Not in an infinite space. — Banno

But matter is appearing in every possible place in the universe - Big Bangs are occurring all over through natural processes. It does not matter if space is infinite, it still reaches infinite density everywhere if time is infinite.

IT would be simple to take this argument's logic and show that there are no integers. Assume there is no first integer. Then there cannot be any next integer... — Banno

No you cannot do that; there is a first integer.

I've quoted the relevant part below:

The ontological doctrine, P, requires supplementation. Consider, for example, a possible world, w, at which the growing block theory of time is true. At the first moment of w, P is true. There exists only the first moment and that moment is present; there are no other moments, and so the past hasn’t yet come to exist. Later on, it will become clear that w isn’t a presentist world, even though it seems initially to satisfy P: at the first moment, only present things exist. For this reason, when being more forthcoming with a definition of their view, moving beyond mere slogan, presentism might more perspicuously be rendered as a view that is always true, if true at all (Crisp 2003: 215, 2004: 19, fn.6, 2007: 107, n.1). So, presentism amounts to the claim that:

(PA) Always, only present things exist.

I do not assume a first cause. All the points in the OP are numbered or lettered.

If you would be kind enough to point to where I assume a first cause?

No, I'm referring to the general style of arguing from any sort of first principle to a self-serving conclusion. They are examples of confirmation bias, not of philosophy. If you assume there is a first cause, it will not be surprising that you can conclude, validly, that there is a first cause. But no one else need agree with you. They are dreadful arguments. — Banno

I was not trying to reach a self-serving conclusion - I am not religious. I'm just trying to discover the truth.

Aquinas did not assume a first cause; he argued from cause and effect to a first cause. I do not assume a first cause or even cause and effect in my arguments. Why do you say a first cause has been assumed?

That's just repeating the same assertion. It's not proof — Luke

1. The effect is in the present
2. The cause must exist
3. The cause must come prior to the effect
4. So 'prior to now' must have existed.

Presentists don't need to accept the assumption about past existence - it's not part of presentism — Luke

I think thats a debatable statement, see here for example:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presentism/

Let''s say I don't accept your assertion that the present would not exist unless the past did exist. How are you going to prove that? — Luke

I think you could say that every effect in the present has a cause in the past else it would not exist so therefore the past must have existed.

"Only now always existed" is grammatically incorrect and incoherent, combining both present and past tenses.. It attempts to refer to a past tense existence of the present moment ("existed"). The present moment does not exist in the past, by definition. — Luke

Point taken. What I mean is: does the state 'only now exists' apply to the past, IE did 'only then exist' in the past if you see what I mean. Because if 'only now exists' applies to all time then there cannot be a start of time (because that would be creation from nothing).

It is a fact that entropy increases with time so with infinite time we should have maximum entropy. We are clearly not at maximum entropy; the universe is very organised.

It is possible that entropy 'resets' somehow (eg a Big Crunch) so these types of infinite time models cannot be ruled out with the entropy argument.

"A start of time" is an essential to where you want to go — Frank Apisa

It's more I'm after the truth than I want to go in a specific direction: the weight of evidence seems to point to a start of time.

Never heard the term 'presentism.' Does such a thing exist if our biology requires a small lag time in our experience of 'now' in essence turning into 'then?' — julian kroin

Welcome to the forum. Only now is real =presentism is what most people believe I think. Contrast to eternalism (past present and possibly future all real depending on which type of eternalism). I think any biological delay in sensing now does not rule out presentism.

have this thought; entropy explains everything (though I 'm not privy to that explanation) — julian kroin

You are referring to the question of whether entropy is a result of time or time is a result of entropy? I tend to think the first; entropy is a result of cause and effect which is a result of time.

The low entropy of the universe points to a start of time which would rule out presentism.

If you believe the past did exist then you believe it no longer does exist and that it therefore does not exist. — Luke

The past does not exist but it provably did exist (else the present would not exist). From the fact the past did exist and from 'only now exists' we reach 'only now always existed'. Unless you are saying 'only now exists' now but 'only now exists' did not apply at some point in the past. In general, it seems the laws of physics are time independent so it seems an odd stance.

