Q&A: Infinity, God, and the World
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
Infinity, God, and the World
Question
Hi Michi, why is God a potential infinity and the world a concrete infinity? And maybe one could say that God is outside of time, and then He is eternal—or does that basically mean potential infinity?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. What does it mean that the world is concrete?
Discussion on Answer
I no longer remember exactly what I wrote there.
There is no fundamental problem with saying that God always existed, because that is interpreted potentially: there was no time without God. In that sense, the same is true of the world as well. But an infinite chain of explanations is a concrete infinity, because you have to present the entire chain for it to count as an explanation.
The idea is that if the world is eternal, then the sequence of time involves an infinite regress. Like al-Ghazali says; the Rabbi also wrote this in the booklet on the cosmological argument.