You don't seem to tell the difference between eternal and everlasting. Creation is timeless and eternity is timeless therefore eternity is not sequential as for infinite regress.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Sep 13, 2021 4:59 pmWell, you only have two possibilities.
One is that the natural world is eternal...because it was created from something, which was created from something, which was created from something...and so on, forever. But the problems with that suggestion are so massive as to be insurmountable; because if there always has to be "something before" everything else, then there is an infinite regress of required causes -- which means that the natural world never gets started at all.
That's mathematical and certain. It's not something that depends on anybody's opinion. An infinite regress of causes never can start, because the starting point is lost in the infinite regress of the past. There never can be a "starting point" at all. And hence, there can never be a "today" either.
But there is a "today." So the universe is not the result of an infinite chain of causes. Period. QED. End of story.
There is only one other possibility: that the universe HAS a starting point, which means it was created out of nothing -- since positing any prior cause to that point subjects us to an infinite regress of prior causes again.
The upshot is that we have to arrive at an eternal entity of some kind causing things to exist. And those things have to have been made out of something that did not exist causally. There's no other possibility.
So we know that ex nihilo has to be right.
God is said to be eternal which means timeless so there is no past, no present, and no future. Time does not exist except as a mental aberration among humans who like to parcel things up into useful quantities. Everything is contained within God, or the Absolute which many people prefer.
Eternity: no past, no present, no future, no beginning, no end. It is causeless; it simply is. Next question , the big one, is "Why is there anything?"
Your first cause argument relies upon time sequence and that is why it's logically unsound.