What is the standard atheist response to this "proof" of God's existence?

[Miller]

@CalD

But I didn’t assume it’s finite. My model makes no assumption either way.

As soon as you apply an infinite number line to represent time, you’ve failed. You’ve assumed the universe is infinite. You can’t do that. I do not accept the very first building block of the premise. You can put no “dot on zero” to represent right now, because that assumes you can have a “now” after an infinite amount of time (is that possible? Isn’t that what we’re testing for? Why have you assumed to be true the very thing we are testing for?) It’s an assumption, and a model-breaking assumption.

It seems to me that, if the question is, “Is time infinite?” and you have a particular test that you want to use to figure out the answer, you have to make two models: one in which time is infinite, and one in which time is finite. You’ve taken your test and applied it to a finite-time model, and it works. Indistinguishable has take your test and applied it to an infinite-time model, and found that it also works. Therefore, the conclusion is that your particular test does not prove that time is either finite or infinite.

@waterj2

Basically, as far as I can tell, all CalD has really managed to prove is that if time stretches infinitely into the past, the beginning of time is infinitely long ago.

Not quite. If time stretches infinitly into the past, the beginning of time isn’t infinitely long ago, because time would have no beginning. This doesn’t rule out the possibilty of a “now,” because any given event that you can point to in history will still be a finite distance away from us. Time is infinite, but nothing in time is infinitly long ago.

[Indistinguishable]

@dropzone

As for Olber’s Paradox, that’s “the dumbest shit I ever heard” from the initial assumption that there is an infinite number of stars. Near as I can tell, nobody but Olber ever said there was an infinite number of stars, just an awful lot of them, and you know that BECAUSE the universe is NOT wall to wall stars. Philosophers actually get PAID for thinking up crap like that? And mathematicians get paid to prove or disprove it?

Incidentally, Olber was an astronomer. And before him, the same argument was originated by Kepler.

[CurtC]

@Indistinguishable

After all, do you take your argument to prove that there is only a finite amount of time from now until the end of the universe? No? Why not?

I’ll join you here. Our current best evidence indicates that the universe had a beginning. BUT, there is no logical reason that time couldn’t stretch infinitely into the past (that the universe had no beginning).

CalD, what you’re saying with your infinite negative time, assumes that there was a beginning, and then you’re proving that the beginning could not have been infinitely long ago. Well, assuming there was a beginning, you’re right. But the idea of time always having existed is that there was no beginning. Do you see the difference?

If you have no logical problems with the concept of time extending infinitely into the future, there’s no reason to logically have a problem with it extending into the past. In fact, I can use symmetry to turn your argument around, and “prove” that time must have a future end point: “When time finally ends, it is impossible for that end to be infinitely long from now, since you can’t ever get to infinity. Therefore time in the future must be finite.” Can you see that this is your exact same argument, just turned around the other direction? And how senseless it is?

[dropzone]

@Indistinguishable

Incidentally, Olber was an astronomer. And before him, the same argument was originated by Kepler.

Feh. Amateurs, they were. And just as bad with philosophy as me.

[Indistinguishable]

[Potential reader: If you haven’t yet seen the problem with the OP’s argument regarding time, even granting its premises, then don’t worry about this post. It’s not for your consumption yet]

Incidentally, I have often wondered why it is that people seem so averse to the idea that two points in time could be infinitely far apart. I am willing to grant the OP the premise that no two are, for his argument, but it should be noted, it is not a logically demanded one. Why couldn’t there be a year X which came after 2008, after 2009, after 3000, after 3001, etc.? Granted, no integer does so, but why should we limit ourselves to integers? Certainly, there are mathematical structures much like the integers but containing such “infinite” quantities.

For that matter, it also seems odd to me that people, if only implicitly, often assume such things as “There is no point in time after now, but less than a second away, less than 1/2 a second away, less than 1/3 a second away, etc.”. Granted, no positive real number does so, but why should we limit ourselves to reals? Certainly, there are mathematical structures much like the positive reals but containing such “infinitesimal” quantities.

People do seem rather fond of the integers and the real numbers, and unwilling to entertain other possibilities; I wonder if this can be given reasonable justification or not, and if so, of what form.