Presentism and eternalism are about temporal existence. A creator outside of temporal existence doesn't count as a temporal existent. — Luke

What would the nature of a creator outside temporal existence be? What would his relationship to time be? Would he see all of time in one go (eternalism)? Or would he just see now? If he just sees now, in what sense is he outside temporal existence?

"All time" for a presentist is only the present moment. If a presentist were to also believe in the existence of the past and the future, then they would be an eternalist. — Luke

There is a distinction:

- You believe the past exists
is different from
- You believe the past did exist.

Most presentist would not deny the 2nd? And if the past did exist, the conclusion is that the past must have always existed, IE no start of time.

don't know, maybe your timeless creator of time came before it. What came before E if it has a start? — Luke

Then that would mean it is not presentism - because something timeless IE other than only now exists.

Presentism makes no claims about the existence of the past. It is your assumption that the past has existed. Only the present moment exists according to presentism. — Luke

Presentism claims that 'only now exists'. That can be qualified as a statement that is:

- True for all time.
- Not true for all time.

If you take the first assumption above which I thought all presentist did, then you arrive at the natural conclusion that there can be no start of time (because 'only now always exists')

Your reference to an infinite regress appears to reveal your assumption that presentism entails not only the existence if the present moment but also the existence of the past. But that is not presentism. — Luke

The fact that the past HAS existed means there WAS an infinite regress. The past does not need to still exist... even if the past does not exist then we still know there WAS an infinite regress.

Only the present moment exists (P)

Past, present and future moments all exist (E)

There is either a start to P or not, and there is equally either a start to E or not. Why should this count for or against one but not the other? — Luke

But if there is a start of P, what came before it, bearing in mind nothing else exists apart from P?

Your reference to an infinite regress appears to reveal your assumption that presentism entails not only the existence if the present moment but also the existence of the past. But that is not presentism. — Luke

So you would hold that presentism is:

- 'only now exists'
- At some point in the past it was the case that not 'only now exists'

That is an unusual form of presentism. Care to elaborate?

My argument for why there is a start of time is given here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5302/an-argument-for-eternalism/p1

Fair to say not everyone agrees with me... it is only an argument.

Please remember that the 50%/50% step can be placed at the end of the calculation rather than the start (it makes no difference). It can therefore be seen as splitting the remaining % unbiasedly AFTER hearing all the evidence (instead of starting at a neutral point BEFORE hearing the evidence).

For other questions like this, though, I'd simply make no assumption whatsoever, because there's insufficient information. There's certainly no way to assign probabilities to something for which we have no information, no frequency data — Terrapin Station

If you make no assumptions, you get no answers. I would like an answer so I choose to make assumptions.

If there was a start of time, there must be something 'other' to cause the start of time. And that 'other' must be timeless.

I thought you were arguing the opposite — Luke

I'm arguing for a combination of both a start of time and eternalism.

Why can't presentism have this too? — Luke

The definition of presentism is 'only now exists'. If something other than 'only now exists' then presentism (the vanilla definition anyway) can't hold.

Note that the 'something other than now' has to be timeless (else we end up in an infinite regress) which further implies that presentism cannot hold (the timeless cannot have a sense of now; the timeless would have to see all 'nows' simultaneously, hence some kind of eternalism rather than presentism).

What I am doing is taking inductive statements like 'blood on the shirt makes it likely he was guilty' and fitting % numbers to them. This does indeed need some estimation and is not exact.

If you think about what your mind would do in a court case as you are presented with evidence, subconsciously it would perform a similar process: blood on the shirt so that makes him a little more likely guilty, prints on the knife so that makes him a lot more likely and so on.

That is all I am doing with my calculation; I estimate % likelihood for each piece of evidence on its own and then combine the results.

