Is this evidence that time is finite? Or am I just crazy?

Factual Questions
1

I may be way off here in my thinking (nor original, but I don’t know), but I was wondering what the “official” line is on what I am thinking about.

First a little background. I dated a woman whose parents were devout Lutherans. They had a falling out with their pastor due to the following (paraphrased): The pastor taught them that when people died, they were in a sleep-like state until everyone was dead and then Judgment Day happened to everyone at the same time and there was a mass induction into heaven. However, the parents believed that when you died you were instantly judged and sent to wherever. My point was what difference did it make? If you slept for a million years, when you woke up, it would seem instantaneous to you anyway.

So, then I started thinking about eternity and lengths of time. If there were an eternal afterlife, time would have no meaning. If someone died and waited in the afterlife for someone who died 20 years later, the second person’s arrival would seem almost instantaneous within an eternal timeframe for the first person. It’s thinking like the number 1 and the number 1 trillion are equally distant from infinity or similar to 0.99999999… = 1.

Imagine a timeline where you can zoom back and see more and more of the timeline. Imagine on the timeline you see every event in human history marked off. As you zoom out, those disparate events become more and more closely packed together. It doesn’t matter if the events are 1 year apart or 10 trillion years apart, because we can zoom out and the timeline is infinite, the events will eventually be overlapping.

Then I started thinking that since everything in this world is not happening at the same time, then time must have a beginning and an ending. Because if time were infinite, then all events would be squished into a tiny fraction of everything happening at once.

Let’s say you and I were born a year apart. In one year, you will be 50 percent of my age. In 9 years, you will be 90 percent of my age. In 999 years, 99.9 percent of my age. Let’s say time ends in 999 years. Then that’s it. You never “catch up” with my age because you never get to the repeating 0.99999…

So, because things happen in separate, discrete events, and since everything isn’t all happening at once, is this evidence that time is finite? If time were infinite would everything seem to have happened at once?

2

I don’t really see how your “time is finite” conclusion follows from your “things don’t happen all at once” premise. But it seems to me like you’re making the common mistake of treating infinite quantities as numbers. This is the path people go down when they think n/0 = ∞, which you seem to be saying with your time interval analogy. But division by zero does not yield an infinity, it’s inherently nonsensical and thus undefined.

3

Also, it’s not entirely sure that things happen as discrete events. Time might be infinitely divisible. (There’s another thread on what the “shortest possible length of time” might be. It might be continuously divisible: if you can measure a length of time t, someone else can measure t/2. Others suggest that time might be quantized.)

In the business where I can never catch up to someone born a year ahead, this echoes Zeno’s Paradox. But the answer to that one is to look at the ratio of the times and the thing measured. I’m 90% of your age for a year; I’m 99% of your age for only 1/10 of a year; I’m 99.9% of your age for only 1/100 year. The convergence accelerates. The 9’s spin out to infinity…infinitely quickly. The “hyperinstant” is over; it doesn’t have a meaningful existence of its own as a real “period of time.”

Someone wrote a story where the Devil makes a deal with someone: they can sleep in perfect peace in Hell…except for just one microsecond, every trillion years, where they will be awakened and tortured. Then, back to peaceful sleep.

The practical effect? An eternity of torture…

4

We can’t zoom out infinitely and comprehend infinite time because we’re finite. An infinite being, however, such as God, could. Besides, even if there’s no God, our inability to grasp the situation is not a valid argument for that situation not actually being the case in all it’s incomprehensible glory. Otherwise, the argument boils down to: Because I’m stupid, it doesn’t exist.

And FYI, the most common orthodox position from a Christian perspective on the points you raise are:

  1. God is infinite. He exists outside space-time in an ‘eternal now’ and can see all of our-time at a glance.
  2. Time in our space-time continuum is finite at both ends.
  3. There is no ‘sleeping period’ for the dead. That was a supposition of Paul’s in his Letter to the Thessalonians which contradicts the Gospel’s understanding of immediate destination for the dead (cf the stories of the Transfiguration, Lazarus and the Rich Man, and the declaration to the crucified criminal: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”)
5

Which it can, most notably on the Riemann sphere as long as n≠0. You can make n/0 always defined if you give up most of what other structure you have, which gets you wheel theory. For example, in wheel theory, x-x does not always equal 0.

My point: Mathematics is built around definitions, which humans choose. It is only constrained by the fact mathematics has to be very stringently internally consistent, even if you’re basing it on a paraconsistent logic that allows for contradictions.

6

But the first person would still have experienced a period of 20 years passing; that those seem inconsequential from an ‘infinite’ perspective has no bearing on this. We don’t experience time as fractions of some potential totality of time, but as a succession of equal measures—seconds, years, minutes, etc. Their duration, and our subjective experience, does not depend on how much time passes in total.

7

Sure, but we don’t generally measure time using those constructs.

8

I’d heard it otherwise, and have heard it explained that it comes from Revelation, where the dead are raised and given new bodies on the Day of Judgement. I’ve also heard it the way you put it. I’m not sure that one can say, for certain, that Christianity holds it firmly one way, or the other. It might vary from sect to sect. Anyway, I’ve definitely heard Christian scholars say that there is a sleeping period, and that (other than, perhaps, the “Good Thief” mentioned above) no one has been judged yet; we’re all due for it after the end of the world.

Lazarus and the Rich Man is particularly easy to dismiss as a parable; it could be set in that future time when souls have been judged and condemned.

I’m not saying “you’re wrong,” just, “don’t be too hasty.”

9

The Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant churches that believe in saints de facto believe in immediate resurrection. That’s the majority of Christians worldwide. Any Christian who believes their beloved dead are with God, or watches over them, or ‘feels their presence’ are, by definition, immediate resurrectionists. It is the majority position.