "order of operations" Logic examples. Even if the universe is infinite in the past temporally, it still needs an effective cause that is linked to the necessity that being has. Being is, and is necessarily so or it wouldn't be. Alone, being has no feature that demands itself over nothing. So we start stacking things on necessary being until it has efficient necessity to be what is, and usually get close to something like what people mean when they say God. Time is a limitation of our experience, but philosophically there remains a requirement for a logical primary cause (using the word first trips people up into temporal sequence thinking, which is so familiar it gets hard to escape). God's eternality from before spacetime may not be linear or properly sequential. I'm fact, if you read the Bible in the original language, paradise is eternally now, it is an eastern religion after all.

[EatHoneyBeeHappy]

I remember the 7 day creation story and the confusing Christian concept of time were the very first things that raised doubts in my faith when I was 11 years old and thinking critically about that stuff for the first time. Christians can't agree on when that first day was, Christians can't agree about how dinosaurs and other pre-human life forms fit into the 7-day narrative. None of my Church elders nor my parents had good responses to these doubts but the threat of Hell looming over made me just scared to think about them for a long time after that.

[KabeloMoiloa]

People who believe this sort of thing would do well to study the theory of coalgebras and coinduction.

Basically, in many programming languages one can define infinite lists like [1, 2, 3...]. One can apply operations/search/filter them as a whole, under certain conditions one simply evaluates as much of the list as needed. Most famously Haskell is built on this lazy evaluation; the theory of coalgebras and coinduction allows a computer to check when such a definition works.

[nemdenemam]

Bit of a different topic but I'm curious if there is a philosophical answer to this. Isn't the thought process of god a causal chain? Or is there any model of sentience that doesn't include the thoughts to be causally linked? I think it would connect to this as if sentience is a causal chain then a first cause can't be sentient (at least if we arrive to the first cause through the impossibility of infinite causal regress).

[joshhoward]

All them spunky kids on tiktok gonna be deconverted asap now

[PBRimmer]

I don't think this class of objections is always bad, and I don't think it's always brought up by Christian apologists. Consider this statement from Shamik Dasgupta (an excellent philosopher, not a Christian), from his paper on Metaphysical Rationalism:

"What would answer the child’s question as to why there is a mountain here?Suppose we said that the mountain’s existence is grounded in the arrangement of particles, which itself is grounded in some physical field, which in turn is grounded in something else... and so on without end. Would citing some non-terminating descending chain of grounds like this answer her question? I think not. For her question is not answered at the first step when one describes the particle arrangements, since (as we have seen) she will just complain ‘Yes, but why is the world like that?’ But the same goes for any step in the chain. So all we have in a nonterminating descending chain is infinitely many bad answers. And infinitely many bad answers do not constitute a good answer. For the child may legitimately gesture at the mountain and the particles and the fields and all the subterranean material in the descending chain and ask why it all turned out like that, i.e. arranged in such a way as to give rise to a mountain."

[macmac]

I would like to add in that these people have no problem with an infinite future though as heaven is eternal and infinite. So why is an infinite past impossible but an infinite future is not?