The creation of the universe isn't, so sometimes deductive argument is needed to create an epistemological conclusion; a conclusion that is not driven by mathematical principle, but by rational reasoning. — SethRy

Even if we had a deductive proof demonstrating creation of the universe; would anyone 100% trust it? The first cause argument is meant to be that; it uses only cause and effect as an axiom, yet not many people place 100% trust in it. So even in the presence of a deductive proof, there would still be a need for a meta-analysis to combine the evidence from the deductive proof with other available (empirical etc...) evidence.

But there's no epistemic justification for assuming a 50/50 split on the question of whether someone committed a murder in that case. There would be no justification for assigning any probability to it whatsoever. — Terrapin Station

If you had to make an assumption without evidence, would you assume he is definitely guilty, definitely innocent, or somewhere in-between?

That alone, is pure evidence that an epistemic is absent, as we are looking for an answer without numbers, without involving statistics — SethRy

Well that relates to what degree you regard inductive evidence as true knowledge. Once you get beyond 1+1=2 nearly everything we know, we know inductively. Are we brains in vats? We answer no inductively. I don't see that we will ever get very fair without induction/statistics.

'Did the murderer do it?' is a good example. In absence of statistics for how many people in court actually come out guilty, we'd start by assuming it is 50% likely that the accused is guilty and then modify that estimate as we hear the evidence for/against.

Say there was blood on his shirt. We might say that makes it 25% likely (on its own) that the accused is guilty. So the revised estimate is: 50% + 50% * 25% = 62.5%. And so on for any other evidence we have for/against the accused.

Another example would be 'is there life on Mars?'. Before taking in any evidence about our knowledge of the solar system and the kinds of places life can tolerate, it would be correct to start by assuming a 50% probability of life. We could then adjust this up/down in the light of the various evidence we have about Mars. For example, Mars has water so adjust upwards by an amount.

My justification is inductive from everyday experience. Questions that are boolean and that have an underlying boolean sample space, have in my experience not come out to be all 100% yes or all 100% no. I can't claim I know the exact number of boolean questions in my life that have come out as yes versus no but the most reasonable assumption is to assume 50% yes 50% no.

So when I am confronted with a new boolean question on which I have no evidence, I would start at 50% likelihood it is true.

...is the fact that we know the distribution of answers to unknown boolean questions is definitely not 100/0 or 0/100. We know that boolean questions have distribution spaces for their answers. We know that distributions on average follow the normal distribution. So therefore we know that choosing 50%/50% is statistically the most likely correct thing to do.

If 'only now exists' and you take away the 'only now' you are left with nothing. Creation ex nihilo without time is then required, which is impossible. So with presentism it is impossible for time to start.

I should qualify that type of eternalism I'm talking about assumes that there is something 'timeless' that caused the start of time. That timeless thing is beyond cause and effect so does not need creating in itself - it is timeless, eternal, it just IS.

This is the only way out of the infinite regress of creators (or one single creator in an infinite regress of time) - you have to assume something is timeless else the buck never stops anywhere.

But we have information on the distribution of answers to unknown boolean questions; we know its definitely not 100/0 or 0/100.

'Only now exists' and 'there is a start of time' are incompatible views
— Devans99

How? — Luke

If 'only now exists' and 'there was a start of time', what was there to cause the start of time? There is nothing; not even time, not a single quantum fluctuation, in existence before the start of time to cause it. So this is not just creation ex nihilo, this is creation ex nihilo without time too - which is surely impossible?

So the view 'only now exists' implies that 'only now always existed' IE no start of time with presentism.

Which is completely arbitrary with respect to what's the case without their being any epistemological justification for two options being equally likely. — Terrapin Station

I thought the justification given here was adequate:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/270560

Most things follow the normal distribution. And if we were to take all know distributions and do a weighted average of them into a meta-distribution, I would warrant it would look normal too. So 50%/50% is not arbitrary; it is optimal in statistical terms.

