I can tell what someone's argument is from reading a few selecting phrases. That's why I often respond to key points only

I only read the important parts of replies. A car is not just a car but the mirrors exist in their own right as things. The whole doesn't supersede its parts. The only thing potential about them is that they can be noticed

A potential infinity can't just subsist. That's Aristotle's great error, who in his ignorance lead people to think that a whole only potentially has parts

If the series is infinite and each moment enfolds only to our consciousness, the fabric of the universe in it's eternal state would be infinite. The rock "now" and then "at another time" would each be all there at once so the universe, instead of being in the present, would be all at once infinite. Now you object to calling eternity an instant but how else would you describe it while keep it a temporal thing?

Finally, there is no "potential infinity" where there is no time. If we approach an infinite surface area and it is potentially infinite to our action then it is infinite in itself

Thanks for the reply. I don't think infinity is impossible in our universe. It just causes lots of paradoxes if not handled properly. I wish I knew the mathematics of infinity better because what could be for fascinating than comparing infinite sets!

Well you are wrong about Gabriel's horn. Infinite surface area with finite space within! How mind blowing. Whether this is how our universe is or if the universe has finite surface area is not known. Besides that though, an eternal instant is just my phrase for B Time. "Instant" keeps the element of time intact. An absolute flow of time is inconsistent with relativity as understood by Einstein. So if there is something objective here it would be an eternal moment and all it contains. I don't see a reason to posit anything absolute about time or space, so I stick with A Time, but my point still stands that if B Time is true and the series of past events is infinite, the universe would be infinite

I didn't say most Jews say Jesus was evil but that its possible that this is their most consistent position logically

Judaism might hold that Jesus was the Antichrist and got his power from Satan. Maybe Satan even gave Jesus his soul back in order to rise. Ancient miracle claims should be doubted though, and anyway we can't know where a miracle comes from

If the One is the divine nature and Nous his personhood, then our collective spirit is our social life. At least that is idealism and Plotinus. But we are also bodies. So there might be a paradox about ourselves in that we think we are purely individual but as much a part of society as owned by ourselves

No idea what that is.

No. For the divine the irrational is nothing

And who is your "we"? Islam? I imagine you living in Syria as a disreputed apologist for Islam, trying to win people with unwise arguments

He can do anything, Mr tricks at a bar, but irrational things are nothing

Well you keep insisting that omnipotence means god can do irrational thing. And you stare in amazement at people when they laugh at that. You are stuck in the mud on this point

The irrational is impotence for god so he can't do it.

Yep. You're not much of a philosopher

Of course. His nature is infinite, his will is infinite. They create each other in one simple being. But this creation is free and necessary, so the necessity of gods goodness requires only rational activity

Sartre said there are different versions of yourself out there, each one being the way people see you. I think that you are what others see

You're just saying gods nature is prior to his contradictions, and without evidence

Your interpretation of god's power is very strange and unorthodox. Most theists would call it insane. If god can do anything in your sense than maybe he never existed and that this is just a contradiction. And he damns theists and this is just a contradiction. He never ever was good and this is just a contradiction. He never was all powerful and this is just a contradiction. I don't believe in relativism in this sense. You are an absolute relativist and not a true believer in god. For some odd reason you think you are very clever for insisting that god can do contradictions but the majority of readers are going to think you're a nut

Well then you are in a strange world where science is doubted. Your finite female god with infinite thoughts and infinite power is not the Christian god

So god becomes evil and stays good at the same time (contradiction?) and in the end damns himself and the world while keeping the world and himself good?

You should know you are a moral relativist

First of all there is a difference between faith and living by probability

I'm not sure you are right. There are different types of infinities so an object might be infinite in some ways but not in others. I hear many physicists say that the universe can be infinite and bounded at the same time. There is Gabriel's Horn as well (something finite with an infinite surface area)

My personal opinion is that "A Time" is correct and that the past is not infinite because time is always slipping away. Talking about objective experience is hard because of all the ways we take up reality, construe, and interpret it. In a sense we feel, when we are honest with ourselves, that we construct the world. Experience is not "meant" on it own because it's hard to conceive what is purely given to us. We make our own self consciousness and choose ways of saying the world.

However, if time is objectively an eternal instant and infinite motions hold together frozen in that instant, it seems to me the series would be geometrically infinite. How to understand the infinite is hard nonetheless

It's unfortunate the word "block" is used in this regard. It immediately configures the mind in a certain way that might be hard to ignore when contemplating time. — jgill

Is time more often than not misunderstood?

