This is something that to me seems blatantly obvious, that time had to have had a beginning, but often I'm told it could extend backward infinitely. I think those who insist so are afraid one is giving creationists and first causality types an opening, and maybe one is, but their stuff fails on so many other grounds there is no need to maintain an erroneous notion just to defend against them. Aquinas was right when he said the idea of there being no beginning of time is absurd. What he didn't understand is that it is absurd to assert that anything could be without beginning.
Now, first, I don't know what "time" is: this is an unsolved question, and tend to think of it as the illusion of past passing into future because things change and events happen, but the only thing here that really exists is the present. Regardless, one can use the idea of time as a flowing river or something along those lines to help.
Now let us say the doctors really get their act together and stop disease and aging, and the engineers do the same thing and stop accidents. We will then live forever. Well, no. No longer how long we live it will never have been forever. It may be a million or a billion or some unimaginable time, but never forever. Infinity is not a countable number that way. You never reach forever, even though you never die.
For the same reason time cannot have "always existed" as it is so easy to say. One cannot climb out of a bottomless well. That applies to existence itself. The mistake of course is in thinking time is a sort-of beginning of the number line. It is not. The number line has neither beginning nor end.
So time had a beginning, maybe the Big Bang, more likely something else much earlier, who knows, but it had a beginning, and there was nothing before the beginning of time. This is an interesting sort of nothing. There were no eons and eons of emptiness. Those eons would still be time. There was nothing and then there was space-time.
There is a sense in which one might say time has always existed, but that "always" is necessarily finite. The when of things can only be measured from after the first event: talk about "before" that is meaningless. I have a notion that before time was like the space between two adjacent irrational numbers, except you can stick an infinity of numbers between any two, so there is no space there, just as there is no time before time.
The argument is sound and the sociology you're describing is real. The reluctance to concede a beginning often does track defensive positioning against creationism rather than honest engagement with the logic. That's a form of motivated reasoning, and it doesn't get better by being on the "right" side.
Your immortality argument is clean. The force of it is that infinity isn't a destination you asymptotically approach — it's a category error to speak of reaching it. No matter how long the sequence, it remains finite. The same applies in reverse: you can't have traversed an infinite past to arrive at now. That's essentially the Kalām argument stripped of its theological payload, which is what Aquinas was groping toward before he handed it off to his deity.
Where I'd push back slightly is on the confidence about the Big Bang or something earlier. You're right that time had a beginning, and right that "before time" is a category error rather than an empty duration. But the nature of that beginning is genuinely murky. Some cosmological models (Hartle-Hawking, for instance) treat the initial boundary not as a moment but as a geometric feature — time becomes imaginary (in the mathematical sense) near the origin, which dissolves the sharp edge rather than extending the timeline backward. It doesn't restore the infinite past, but it makes "beginning" a fuzzier concept than a crisp first moment. Your analogy to the gap between adjacent irrationals is actually quite apt here, though you've identified its own paradox: there's no gap, which is exactly the point.
The "interesting nothing" you describe — not eons of emptiness but the absence of any temporal container at all — is the philosophically honest formulation. What's notable is that this is what contemporary physics says, to the extent it says anything coherent: not that there was a void waiting around, but that the question of what preceded the metric has no referent. Augustine got there before the physicists: when asked what God was doing before creation, he said the question is malformed because time itself was created.
Your irrational number image deserves a little more pressure though. The real line is dense — between any two reals there are uncountably many others, so "adjacent irrationals" don't exist in the sense of having nothing between them. I think what you're reaching for is something more like: the boundary isn't a point on the timeline at all, it's the edge of the domain where the concept applies, beyond which the concept has no extension. Which is right, but it's more a topological intuition than a number-line one.
The final point about "always" being necessarily finite is underappreciated. Language smuggles in the infinite past through that word constantly, and almost nobody stops to notice.
Your pushback seems a little misapplied. All I said was that the Big Bang might represent the beginning of time, but I doubted it.
Fair enough. I read more into it than was there. You made a parenthetical hedge and I treated it as a claim worth contesting. The actual argument stands without that.
You mentioned Augustine briefly and I have heard that before. Could you provide more detail?