I think that we lead our lives on the principal that induction/statistics yields true results. We can be 100% sure of virtually nothing so we rely on induction/statistics: should I get on that plane today? The last one did not crash so I guess it's OK... induction/statistics.

I think therefore we can extend induction/statistics to provide an answer to many questions that are not amenable to the deductive method. I Admit with questions like the origin of the universe, any inductions we make have a wide margin of error.

I am roughly speaking agnostic leaning in the direction of deism.

Yes I'm just arguing for a creator, not God (it's not my OP).

For a god/entity's existence, there is not, hence the conclusion; your mathematical statement has no epistemic justification. — SethRy

There are two possible states: either the universe was created or it was not (I am not arguing for God's existence, just creation of the universe).

Say you have a proposition X for which you truely have no evidence for. In fact you do not even know what the proposition is, only that it has a boolean outcome. Would you assume:

1. 100% certain that X is true?
2. 100% certain that X is false?
3. 50% certain that X is true/false?

So the question is, what is the distribution of answers for boolean questions for which we have no evidence for? It would be most remiss to choose 1 or 2 as that goes against our experience with boolean questions. It is best, in the absence of any other evidence, to assume a normal boolean distribution and to therefore to assume 50%/50%.

So for the question 'is there a creator?' we should assume 50% yes, 50% (as a starting point before weighing the evidence for/against).

It just doesn't make any sense anymore. There is no epistemic justification behind the 50/50 argument of God's existence, — SethRy

Thats not what I'm arguing for. I'm saying 'was the universe created?', that is not the same question as 'Is there a God?'. I think the 2nd is not a 50/50 proposition if you include attributes like omnipotence in your definition of God.

You simply can't calculate the beginning of the universe by starting at 50/50 with no epistemic justification and having a basis solely because there are two factors — SethRy

Yes there is epistemic justification. If you truly have no evidence either way then you have to assume 50/50. If I were to toss a coin 100 times, what would you assume the outcome would be? The best assumption, in the absence of any other evidence, is 50 heads / 50 tails. I fail to see how you can argue otherwise.

I agree with him. Really. More than one person thinks your calculations are flawed; and I know conforming to utilitarian principles is not always right, but this time it might be. — SethRy

More than one person does not understand my calculation I would say.

Analyse it this way, if it's 50/50 for both suppositions or; extremes, then it is also 50/50 for me to walk down the street, and encounter a case of gold, or I do not. — SethRy

It's not a 50/50 proposition - we know the distribution of cases of gold is very low - you are taking into account evidence against the proposition implicitly.

If you look at the proposition 'was the universe created?', it contains no 'built in' evidence as too whether the answer is yes or no, so 50%/50% is the correct assumption.

Well it does not matter mathematically whether you do the 50% allowance as a first step in the analysis or as a last step, the calculation comes out the same.

If you do not accept my method, how else would you perform a meta-analysis for proposition X when you have inductive statements A, B and C that each tell you something about the truth of X? How do you go about combining the % likelihood that A, B, C, imply X into one overall % likelihood of the probability of X?

I can see no other valid method apart from the one I'm using.

I think you can object on philosophical grounds that one should not take a position for/against a proposition without evidence.

But if you look at my method, 50% is just the starting point for the probability analysis; I then adjust that number up/down as I take into account evidence for/against the proposition.

So if you look at the first step in my probability analysis, it looks 'philosophically questionable', but if you look at the analysis as a whole, it should make sense.

i would agree that absolute truth can rarely be found using discrete mathematics or boolean algebra — James Statter

If you have a proposition X and also propositions Y and ~Y then you can prove X is absolutely false if you can show:

X AND Y = false
X AND ~Y = false

Then by exhaustion of the probability space, we can absolutely conclude that X is false. Note that we have not used any axioms to prove that X is false so it is 'absolute knowledge'.

The actual process of proving X AND Y = false, X AND ~Y = false might introduce other axioms though so we might not end up with pure 'absolute knowledge'.

