Expansion of and Objections to Premises 4 and 5

Objections to Premises 4 and 5

Premises 4 and 5 are quite closely related. If you want the expanded form of this packet of reasoning, please click here. Now to the objections:

Objection 1 [The most common objection]: You are defining time to be what you want. Who knows what time is or whether it passes?
Reply 1: No; time has been defined in accordance with the way it in fact is, not the other way around. We do not say that time consists of a past, present and future just because we define it that way! This would be like what the unthinking multitude says about abortion: it is alright as long as we define the fetus as not being a person. Again, it is like the old excuses for slavery of blacks: they were not defined as humans. No, the self-evident reality comes first. "Who knows if time passes?" If you ask this, pretend then that time is not passing from the past to the future. Since the future is not coming, your future meals are not coming; stop eating. Since no more hours are being added to your day and past events get no more distant, you will no doubt never get hungrier. In reality, when you begin to starve from not eating, perhaps you will be persuaded that you know that the things said here about time are undeniably true.

Obj 2: The timeline seems equal to the numberline, and he present moment may be said to correspond to number 0 (though we could choose another point on the line). Therefore if the numberline can progress backwards (in negative numbers) to infinity, so can the timeline. The past may have had no beginning.
Re 2: The timeline is analagous to the numberline, but cannot be equated with it. Two differences refute the objection. First, see if you can multiply A.D. 1980 by B.C. 540. Time and numbers are extremely different. This takes care of the basis of the objection. Secondly, when we consider a numberline with negative numbers, we must start at 0 and progress backwards. But in the case of time, history only progresses forwards (cf. Obj. 5 if you disagree). So again, just as there is an infinite space between negative infinity and 0 on the numberline, there is infinite time between an infinite past and now. It would have taken forever to progress to now, and this forever could not have passed, by definition.

Obj 3: Time is proven to be relative, according to relativity theory in twentieth century physics.
Re 3: What I have said about time is no more than what is self-evident to us. The truth of it is quite unaffected by theories of physics, put either mathematically or more obscurely.
Further, to assert time's relativity is only to describe how fast time passes in one situation in comparison to another. So the passage of time in one situation is measured by its passage in another. But time is still time; the notions of and interaction between past, present and future are not destroyed, nor is the notion of passage of time lost; indeed it is required and assumed. So there is no objection from time's relativity.

Obj 4: "A cyclical theory of history explains things as well as your argument. A universe is born, it lives, and then it dies; this happens over and over again. And such theories abound, such as the recurring Big Bang-Big Crunch theory, and the Eastern Mystical Samsara."
Re 4: History seems to repeat itself in the periodic assertion of the adequacy of the theory of cyclical universes. Well, if universes live and die one after the other, the question remains whether the past is of infinite duration. The objection only asserts that time in the past is infinite using the language of some well-known hypotheses. But to merely contradict steps four and five of this argument is not a way to argue logically. What proves that the cyclical theory is even possible? Where is the resulting absurdity of an infinite past dealt with? The past could not have been eternal, for the reasons given.

Obj 5: "Perhaps time will someday travel backwards! Indeed, world-renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote that if the universe begins to stop expanding and contract, time will be reversed:

[P]eople in the contracting phase would live their lives backwards. They would die before they were born and get younger as the universe got small again. Eventually, they would disappear back into the womb.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion, p. 163.

You may have to give up this notion of the progression of time.

Re 5: Are the past centuries are determined by the future?! Or is it that the past will become the future although it hasn't yet? Or is the future perhaps our past, already?! These are self-contradictory. In the case of physics, it is now being admitted that this was in no way to be the case. inaccurate. Thus Hawking writes later,

I had made a mistake . . . . Time will not reverse direction when the universe begins to contract. People will continue to get older, so it is no good waiting until the universe recollapses to return to our youth.

Ibid., p. 167

No, the progression of time I speak of is basic and self-evident, even if we do not know everything about time.

Obj 6: "But around singularities and black holes, time stands still, the gravity is so powerful."
Re 6: If time there stood still, it would follow that all things happen here infinitely fast relative to the singularity or black hole, which is a dead-end of more galactic proportions than a black hole. For "infinitely fast" motion is an oxymoron. It means timeless motion, which is absurd. Motion is a type of change, and change needs time to occur in, or else it is not really change, is it? Besides which, the speed of light in that part of space is still constant (about 300,000,000 cm/s) according to all our physicists, and one cannot have velocity without time passing.

Obj 7:Again, Dr. Stephen Hawking theorizes:

[S]pace and time [at the beginning of the universe] were finite in extent but were closed up on themselves without boundaries or edges, just as the surface of the earth is finite in area but but doesn't have boundaries or edges. . .
In real time, there are only two possibilities: either time continues back into the past forever, or time has a beginning at a singularity. . . But one can also consider another direction of time at right angles to real time. This is called the imaginary direction of time. [It is called imaginary because its calculations involve the "imaginary numbers," namely square roots of negative numbers]. . . In imaginary time, there would be no . . . edge of the universe at which one would have to appeal to God. The universe would be neither created nor destroyed. It would just be. . . So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a Creator. But if the universe is really self-contained, what place then for a Creator?

A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion, p. 121, 132, 140)

Re 7: Hawking here (as elsewhere) employs an unusual meaning of "time," which he calls "imaginary time." This time really refers to a dimension of space, as is indicated first in his saying that time and space were thought to "close up on each other" just like the boundaries of the earth into its spherical shape. It is indicated a second time where he said it was a dimension at "right angles" to the dimension of real time. Therefore he is not speaking of "time" in its ordinary sense, which is what we are discussing. I fully accept Hawking's position that in this "imaginary time, there would be no edge . . . at which one would have to appeal to God." We are talking about real time. There is the edge and appeal to God. And as for real time, he does indeed posit a real beginning, which imaginary time still doesn't explain: "If the no boundary proposal is correct, . . . I still don't know why it [the universe] began." (ibid., pp. 121-122). His texts do not object to our argument.

Obj 8: Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Passage is always understood as being from term to term. Whatever by-gone day we choose, from it to the present day there is a finite number of days which can be traversed... [The kind of argument which Wadel puts forward] is founded on the idea that, given two extremes, there is an infinite number of mean terms." (S.T. Q 46, a. 2)
Re 8: This fails in three ways. First, the passage of time can be understood not only from exactly one point of time to exactly one other point, but just as well from any number of points to any number of points, at any distance(s) from one another. Otherwise, we could not comprehend the very notion of the progression of history from an infinitely long time ago to this moment. But we do understand it. Further, calculus itself would be impossible if motion to or from an infinite number of points were incomprehensible or impossible. The objection fails.
Secondly, my argument is not founded upon the infinity of mean terms betweem two exact extreme points. Rather, Aquinas' objection is founded upon it, in that his case is in part founded upon there being exactly two points of time between which which there is motion.
Thirdly, if the time that constitutes the past stretches back infinitely, then time existed and progressed, infinitely long ago. And since that time was made up of days (or seconds, or any other period of time we should choose), then some days passed infinitely long ago. The "bygone day we choose" could, then, could be one which occurred infinitely long ago. His rebuttal, then, fails thrice.

If you have further objections, please email me.

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