@Coolduude conclusion
This all leads me to my promised “other way.”
Picking up on the space-time continuum issue of a few days ago, it seems that while the space-time continuum concept cannot work as evidence for your argument, it can be used for mine, at least as an analogy. If time itself were to be considered as a continuum, and therefore indivisible, then the past would depend on the vantage point of the observer. Move the observation point and voila! there would be a different past, longer from his point of view, but not by successive addition, because the observer could move the other way and shorten the past.
Nonsense you say. I tend to agree with that judgment. But that is pretty much what the popular pseudoscientific idea is. All you have to do is read a lot of the stuff on this blog. Beware of anyone who talks of “the space-time continuum” because he thinks of it as a thing rather than one of several space-time continua models for looking at the universe from different observation points. I get the feeling that a lot of people who drop in here don’t even read good science fiction, much less something as reputable as Scientific American.
All this doesn’t mean that modern scientific and mathematics are wrong. It just means that you don’t need to deal with scientific theories to deal with this category error. I think it is perfectly sensible to say that to consider the past as a “thing” meaningfully separable from the context of time in general is to reify it invalidly. The past is only the past from the observation point of the observer’s present. Ditto the future. What used to be the present doesn’t exist anymore. The actuality of the past doesn’t exist anymore. If you can’t subtract from it, or alter it, you can’t add to it in the same sense of creation, any more than you can add more to the present. And that fact alone should probably be convincing. If time were an “addable by successive addition thing” why could you not add to “nowness,” to the “present” without reference to the future? If time is a concept rather than a thing among other “things” then the answer is simple: ”the present is the observer’s reference point.” If it is a thing, in the same sense as any other created thing, and not “just” an idea, you will have to be able to explain why the present, the “now” between past and future, is simply not subject to the laws of successive addition. “Now” cannot be more “now” or less “now,” it is simply “now.”
Another query. If time is finite, and subject to the laws of successive addition, then the past must be getting larger while the future shrinks with each passing moment; doesn’t that fact mean that since “actually created things” are subject to the laws of successive addition, and the “now” of time is not subject to the laws of successive addition, does all that not mean that the present itself, the “now,” is not an actually created thing, and somehow un-actual compared to the past or future. This arrant nonsense is not what you intend, of course. But it is hidden there in the way you’ve phrased this premise and it’s waiting to bite you.
What is not nonsense is the idea that time does not exist in the same way that a carrot growing in a garden exists. That it can be looked at and described mathematically as a continuum from different points of view without reference to addition is a fact almost by definition today. It can be considered infinite by itself in mathematics. Your argument needs to confront both those ways of thinking about time and your premise needs to show the modern concept of time to be wrongheaded. In theory I suppose that it’s possible to do so. But to do it you will have to think hard about your own assumptions and question them as hard or harder than your opponents will. That’s one of the reasons why philosophy is not for sissies. Shoot from the hip on the blogs and you wind up with sophistry, not philosophy. End of rant.
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Myself, I am lazy I suppose and quantum mechanics and string theory hurt my head. I love Thomas Aquinas in part because he is a very practical thinker. And easy to deal with as far as Science goes. St Augustine somewhere says in effect that when we look into the water from a boat a perfectly straight oar looks bent not because it is bent, and not because our eyes lie to us. The fact is, he says, that because the oar is in water it is supposed to look bent. He had noticed what a modern would call refraction of light in water and drew a sound conclusion. Not that our eyes lie to us, but that our understanding of what happens in optics is limited.
Thomas, I think, would be happy to concede to math and physics their proper provinces today, so long as they are logical and don’t overdraw conclusions and run beyond the realm of the measurable. It would be perfectly acceptable to him to think of time as a human concept internal to man and therefore created, not directly by god but as part of the hard-wiring of man’s understanding of his own existence. In this context as I said a couple weeks ago God would not be the direct but the proximate cause of time in Thomist terms. Revealed Truth would still indicate that time will ultimately end with end of man, and that it began during creation, but it would still be a fact that physics and math and whatever other science is properly interested in the issue can still treat it however they wish because they speak only of the measureable universe and the way things appear to their eyes and instruments. One notes that sometimes in physics time can be treated as finite, sometimes as infinite. And Newtonian physics was not superseded or replaced by Einstein but still exists usefully. It is still the truth of everyday engineering, for instance. Properly so, both Thomas and St Augustine (who so often differ) would say.