(Anyway, that is all to the side; whether or not the integers/reals actually describe the temporal structure of the universe, they do demonstrate the problem with the OP’s argument.)

[Indistinguishable]

[On the flip side, whenever such discussions of non-Archimedean arithmetic arise, people start looking to the transfinite cardinal numbers (indeed, it even happened in this thread), yet those are only very rarely well-matched to the concepts at hand. But they are more popularly known than anything else, so that’s where discussion goes]

[dehacker]

All this discussion over CalD’s argument for the beginning of time misses the point. Almost everyone, atheists included, accepts that the universe and time had an origin approximately 14 billion years ago.

However, this does not “prove” the existence of a “God”, anymore than it proves the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

[begbert2]

My take on two of the arguments I’ve seen in this thread:

1. Simple proof that the universe has not existed forever - infinity is not a number. People get the wrong idea about this because of symbolic shorthand used in math classes, but they’re wrong. Infinity is not a number; it’s a description. It means that you can keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll never be forced to stop. It does not mean an indescribably large numerical quantity that has the nonsensical property that you can keep lopping chunks off of it and still have it remain the same regardless - that’s just silly.

So. Looking at the universe, I can ask the question “How many seconds have passed total?” And, “an infinite number of seconds have passed” is not a valid answer - that’s not a number! A specific number of seconds have passed prior to any given specific moment - which means that if you look at the time that many seconds earlier you will find a second before which no seconds have passed - the beginning of time.

Now, does this mean there is an end of time as well? No. Because there is no reason to believe that at some point we will ‘run out’ of seconds. We sometimes say “there’s an infinite number of seconds available” - but what we actually mean is “there is no limit to the number of seconds that can pass”.

Why is this not reversible? Well, as time passes, we keep pulling more and more seconds out of ‘the unlimited/infinite future’, making a larger and larger pile of ‘passed seconds’ - however the thing to note is that the pile always remains finite, no matter how much time passes. This means that the question “How many seconds have passed total?” will always have an actual numerical answer, which is a necessary fact of reality. If we ‘reversed’ that though, and tried to claim that the past was ‘infinite’, that would mean you just tried to dump an infinite number of ‘passed seconds’ onto the pile. And that’s impossible. “Infinite” isn’t a number, and no matter what you can never have a pile with an infinite number of anything in it. Including passed seconds. That’s impossible; ergo, the situation isn’t reversible.
2) The notion that since God is “outside of time” that he’s not subject to proofs of having a beginning, or related proofs of nonexistence.

Well, to start with, I will readily admit that God could be outside of and independent of our time. After all, I am outside of and independent of the time of the characters in a book - I can skip around at will, visit future or past pages, look at it all at once - easy. There’s nothing saying that god doesn’t have the same relationship with us (though there are implications about free will there).

So, god could be outside of our time. However, he must have his own sort of time that he exists in. Otherwise, it would be impossible for him to do anything. Anything. Time is necessary for all motion, all action, all change, all creation. Absent time all there is is intert lifelessness.

So, God must exist in time (even if it’s not our time). Which makes him subject to all the same arguments as our timeline does us. For example, God must be able to answer the question “How many seconds of my time have I experienced?” That answer must be finite; ergo, whatever timestream God is in, it must have started at some specific point. To himself, God and the universe he resides in is not infinite or pastways-eternal - It started at some point, just like ours. And if we couldn’t have started spontaneously, neither could he. If we cannot have been an uncaused cause, neither can he.

Consider the special pleading killed.

[Indistinguishable]

@begbert2

Why is this not reversible? Well, as time passes, we keep pulling more and more seconds out of ‘the unlimited/infinite future’, making a larger and larger pile of ‘passed seconds’ - however the thing to note is that the pile always remains finite, no matter how much time passes. This means that the question “How many seconds have passed total?” will always have an actual numerical answer, which is a necessary fact of reality.

Why? It’s logically possible that the “pile” never has been finite and never will be.

Your whole argument is sophistry… why must “How many seconds have passed?” be answerable in the form of an integer? You’ve just pulled this out of nowhere; obviously, anyone who thinks time stretches infinitely into the past will say that you can answer “How many seconds have passed?” the same way you can answer “How many seconds are yet to come?”, the same way you can answer “How many integers are less than 0?”, etc., etc. Demanding the answer to be a finite number is simply begging the question.

