Originally Posted by
ghollisjr
This is getting tiresome. A time which is infinity ago does not exist in the same way that infinity is not an element of the real numbers. This does not mean that the real numbers have a lower bound, and it does not mean that there was a beginning of time either. I have explained this over and over again, and you keep telling me that I'm confused or delusional. I'm in graduate school working on a PhD in physics, I am not the one who is confused, or delusional as I have provided the demonstration for my arguments in the form of mapping time to the real numbers, which can be and is done every time we perform a time calculation in physics. Physics never says that time nesessarily had to have a beginning, just that our current natural laws started with the big bang. This does not mean that the big bang somehow came from philosophical nothingness, and it doesn't mean that time didn't exist either, just that our current description is incapable of saying what happened before the big bang if there was a "before".
Also, where are you getting this whole "you would have already happened if there was a past eternity of cause and effects"?? I'm pretty sure your reasoning is assuming that there is actually a time which is infinitely far away from any other time. But the idea behind the real numbers is that there is always an element which bigger or smaller (more negative) than any element you choose in the real numbers. So, if infinity belonged to the reals, there would have to be a number bigger than infinity. This type of thing happens in set theory (look up aleph 0 on mathworld.wolfram.com) where there are infinities which are different from other infinities, but is not a part of the real numbers and is thus not a part of my description of time. Your idea of time may in fact disallow an infinite regress, but it is not the one used to describe the universe in the most reliable way we have found to date: science.
If you want to talk about infinity, I suggest studying mathematics on the subject as it is a concept which is best described axiomatically and not using intuitional logic.
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