Did you or anyone view Stephen Hawking on television last night(Sunday)? This was a programme for non-physicists. Hawking summed up (much of his argument involved black holes and anti-matter)by saying that the universe's beginning was not in time but that the beginning of the universe was the beginning of time. So, according to Hawking,the universe is cause of itself, and is not infinite but began.davidm wrote: ↑Sun Nov 26, 2017 6:58 pm Time, Change and Freedom
A free online book that I discovered yesterday and then read all the way through. It touches on virtually everything that has been discussed in this thread, in some detail. It agrees with me. Logical determinism, theological determinism and causal determinism pose no threat to free will. Distinctions made between libertarian and compatibilist free will. Note especially Dialogue 2, which concerns the possibility of an actually infinite past. Not only does it agree with me that such a past is possible, but it explains in some detail why this is so (similar to my explanations but much more fleshed out). To reiterate, ICan’s argument that there must be a first cause, because there cannot be an infinite past, has utterly collapsed.
Bear in mind, to say that there is an infinite past, is not to say that there is an infinitely past event. It is to say, rather, that there are an infinite number of finitely past events.
The programme contained an illustration of anti-matter as follows: a man with a spade went to flat ground to dig a hill. As the hill grew so grew the empty hole from which earth has been extracted. This illustration reminded me of Yin and Yang which are the two pillars of existence itself.