luvluv

For some reason I can't access the article you linked Tercel, but I think I may have the answer to your question (if it's the question I think it is). At any rate, it's funny.

I think the turtle line comes from a response an apologist (I forget who) got when discussing arguments for the existence of God.

Some old lady popped up and said:

"This is all ridiculous, we all know that the earth is held up by a turtle."

The apologist said: "Well, what is holding up the turtle?"

The lady said: "Very clever young man. But everyone knows it's TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN."

I can't remember where I read this, but I remember laughing.

Tercel

That's a good explanation for it. :notworthy And probably true at that.

Whenever I've argued about infinite regresses I've always had this mental picture of a gigantic house of cards with each layer sitting on nothing except more cards all the way down...

K

luvluv:

How's it going? Just stopped in to clarify something.

The set of natural numbers {1, 2, 3, ... } is infinite. It doesn't matter that there is an actual smallest number in the set. The set is simply the collection of integers - the order doesn't matter. There are an infinite number of positive integers.

Galan

You're welcome! Yes, the CTMU is very interesting. I think that as it becomes more widely known it will be next to impossible to ignore it when discussing reality and the question of "God". (Saying it is something akin to Spinoza on steroids is probably still an understatement ).

luvluv is very close on your question, though a little off. The story goes that the old lady raised her hand and offered the turtle explanation during a lecture that William James was giving about cosmology.

luvluv

Yeah Galan that's it. I've been trying to remember where I read that but I can't figure it out. Was it in James book, The Variety of Religious Experiences? That's the only book of his I have dabbled in.

eh

It's the law of energy conservation. Matter CAN be destroyed, so long as it is merely converted to another kind of energy. Matter can be formed from the vacuum, so long as there is energy to allow it. So we have a universe that can change shape, expand, contract but never fail to exist.

I disagree, since energy is conserved. An initial state does not mean the universe needs a cause.

If you had a time machine, there is no limit to how far into the future you could go. So it would be like natural numbers, which start at one but have no limit. Still no reason to call the universe contingent.

If God does not have a first thought, does he have an infinite number of thoughts prior to the big bang? If he doesn't have thoughts in any understanding of the concept, why should we call him a person, intelligent, or a conscious being at all? Since such a being would be logically undefined, I have to conclude that this does not explain anything.

This is exactly my point about such a supernatural entity being a non explanation. If we cannot understand, or even logically define what this being is, how is proposing his existence going to explain anything at all? It seems that God is defined entirely by negatives.

luvluv

K:

Hows it going? Do you post under a different name sometimes?

Anyway, you are probably right. But I thought eh was talking about an actually existent thread of numbers written out on paper or something. Yes the actual set of natural numbers is infinite, but no listing of the natural numbers could ever actually be infinite. I thought eh was referring to a listing of some sort, which is the closest parallel to the regress of actual events in time that we were discussing.

I wouldn't bet 2 cents on any mathematical statement I made, anyhow. I'd barely be able to do enough math to collect...

Shadowy Man

Which is longer, a ray or a line?

luvluv

eh:

You might be right. I have to look into this some more. I wonder though why all the books I've read on cosmolgy, many by confirmed atheists who seem to be hostile to the idea of an existence of God, never made this argument? It seems like a good one. I'll get back to you on this.

The universe would still need a cause. There would need to be a reason for why the energy produced a universe when it did the way it did. Perhaps the energy would not need a cause, but the Big Bang would.

It is possible that He has thoughts, though this notion seems unintelligible to me from the standpoint of the logical implications of omniscience. But if He is eternal, then His thoughts could not be put in sequential order. He could be thinking all thoughts at all times without begining.

What do you mean by logically undefined? Isn't that a fancy way of saying: "That doesn't make sense to me"?

That's basically an argument from personal incredulity, and so I have to conclude that your disbelief doesn't explain anything.

SRB

You throw about words like "absurd" and "contradiction," but there is no formal contradiction in the hypothesis that the past had no beginning. In other words, there is no way to derive a proposition of the form "P & ~P" from the statement "the past had no beginning" (if you disagree, please try).

Craig has at best highlighted the fact that an infinite past would have some unfamiliar and counterintuitive properties. That is hardly any great surprise to some of us, since the infinite is not something that we regularly encounter. It is indeed remarkable that if the past is beginningless then there are "as many" past moments now as there were ten years ago (i.e. the two sets of past moments can be put in one-to-one correspondence). That is an unfamiliar (and an entirely logically consistent) idea, but is it any more surprising and counterintuitive than discoveries made about other unfamiliar contexts (e.g. at near-light speeds in Special Relativity, or at small scales in Quantum Theory)? I think not. Craig's argument, that makes heavy use of the fact that a beginningless past would have counterintuitive properties, is a flop.

SRB