desdamona writes:
Yes,but do you understand that there had to be a first?
No, there doesn't have to have been a first anything. Let me illustrate with gman's
post #8 in this thread:
gman writes:
If we assume that time actually exists as we perceive it to exist, (A linear series of events moving from past to future) then time must have a starting point. Otherwise we would never have reached the present moment because an infinite number of events would have already happened in the past...and infinity can't end.
This demonstrates a certain naivete of relativity theory and the various ways of describing infinities. There is nothing irrational about the idea of an infinite number of temporal moments in our past because time is not discrete -- it's continuous (think: space-time
continuum). All continuous intervals are infinite, even if they are bounded. The last hour had an infinite number of temporal moments in it, and so did the last minute, and the last second for that matter. Even so, there's no rule that says infinite sets cannot have a least or greatest element. The points on a closed continous interval comprise an infinite set with BOTH a greatest and least element, for example.
The argument that an infinite number of temporal moments cannot have passed for the reason that "infinities don't end" is easily overcome by some elementary training in set theory.