I will let the millions of believers around the world, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists make the determination that their faith is 'no longer needed'. — FreeEmotion

I never said faith was always bad, first of all. It's just wishful thinking. Secondly, many Hindus and Buddhists don't believe in God

Believing in people is in no way comparable to believing in God. One is mental health, the other is wishful thinking

All knowledge is probable but science is accurate however much we are in an illusion. Time is a philosophical concept but physicists use it in a geometrical way. If we were cave men we could ask whether science works. But in this age we know it does because science has gone far far far beyond what could be pure luck. Is there a fairy fooling us? Science doesn't care about those questions

Time might the the activity of minds interacting in the society of their species. Physics makes sense to a degree even if time can only be between like minds.

I don't think it is right to rationally analyze a being we know nothing about. If it's a spiritual exercise it's ok but we can't know if this being exists, we can't know anything about abstractly, and we can't know if anyone can even really believe in such a being. This was Dawkins real point. God is not a scientific or a philosophical idea, it's a spiritual one, not useful when no longer needed. As for the science, we know the series of causes go back millions of years but if time is Absolute it might have happened in 6000 years. Science considers that philosophy, but the Bible is just one out of all the religious literature oral and written, and rejecting data because an old book àppears to contradict it is loony.

Come to think of it, time is relative, so how does it make sense to talk of time existing for 6000 or 14 billion years. We only know how *we* experience time

it does raise the continuum from the fundamentalist to the Gnostic, and funnily enough Elaine Pagels suggests that in their time the Gnostics were regarded as atheists. I have stood at many places on this continuum because I was raised as a Catholic, but looked at The Bible and Christianity from different angles. I remember when I was writing a dissertation on Carl Jung, I went to an evangelical church and a couple of people there told me that I should not study or write about Carl Jung. They were fundamentalist and regarded Jung's ideas as the work of the devil. — Jack Cummins

The Gnostics believed we had God within us, similar to the Atman/Brahmin thing in India. Jung shared this as well. That is why Christians, who believe in a literal father in heaven, don't like these more advanced methods of spirituality.

I also discovered a few years ago that my English teacher from school has written a book on the complex relationship between Catholicism, sex and psychology. — Jack Cummins

I don't think Christians are anti-sex at all. They think it should be in marriage only but dont people have a lot of sex in a marriage? The idea that having many partners in your life is a good goal is not consistent with most spiritual systems. Many groups in India say that sexuality is the first thing to have an awakening about before you can become more spiritual. That would apply to those in marriage as well who put their marital sex life as the center of their life. The problem in the West with non-Christians is primarily pornography and make it it into a Platonic ideal

Kierkegaard wrote "so it is the supreme passion of reason to seek a collision, though this collision must in one way or another prove its undoing." And Kant said "Human reason has this particular fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer"

Husserl and Heidegger unravel the concept of self-present identity. — Joshs

Heidegger and Husserl are underappreciated these days. This tradition though started with Kant. I think that Kant's first two antimonies were more a question for math and physics than philosophy. His last two though are the core of the Kantian paradox: we feel like we are free but that we impose freedom on ourselves by something determining us to. Do we create ourselves, and even the world, or is there someone else besides us pulling the strings? Descartes had a greater influence on Kant than people realize I think. Wasn't it Descartes's ontological argument that Kant was referring to in his criticism? Anyway most German philosophy after Kant has been trying to figure out our relationship with the world and with ourselves. These questions are true puzzles

The thing is Zeus might be God and the lesser gods could be each giving miracles to their favorite religions. There is no way to no. I've prayed much of my life but I realize now that I'm just talking to myself when I pray. I don't think God exists. Christians will blame the person who prays instead of the God who doesn't answer or exist and that is messed up. I don't mind Christians except when they say they can prove their faith is true. Many other religions make this claim too but I usually debate Christians because I've been Christian and am familiar with their theology

Great posts guys! I like the idea that we are throwness and that we are time. The two ideas are very similar actually. Things "that be" are affected by time and if we are time we are not separate from the world. Thus "being" is "phenomenal" and nothing ever is purely static or purely flux.

B&T end with Hegel. This is interesting because the first 4 sections of Phenomenology of Spirit (Sense, Perception, Understanding, Self-Consciousness) are a forerunner to what Heidegger stood for

So are there 3 positions?

1) being is source

2) being is knowledge

3) being is something else

If there are miracles, how can we ever know the source of them?

I live in California so I see a lot of the culture of buying all the new stuff and being attached to material possessions. I hear a lot that this is prevalent in the West but I don't travel much so yes all this is my opinion. To my eyes Abrahamic religions are attached to something that probably doesn't exist but attachment to things besides your own self worth can happen in any region or culture. I see non-Christian religions as often rather advanced because they don't cleave to something that might not exist, at least not as much.

Evolution is consistent with Catholic teaching and with it's methods of historical criticism when it comes to the Bible. I don't think Christian theology in general makes much literal sense but I was raised Catholic and am one culturally. Don't take my posts as those of a church going Catholic nevertheless. Regular Catholics believe they have a monopoly on truth and I don't believe what they believe in a literal sense