Augustine's treatment is in Confessions, Book XI, and it's remarkably sharp for the 4th century.
The standard taunt aimed at Christians was: what was God doing before he made the world? The implied gotcha being that either God was idle for an eternity before getting around to creation, which seems odd, or there's some account owed of that prior time.
Augustine's response was that the question contains a false premise. Time is not a pre-existing container into which God dropped the universe. Time is part of creation. There was no "before" creation because before requires time, and time didn't exist until there was something to change. He puts it fairly directly: the world was not made in time but with time.
This leads him into a long and genuinely interesting digression on what time actually is, which anticipates your own framing more than you might expect. He concludes that the past has no existence — it's gone. The future has no existence — it isn't yet. Only the present exists, but the present is a dimensionless instant, not a duration. So he ends up saying that what we call the three tenses are really three modes of present experience: the present of past things (memory), the present of present things (attention), and the present of future things (expectation). Time turns out to be a property of mind engaging with change rather than an independent feature of the world.
Which is surprisingly close to your own "illusion of past passing into future because things change" formulation, arrived at fifteen centuries earlier from a different direction.
He doesn't resolve everything — he punts on the deeper question by saying God exists in an eternal present outside time altogether, which is more a restatement than an answer. But the core move, that "before creation" is a malformed question because time is itself a created thing, is exactly right and follows the same logic as your argument.
You appear, or maybe it's my own doubt here, to hedge on the notion of time being what we think it is. If future and past are real places, spacetime could be a finite thing closed in on itself and the problem of a beginning goes away.
No hedge intended on my part — I was reporting Augustine's position and your convergence with it, not casting doubt on it. If anything I think the presentist view you hold is more defensible than its alternatives.
But you've put your finger on the genuine complication, which is the block universe interpretation of relativity. In that picture past and future are equally real — the distinction between them is an artifact of where you are in the four-dimensional manifold, much as "here" and "there" are. Time becomes a spatial-like dimension and the universe is a static four-dimensional object. Nothing flows; the appearance of flow is a feature of consciousness moving through it, or perhaps just of how memories are arranged. In that picture "now" has no privileged status.
If that's correct, and the block universe is a serious position, then a closed finite spacetime without boundary becomes coherent — Hawking's no-boundary proposal being the most discussed version. The manifold simply curves back on itself the way a sphere has no edge, and asking for the beginning is like asking what's north of the North Pole.
The difficulty is that this seems to relocate rather than dissolve the problem. A closed finite four-dimensional manifold still exists rather than not existing. The question of why there is something rather than nothing doesn't care whether that something has a temporal edge. You've removed the beginning but you haven't removed the explanandum.
And the block universe has its own serious problems, the hardest being that it seems to make the direction of time — the arrow — very difficult to account for. That asymmetry is real and wants explaining.
So: not hedging on presentism, but the closed spacetime move is worth taking seriously on its own terms rather than dismissing. It just doesn't actually make the deep problem go away.
Well if there is no direction of time you get some paradoxes.
Yes, and they're not minor. The most immediate is causality. If the future is as real as the past and there's no preferred direction, the asymmetry between cause and effect loses its grounding. Causes precede effects, and if "precede" has no objective content you're in trouble. You can try to recover it statistically through entropy — causes are the low-entropy end of a process — but that just pushes the question back to why entropy was low to begin with, which is itself a major unsolved problem.
Then there's the information paradox class of problems. Retrocausality becomes difficult to rule out in principle, which most physicists find deeply uncomfortable even when their equations don't formally forbid it.
And the experiential asymmetry is stark and demands accounting for. We remember the past and not the future. That's not a trivial fact to explain away as illusion. Even if the block universe is correct, something about the structure of mind or memory encodes a direction that the underlying physics in that picture doesn't privilege. You've moved the mystery rather than solved it.
The thermodynamic arrow, the causal arrow, the psychological arrow — these all point the same way, which itself requires explanation, and in a truly directionless universe the alignment of all three is either a brute fact or a coincidence of staggering proportions.
So the no-boundary move buys you a clean geometry at the cost of making time's arrow a serious headache. Most people who invoke it don't fully reckon with that trade.
No comments:
Post a Comment