“Infinity is not a number” is not an argument. Indeed, I hate that phrase; for my take on it, see this previous discussion of that phrase (which I see I’ve re-used before).

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Indistinguishable

[Potential reader: If you haven’t yet seen the problem with the OP’s argument regarding time, even granting its premises, then don’t worry about this post. It’s not for your consumption yet]

Incidentally, I have often wondered why it is that people seem so averse to the idea that two points in time could be infinitely far apart. I am willing to grant the OP the premise that no two are, for his argument, but it should be noted, it is not a logically demanded one. Why couldn’t there be a year X which came after 2008, after 2009, after 3000, after 3001, etc.? Granted, no integer does so, but why should we limit ourselves to integers? Certainly, there are mathematical structures much like the integers but containing such “infinite” quantities.

For that matter, it also seems odd to me that people, if only implicitly, often assume such things as “There is no point in time after now, but less than a second away, less than 1/2 a second away, less than 1/3 a second away, etc.”. Granted, no positive real number does so, but why should we limit ourselves to reals? Certainly, there are mathematical structures much like the positive reals but containing such “infinitesimal” quantities.

People do seem rather fond of the integers and the real numbers, and unwilling to entertain other possibilities; I wonder if this can be given reasonable justification or not, and if so, of what form.

Well, there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason to assume that there are two points in time infinitely far away, so the conservative assumption to make seems to be that there aren’t. Also, I wonder if points in space-time infinitely far away could meaningfully be considered part of our universe, since such a point wouldn’t be in the light cone of any point a finite distance away from us (I think, at least).

@begbert2

So. Looking at the universe, I can ask the question “How many seconds have passed total?” And, “an infinite number of seconds have passed” is not a valid answer - that’s not a number! A specific number of seconds have passed prior to any given specific moment - which means that if you look at the time that many seconds earlier you will find a second before which no seconds have passed - the beginning of time.

Now, does this mean there is an end of time as well? No. Because there is no reason to believe that at some point we will ‘run out’ of seconds. We sometimes say “there’s an infinite number of seconds available” - but what we actually mean is “there is no limit to the number of seconds that can pass”.

But no matter how long you’d wait, the infinite future would never come to pass; you could only ever get to x o’clock, never to infinity o’clock, by your own logic, so you would have to conclude that there is an end of time in the future since you can’t reach infinity, to stay congruent with your argumentation that there needs to be a beginning in the past.

[begbert2]

@Indistinguishable

Why? It’s logically possible that the “pile” never has been finite and never will be.

Your whole argument is sophistry… why must “How many seconds have passed?” be answerable in the form of an integer? You’ve just pulled this out of nowhere; obviously, anyone who thinks time stretches infinitely into the past will say that you can answer “How many seconds have passed?” the same way you can answer “How many seconds are yet to come?”, the same way you can answer “How many integers are less than 0?”, etc., etc. Demanding the answer to be a finite number is simply begging the question.

Hardly.

Whenever you are talking about infinities you are talking about a process, and how the process behaves as you carry it out a really, really large number of times - not how it behaves when you ‘get to’ infinity. Nobody ever has or ever will do something an infinite number or times, and there never has and never will be an infinite quantity of anything, by the very definition of ‘infinite’.

Now when you mention that the numberline is “infinite in both directions”, you are shorthanding the fact that you can keep adding/subracting one and never run out of numbers. You of course aren’t actually doing such additions until you reach the end - you’d never finish. In fact that’s what calling the number line infinte means - that you can never carry out the process to a natural limit and ‘get to the end’.

But, by claiming that an infinite amount of time has already passed you are declaring that you have ‘got to the end’ infinity - you’re claiming that an infinite number of seconds have already passed and are all neatly recorded in your ledger. That is, you’re explicitly claiming that the universe has already counted to infinity and reached the end. The problem is, that is definitionally impossible - an infinite number of seconds can never have passed. There is no ‘after’ an infinite number of seconds.

I repeat: the position that an infinite amount of time has passed is definitionally impossible and based on a critical failures in understanding what the term ‘infinity’ even means. Stating so is not ‘begging the question’ - it’s argument from definition.

