The hotelier says there aren't any vacancies, but that it isn't a problem. Then you rock up, looking for somewhere to stay. So there is a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and an infinite number of guests. William Lane Craig famously denounced the possibility of an actual infinite, using the Hilbert Hotel story to explain why. Others, perhaps more, think the idea of an infinite regress is balls to the wall crazy on the face of it. Some philosophers have pretty much taken your view. Also, there is an interesting article by Claude Gratton, who wrote an entire (very expensive) book on the subject of infinite regresses. In this case, the infinite regress is (arguably) not vicious.ĮDIT: if you have access to jstor, Peter Klein wrote an article on this called 'When Infinite Regresses are Not Vicious' in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66:3 (2003), focused on the regress of reasons in epistemology. the universe has no beginning), to point out that this produces an infinite regress isn't providing a counterexample to the argument, simply identifying one of its features. To take your example, let's say someone is arguing that causation is infinitely extended into the past (i.e. Not all infinite regresses are vicious, i.e. If Descartes could not provide at least one certain truth on which to base all others, he would be guilty of a vicious infinite regress which would have totally undermined his theory of knowledge. As such, he had to be able to provide a final answer to the question 'but how do you know?', and famously he used the cogito to do so. Take Descartes' foundational epistemology as an example, he wanted to base his theory of knowledge on certain knowledge. An infinite regress is a bad result if you are making a claim which ought to have some fundamental grounding. I am not arguing that infinite regress is real, just that it could have been, so it's wrong to dismiss it as an impossibility.Įdit changed the wording of one sentence.The reason that infinite regresses are generally seen as problematic is not a dislike of infinity in philosophy, it is the regress which is the problem. Meaning that even if the first graph seems to show causality better as we experience it, both graphics would be experienced equally by a human. (Duh, otherwise I wouldn't be atheists)įrom a human point of view, if we were in a universe that looked like the second graph we would experience an universe that is equal to the first graph. Knowing that time started expanding and does not go back infinitely, knowing that time is relative and that humans are not able to detect changes in the rate of time I think it's wrong to dismiss infinite regress as a possibility, I even see it way more probable than a creator. In this case, the same as before, each peak and low is caused by the previous one, but in this case we can't determinate a first cause, you could try to find the peak closer to 0, but you won't, there will be always a peak closer to 0. Let's look at the second graph I am presenting, sin(1/x). (Meaning that we can't detect when time expands/contracts) What's constant is human experience of time. The problem is that time is not a constant, we know this, so this model would be wrong, since it assumes time is constant. If time started at some point, it must mean that there was indeed a first cause right? Using this graph to represent causality/time makes it seem obvious that infinite regress of causality in a limited time is impossible. I think this is a great example to explain how we experience causality in a visual way. Each peak is 'caused' by the previous low, and each low is 'caused' by the previous peak. The mathematical parallel I am using for the theist position human experience of causality is the function y=sin(x). I like to use images to try to get my point across, I think they do a good job in this case.
This is not a 1:1 model, I'm sorry I'd you feel like I am misrepresenting your position. Math graphics will be used as parallelism, this is a link to the 2 functions I will use. A lot of theist arguments tend to discard infinite regress as an obvious impossibility, I am presenting an argument arguing that is indeed possible.
0 kommentar(er)
