Q&A: It Is Not Eternal
It Is Not Eternal
Question
Premise A: An infinite amount of time cannot pass. (Whether time is continuous or discrete.)
Premise B: For any event to occur in time, all the time before it must pass.
Conclusion: If an event occurred, then the amount of time that passed until it is not infinite.
If a person accepts the premise that events occur, he must hold that there was a starting point to time and that the world is not eternal.
Does the Rabbi think there is a premise here that is incorrect? And if not, is there a flaw in the reasoning process? Does the kind of infinity mentioned in the first premise allow an infinite amount of time to pass?
Answer
Relating to an infinite length or duration in terms of finite time gives rise to paradoxes and problems.
It seems to me that Premise B is the main stumbling block here.
You are looking forward from the starting point, and then you have a problem (because if you set out from the beginning, you cannot reach any finite point in a finite time). But the correct way to look at it is backward from the present. Then you say that when looking backward, there is no finite length of time that describes the entire axis. This is a potential rather than a concrete formulation of infinity. In essence, the claim of those who maintain that the world is infinitely old is that there is no first point on that axis, and therefore you cannot talk about how much time passed from it until us.
Go think about this: suppose the world has existed for a finite amount of time. And what was before it? In physical terminology: how long has the singular point of the Big Bang existed? It too has existed for a finite time. So there was something at the beginning of the axis before it, and about that I will ask: how long has it existed? If you want, apply this to God.
Discussion on Answer
That is not a good example. On the time axis there is a plausible argument that time has to be traversed in order to reach the present moment. With apples there is no reason to count apples that do not exist. There is no ordering among apples the way there is among moments on the time axis.
Or another example: when you count apples, do you first have to count all the negative numbers in order to get to zero?