@Indistinguishable

“Infinity is not a number” is not an argument. Indeed, I hate that phrase; for my take on it, see this previous discussion of that phrase (which I see I’ve re-used before).

From your second link: “Infinity is not a real number, or a complex number, or an integer, or any of that, by the very definition of such systems. That doesn’t mean there cannot be some mathematical system with some element naturally labelled as “infinity”, with the system naturally thought of as one of “numbers”.”

You can say exactly the same thing about cheddar cheese. Somebody could invent a mathematical system of their own and call some number “cheddar cheese” if they like too - that does not cheddar cheese a number. In reality, in the number systems everybody is talking about when they talk about numbers, cheddar cheese is not a number. And neither is infinity. If you have a problem with that, too bad for you; reality trumps your strange personal preferences in this discussion.

“Infinity is not a number” is a true fact. Deal with it.

[Indistinguishable]

No one who doesn’t already think that time began a finite number of seconds ago will be swayed by “Well, surely, there is some Great Ledger with a finite number recorded in it, keeping count of how many seconds have passed since the start of time.”…

One could just as well postulate a Great Ledger keeping count of the number of seconds left, ticking down, one by one, like the Times Square Ball, till it eventually hits 0 at The End. Whatever the number on it right now, that’s how long we have left. But just as you are not already inclined to accept such a thing and won’t be swayed to simply by my postulating it, so it is with your own argument.

[Indistinguishable]

As for “infinity is not a number” and cheddar cheese, if some mathematical system useful for some analysis, and naturally thought of as one of numbers, should happen to contain an element naturally thought of as cheddar cheese, I would voice no objection to considering cheddar cheese to be the relevant sort of number for that analysis.

There are undoubtedly many mathematical systems useful for many purposes in which there are elements naturally thought of as infinite or infinity (e.g., those disparate systems used to analyze questions such as “How many integers are there?” and “What is the slope of a vertical line?” and so forth). Saying “infinity is not a number” is like saying “sqrt(-1) is not a number”; sure, for some purposes it’s entirely inappropriate [e.g., one does not use complex numbers to describe bank account balances], but for others, it’s just what hits the spot.

[begbert2]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

Well, there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason to assume that there are two points in time infinitely far away, so the conservative assumption to make seems to be that there aren’t. Also, I wonder if points in space-time infinitely far away could meaningfully be considered part of our universe, since such a point wouldn’t be in the light cone of any point a finite distance away from us (I think, at least).

It’s definitionally impossible to say that two points are infinitely far away from one another - you’re saying that there is no number large enough to describe the distance between them - which is saying there isn’t a distance between them. As all points in the universe are some distance away from any given point in the universe, no points are infinitely far away from one another.

That’s of course because infinity is not a measure of distance, time, or quantity. Despite it’s use in mathematics, it’s not any more a number than the plus sign is.

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

But no matter how long you’d wait, the infinite future would never come to pass; you could only ever get to x o’clock, never to infinity o’clock, by your own logic, so you would have to conclude that there is an end of time in the future since you can’t reach infinity, to stay congruent with your argumentation that there needs to be a beginning in the past.

When you talk about infinities you’re talking about potentials and trends, not actualities. “If we keep going and going in this direction, what will happen?” If the answer is “you can’t keep going and going in that direction; you’ll be stopped”, then you’re describing a behavior without finite limits. If the answer is anything else - “you’ll trend towards a specific value”, “you’ll keep getting further and further in that direction” “You’ll go in circles forever” “You’ll oscillate back and forth forever” “You’ll wander randomly forever” - those are descriptions of infinite trends.

But you can never carry out an infinite trend to its end - the very nature of infinity is that you can’e get there. (Because it’s not a number - infinity means you keep doing the same thing and never reach a natural end.)

Now, as far as we can tell, that’s exactly what we’re doing with regard to time - chugging along doing the same thing, passing one second after another second after another second, with no natural end to the seconds in sight. We will never “reach infinity” -because that’s an impossible notion and a misinterpretation of the word; we’ll just keep passing through time unimpeded (so far as we know).

