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All in all, I do not think this Thomistic-style argument for God's existence is the best one to use. I think the Kalam cosmological argument defended by William Criag and J.P. Moreland is much stronger because it depends on fewer questionable assumptions.

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He said there is an actual infinite amount of time. Right now we are experiencing a finite subset of that time. Given our finite perspective in this subset, we experience time as though it is adding onto the series. Yet, that is only our perspective. In reality, tomorrow has already happened.

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Just joking here, but wouldn’t the circumference of an infinite circle, look something like that of an eternal straight line? ...

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I confess that I find the arguments for the impossibility of an actual infinite strong, convincing in fact. I also find the arguments for God’s being temporal based on his knowledge of tensed facts and his real relations to a temporal world even more convincing. Put together, these two would appear to support Craig's theory that God is timeless in the absence of creation but temporal since creation. Timelessness and temporality are, thus, contingent attributes of God.

But I also find the unhappy implications which God’s timelessness (in the absence of creation) has for his being “personal” at least as difficult to escape as the impossibility of an actual infinite. In addition (and I don’t know how to argue this), something tells me that an absolutely timeless God would never be able to get off the dime, so to speak, in creating the world and time. Is passing from timeless existence to temporal existence even coherent? If God is timeless in the absence of creation, I don’t see how creation ever happens at all. How does an absolutely timeless being "do" anything? I don't know how to adjuticate the evidence for timelessness and temporality of God in the absence of creation.

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Thus, on a relational view of time God would exist timelessly and independently 'prior' to creation; at creation, which he has willed from eternity to appear temporally, time begins, and God subjects himself to time by being related to changing things. On the other hand, the Newtonian would say God exists in absolute time changelessly and independently prior to creation and that creation simply marks the first event in time.{31} NOTE
#31 {31} This serves effectively to rebut the objection of Julian Wolfe to the kalam cosmological argument 'Infinite Regress and the Cosmological Argument', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion II (1971), 246-9. The crucial premiss is, in Wolfe's opinion, that an infinite time cannot elapse. He argues that this is incorrect because prior to causing the first effect, the uncaused cause existed for infinite time. Since the first event did not occur, then an infinite time must have elapsed. But in the first place, Wolfe's formulation of the argument is defective, for the contention is that an infinite number of events cannot elapse, not that an infinite time cannot elapse. Because the argument concerns events, not time, Wolfe's analysis is inapplicable, since prior to creation there were no events at all. Second, if the relationalist is correct, then an infinite time does not elapse prior to creation, because time begins at creation. God is simply timeless before the first event

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· A is actually infinite if A has a denumerable subset.
· A is actually infinite if A can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself.

· E = 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 …
· F = 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 …

Xo – 1 = Xo, Xo + 1 = Xo, Xo – n = Xo, Xo + n = Xo, and (where n is any natural number), Xo * Xo = Xo.

lim1\n = 0
.
n > 8 [infinity]

“It should also be noted that if it is possible for an actual infinite set to exist outside of a mind, contradictions and absurdities would be generated. To illustrate this point, let us look at two infinite sets. Set A consists of all numbers, both odd and even. Set B contains only all the odd numbers. Set A and Set B are equal since they both have an infinite number of members. Still, Set A has twice the number of members as Set B since Set A contains both odd and even numbers, while Set B contains only odd numbers. It is a clear contradiction to say that Set A and Set B have an equal amount of members, while Set A has twice as many members as Set B. Therefore, actual infinite sets cannot exist outside the mind. Actual sets existing outside the mind can only be potentially infinite, not actually infinite. These sets can be added to indefinitely; still we will never reach an actual infinite by successive addition. Therefore, the universe cannot have an infinite number of events in the past. The universe had a beginning.”

First the philosophical argument. It is impossible to traverse or cross an actual infinite number of events by successive addition. An actual infinite, what mathematicians call aleph-null, is a set of distinct things whose number is actually infinite. Infinity, plus or minus any number including infinity, is still infinity. This contrasts with a potential infinite, which can increase forever without limit but is always finite.

By contrast, an actual infinite has no room for growth and is non- finite; that is, one of its subsets can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the set itself. The impossibility of crossing an actual infinite has sometimes been put by saying that one cannot count to infinity no matter how long he counts. For he will always be at some specific number which could be increased by one to generate another specific number; and that is true even if one counted forever.

Now if one cannot cross an actual infinite, then the past must have been finite. If it were infinite, then to come to the present moment, one would have had to have traversed an actual infinite to get here, which is impossible. Without a first event, there could be no second, third, or any specifiable number of events including the present one. To get to the present moment by crossing an actual infinite would be like trying to jump out of a bottomless pit. Not only could one never complete the jump, one could never even get started; for to reach any point in the series, one must already have crossed an infinite number of points to get to that point, as Zeno's puzzles clearly showed.

Put differently, suppose you go back through the events of the past in your mind. You will either come to a beginning, or you will not. If you come to a beginning, then the past is finite and my argument is settled. That would be the first event. If you had never come to a beginning, then the past is actually infinite; and as you go back in your mind, you never in principle could exhaust the events of the past. It would be impossible to traverse the past going backward in your mind.

Since time doesn't go backward but forward, and the number of events traversed is not a function of the direction of movement, this amounts to saying that the present could never be realized. But since it has been realized-after all, here we are-there must have been a first event, and this event must have been spontaneously generated by a situation that was immutable, unchanging, timeless, and free.

Now most of the experiences we have in life where an event is spontaneously generated without sufficient conditions prior to it occur by means of agent causation, or what we would call agent causes. That is, you and I act everyday; we raise our arms; we do things. It seems reasonable, based upon agent causation, therefore, to say that the first event was spontaneously caused to be by a personal agent of some kind. The major alternative is that the first event popped into existence out of nothing without a cause, and that doesn't seem reasonable to me.

How can that be? Think about numbers for a moment. Are numbers potentially infinite? Yes, sure they are. They can potentially go on forever and ever. Potentially, the quantity of numbers is infinitely large. There's no end to them.

Now, how do you ever get from a potential infinity to an infinity when it comes to numbers? Well, you can start counting--one, two, three, four, five, billion one, billion two, a zillion one, two, a quintillion one, a quintillion two. Keep going. Do you realize that at any particular point in time as you keep adding one number to another – a procedure which potentially could go on forever – that you haven't really accomplished that feat? You haven't really gone on forever, have you? The number gets bigger and bigger, of course. But at every particular point you happen to be counting at, your count describes a finite number. Will you ever get to eternity by counting, adding one number onto another? The answer is no, you won't.

That's why I can say that you will never live for an eternity. You started – you came into existence--at some point in time. That's when your clock started running and the moments began to add up, one event upon another. But as you go forward into eternity, if you make an assessment at any particular point, your cosmic clock will show a finite age, counting from the time you started to the time you're at. Now, you can keep going on forever and ever, but no matter how long you continue going on you will still have a particular age identifying the length of time of your existence. That particular age will never be an infinite amount. Do you see how that works? This is why you can never count to infinity, because infinity is not a particular number; by definition it's an innumerable amount. At every stage along the counting process you are always describing a finite number, even though that number gets larger and larger as you count. In the same way, you will never live to eternity even though you live forever and ever, even though you never cease to exist, because at any given point in the process you will still have an age, even though the age is getting larger and larger as you move deeper and deeper into eternity.

"I quote others only the better to express myself."[/list]Michel de Montaigne

Edited by - SeanG on 03/10/2003 09:20:34 AM

Edited by - SeanG on 03/10/2003 11:40:18 AM