Seems to me that there is an assumption here that logic tells the universe what to do. I don't think it works that way. Rather, we choose a logic - a language or grammar - that best suits what the universe does. — Banno

I think there is an assumption in my argument that the universe won't do anything deeply illogical or magical. I think you will find the same assumption is used very extensively in science and in our everyday lives. Without this 'no magic' axiom, we would have made little progress in science.

So the line of philosophising that you adopt is fraught with potential error. A better way, the physicist way, is to find a language that describes what is going on... to do experiments and theorise using mathematical models that suit what you see — Banno

I've given a theoretical argument; its true some empirical evidence is needed to back it up. I can point to the Big Bang; time slows down the closer we get to the Big Bang; so that looks like supporting empirical evidence for a start of time. We then can look at the low entropy nature of our universe and take that too as evidence for a start of time. It would be better to have more empirical evidence than this but it is hard to collect empirical evidence for something that happened 14 billion years ago.

The style of argument you use in this OP - and elsewhere - is that adopted by medieval monks to show that God exists. Just as with those arguments, no one was convinced except the monks. — Banno

You are referring to the prime mover / first cause arguments of St Thomas Aquinas? These arguments have stood the test of time. I believe they are still valid: once you allow that quantum fluctuations lead to infinite density so are impossible as a cause of the universe then cause and effect is back as an axiom and so there is no reason to doubt the prime mover / first cause argument except in its general abstractness. It shows there must logically be a first cause. That it not the same thing as demonstrating the existence of God I grant.

An odd way to phrase it - 'always existed'? That's not how presentism is typically defined — Luke

Presentism is usually defined as 'only now exists'. 'Only now exists' and 'there is a start of time' are incompatible views (IE what then caused the start of time?) so that implies that presentism also means 'only now always existed'.

What infinite regress? Where is your reasoning or argument for this "requirement" of presentism? — Luke

If 'only now always existed' then we have an infinite regress in time; an infinite regress of events stretching back forever.

Starting at any value would be completely arbitrary, wouldn't it? — Terrapin Station

Starting any any value other than 50%/50% would be arbitrary. Its optimal to assign 50%/50% - no bias at all for/against the proposition.

If the present is considered to be the origin of one's spatio-temporal coordinate space, then there is no reason to consider past eternity to be any more complete than future eternity. — sime

I think the nature of eternity varies depending upon the model of time:

1. Presentism. Then there is a distinct difference between past and future eternities; the former being complete.
2. Growing block (past and present real). Again distinct difference between past and future eternities; the former being complete.
3. Block universe ((pas, present and future real). Then as you point out, both past as present eternities would be complete.

The same is also true of certain models of cosmology, for example the Hawking-Hartle Model that does not single out any point of space-time as being the unique causal-origin. — sime

I read up on this a little, came away somewhat confused. It seems as though the model has a temporal start in 'real' time but no temporal start in 'imaginary' time? What that means I'm not too sure. What is the justification for treating time as a complex number when it seem to behave as a scaler dimension I wonder.

So the problems begin there. What would be the epistemological basis for saying it's 50/50 at any point? — Terrapin Station

The idea is for a boolean question like 'was the universe created?' that we start at 50%/50% yes/no before considering any evidence. Then we modify that value up/down in the light of the evidence. So imagine if you were tossing a coin. You'd start at 50% heads / 50% tails as a guess as to how often it would come up... its the same thing for any question before evidence is admitted. If I then told you the coin was weighted to heads, that would count as evidence and you would change the estimate (eg to 90% heads). This is the mechanism my calculation employs.

I'm not sure where else you can start except 50%/50%:

- We could start by assuming 0% but that would be showing a bias towards the universe not being created.
- We could start at 100% but that would be showing a bias towards the universe being created.
- So its correct to start at 50%/50%, equidistant between the two extremes.

I'd argue that matter cannot exist forever; see points 1-6 in the OP.

I give more arguments against the possibility of 'infinite existence' here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5242/infinite-being/p1