You can’t claim to have done that in the past direction because the past isn’t getting longer and longer as we speak - everthing that has happened in the past has already happened, so it’s not a growing series. Time appears to be growing the forward direction, with seconds continuning to add on as we speak, so it might continue to do so forever with no limit, which can be referred to as ‘increasing infinitely’. That’s something that can only be said about the forward end of the timeline, though.

[Indistinguishable]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

Well, there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason to assume that there are two points in time infinitely far away, so the conservative assumption to make seems to be that there aren’t. Also, I wonder if points in space-time infinitely far away could meaningfully be considered part of our universe, since such a point wouldn’t be in the light cone of any point a finite distance away from us (I think, at least).

The frugality argument is an appealing one, and it deserves its own discussion, but I think I’ll save that for later (since I appear to be swimming against the tide of this thread, anti-progressing from one poster to convince of the broken logic of his arguments to two).

I just wanted to ask, though, why do you say what you do about light cones? Consider a reference frame in which I stand still for all eternity; surely, my position in space-time after X many seconds is always in the lightcone of my position now, no matter how large (even possibly infinite) X is. (After all, I “travel” from one to the other)

[begbert2]

@Indistinguishable

No one who doesn’t already think that time began a finite number of seconds ago will be swayed by “Well, surely, there is some Great Ledger with a finite number recorded in it, keeping count of how many seconds have passed since the start of time.”…

That ledger is called history. Do you think history is growing backwards (with reversed causality and various other nonsensical crap) as we speak? Because if the past isn’t constantly changing, it’s not growing infinitely. And no matter what it does an infinite amount of time has not and never will pass - because by definition, there is no such thing as an infinite amount!

@Indistinguishable

One could just as well postulate a Great Ledger keeping count of the number of seconds left, ticking down, one by one, like the Times Square Ball, till it eventually hits 0 at The End. Whatever the number on it right now, that’s how long we have left. But just as you are not already inclined to accept such a thing and won’t be swayed to simply by my postulating it, so it is with your own argument.

I’m fine with accepting that as a possibility - but so far as I know there’s no proof for it. For all I know time will eventually end. But I have no reason to think it will.

On the contrariwise, the notion that an infinite amount of time has aleady passed is false by the very definition of infinite. It’s not a case of us not knowing; it’s a case of “all continued ignorance on this subject will be wilful, accompanied by fingers shoved in ears and loud whistling”.

@Indistinguishable

As for “infinity is not a number” and cheddar cheese, if some mathematical system useful for some analysis, and naturally thought of as one of numbers, should happen to contain an element naturally thought of as cheddar cheese, I would voice no objection to considering cheddar cheese to be the relevant sort of number for that analysis.

There are undoubtedly many mathematical systems useful for many purposes in which there are elements naturally thought of as infinite or infinity (e.g., those disparate systems used to analyze questions such as “How many integers are there?” and “What is the slope of a vertical line?” and so forth). Saying “infinity is not a number” is like saying “sqrt(-1) is not a number”; sure, for some purposes it’s entirely inappropriate [e.g., one does not use complex numbers to describe bank account balances], but for others, it’s just what hits the spot.

There are of course certain situations in mathematics where the infinity symbol may be used in the place where a number might be - and in all such cases the entire meaning of the structure is different. It’s just like NAN. It is mathematically correct to say that 3 / 0 = NAN. This isn’t because Not A Number is a number, though; it’s because using it in the specific places that it is allowed is a shorthand for another related concept; in the specific case of NAN it’s “the mathematical operation you have attempted cannot be carried out”.

Oh and look at that - 3 / 0 = infinity is also legal - and infinity again isn’t a number; it’s shorthand for “the mathematical operation you have attempted cannot be carried out because no matter how many peices you slice 3 into, you don’t get 0 - but the result as you put in smaller and smaller positive numbers approaching zero gets larger and larger without limit.”

Cheddar cheese is not just not a number, but it also has another meaning which means something quite different from being a number. This is the case with infinity as well; infinity is not a number and it already has another meaning, so it would be no more accurate to call it a number or even to define it as being a number than it would be to define the minus sign as a number or the ‘7’ character as being a mathematical operation. Your position is one of ignorance leading to misconception and, ultimately, total confusion and absolute wrongness. Fight your ignorance rather than wallowing in it, man.

