GDR writes:
I’m going to copy this over from what I wrote on another thread a while back concerning who created God. The same objection keeps coming up on different threads so this is actually the third time I've posted this.
In "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, (one of my favourite books), he writes the following after talking about how we only experience time in one direction, and that we would expect there to be a law that confirms this.
quote:
"The perplexing thing is that no one has discovered any such law. What's more, the laws of physics that have been articulated from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up to until today, show a complete symmetry between past and future. Nowhere in any of these laws do we find a stipulation that they apply one way in time but not the other. Nowhere is there any distinction between how the laws look or behave when applied in either direction in time. The laws treat what we call past and future on a completely equal footing."
It seems that our current understanding of the laws of physics indicate that theoretically it should be possible to exist by either going forward or back in time.
Greene raises this point so he can later explain why it
*isn't* possible to go either direction in time. If you continue reading past page 145 and on through the section on entropy that begins on page 151 you'll understand why time can't flow in either direction. Sure, some equations like f=ma work equally well in either time direction, but the universe obeys
*all* its laws (including entropy), not just some of them.
This alone would allow for an infinite existence.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise (which was wrong anyway), and time doesn't need to extend infinitely in both directions to be infinite. The set of positive integers is infinite, even though it has a beginning point.
--Percy