[Indistinguishable]

@begbert2

Cheddar cheese is not just not a number, but it also has another meaning which means something quite different from being a number. This is the case with infinity as well; infinity is not a number and it already has another meaning, so it would be no more accurate to call it a number or even to define it as being a number than it would be to define the minus sign as a number or the ‘7’ character as being a mathematical operation. Your position is one of ignorance leading to misconception and, ultimately, total confusion and absolute wrongness. Fight your ignorance rather than wallowing in it, man.

Here, we can both wallow in my ignorance for a while.

What does “number” mean to you? Why is infinity not even capable of being viewed as a number? Is -1 a number? Is sqrt(-1) a number? And how does this terminological quibble manage to impinge upon the (meta)physical facts of the universe’s temporal history?

Yes, “infinity” has a meaning. Like most words in natural language , it has a whole bunch of meanings, connected by family resemblances, no one fiber running through them all. So does “number”. One very natural thing to do is to think of some kinds of “number” as including some notions of “infinity” or “the infinite”. And why not? Do you make this much of a fuss when someone uses sqrt(-1) in a calculation, objecting “But that is not a number!”. Hell, people objected to taking 0 as a number at one point. There is no fixed system of numbers; there are systems that are useful for various purposes, and it may well be that the system most useful for describing the temporal history of the universe is not the system you have in mind.

[RaftPeople]

Begbert, your ledger assumes a starting point which implies finiteness from now which is a contradiction of the assumption of infinite history. Forget the ledger, it can be the same way going backward as it is going forward, and that is there is no end-point (as in there is no beginning and there is no end). It seems hard to understand that concept (I know it’s weird for me), but if the universe has taught us anything, it’s that it’s weird.

Also, you state that “time” is required (for things to happen, etc.). This is very undecided. It’s truly not known what time is, if anything, and it’s possible that it doesn’t really exist.

[Strinka]

@dehacker

All this discussion over CalD’s argument for the beginning of time misses the point. Almost everyone, atheists included, accepts that the universe and time had an origin approximately 14 billion years ago.

That’s not the point. After all, our empirical observations (however unlikely) could be wrong. The point is, is it even logically possible for the universe to not have a beginning.

@begbert2

My take on two of the arguments I’ve seen in this thread:

1. Simple proof that the universe has not existed forever - infinity is not a number. People get the wrong idea about this because of symbolic shorthand used in math classes, but they’re wrong. Infinity is not a number; it’s a description. It means that you can keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll never be forced to stop. It does not mean an indescribably large numerical quantity that has the nonsensical property that you can keep lopping chunks off of it and still have it remain the same regardless - that’s just silly.

So. Looking at the universe, I can ask the question “How many seconds have passed total?” And, “an infinite number of seconds have passed” is not a valid answer - that’s not a number! A specific number of seconds have passed prior to any given specific moment - which means that if you look at the time that many seconds earlier you will find a second before which no seconds have passed - the beginning of time.

Now, does this mean there is an end of time as well? No. Because there is no reason to believe that at some point we will ‘run out’ of seconds. We sometimes say “there’s an infinite number of seconds available” - but what we actually mean is “there is no limit to the number of seconds that can pass”.

Why is this not reversible? Well, as time passes, we keep pulling more and more seconds out of ‘the unlimited/infinite future’, making a larger and larger pile of ‘passed seconds’ - however the thing to note is that the pile always remains finite, no matter how much time passes. This means that the question “How many seconds have passed total?” will always have an actual numerical answer, which is a necessary fact of reality. If we ‘reversed’ that though, and tried to claim that the past was ‘infinite’, that would mean you just tried to dump an infinite number of ‘passed seconds’ onto the pile. And that’s impossible. “Infinite” isn’t a number, and no matter what you can never have a pile with an infinite number of anything in it. Including passed seconds. That’s impossible; ergo, the situation isn’t reversible.

But what about my magic clock? I’m not saying there was ever a point where it read -∞. I’m just saying that there is no X, such that it reads (N-X), but not (N-X-1). Since that applies to arbitrarily large Xs, that effectively means time is infinite.

[Telemark]

@Indistinguishable

What does “number” mean to you? Why is infinity not even capable of being viewed as a number?

http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/answers/infinity.html
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/55765.html

Is infinity a number?