Is the position that time has extended infinitely into the past logically untenable?

Question

On the basis that "if the past was infinite, then enough time hasn't passed yet to reach the present."

Answer 1

If the universe had a beginning, then so did the time that pertains to said universe.  It is an element of said universe.

Answer 2

time is an illusion that you took on when you were born.  you are an infinite being with a memory problem, and everything that ever was, still is, and always will be.  entropy is a fallacy.  quanta which seem to pop in and out of existence in microseconds are just as infinite as the sun and a turtle.  if you were able to travel back in time 63 billion years or cross the universe instantaneously, you would see how meaningless that watch you wear really is.  the reality of the universe does not correspond to Swiss train schedules; things just don't co-ordinate together that way.    

Answer 3

"if the past was infinite" means you can go back into the past at any point.

"enough time hasnt passed to reach present" you go the other direction from some point to now. and that is finite, no matter what point you chose in the past

i see no problemas.

Answer 4

We do reach 1 from 0, and there are an infinite amount of numbers in between. All this kin of logic points to is a weakness in our concepts, the premises we proceed from. Time and our model of it are two different things.

Answer 5

No, of course not.  We model infinite time with a timeline like the integers, 0 is where we are now, minus is past, plus is future.  Aristotle's Prime Mover, First Cause (=God) was based on a mathematics that did not include negative integers.  He assumed there had to be a beginning, just like Big Bang physicists.

"Enough time hasn't passed yet to reach the present."  Time since when?  The beginning? That contradicts the premise that time extends infinitely into the past.  Rather like "if God can do anything, can he make a rock so big he can't lift it?"  Saw through that one in 6th grade.

Answer 6

Once upon a time that would have been a problem for us, but not anymore.

The dilemma you present is similar to Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise where Achilles represents the past and the Tortoise represents the present.  (Basically, the tortoise gets a head start, and according to the paradox, Achilles can therefore never catch up to the tortoise because every time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise was, the tortoise has moved ahead again.)  By simply observing the natural world, we know that Achilles could catch up and pass the tortoise, but we could not provide a mathematical proof of the phenomenon until the discovery of Calculus by Newton and Leibiz.  Calculus can demonstrate that an infinite number of points (whether they be on a time line, number line, or physical space) does not necessarily take an infinite amount of time to pass over.

Furthermore, if time is circular (which is tenable given the non-Euclidean nature of spacetime), then even though time is unbounded in the direction of the past (and future), there remains only a finite number of points on the loop.  So even if it was not possible to pass over an infinite number of points in a finite period of time, there would only be a finite number of points on the time line to pass.  And the reverse is true as well.  If time is infinite but bounded (such as if it followed a non-linear orbit), then a similar solution to the problem exists.  Only when it is both infinite and unbounded does there appear to be a problem, but like I said, the problem has been solved.

So yes, it is logically tenable that time extends infinitely into the past.

Answer 7

i will tell you later

Answer 8

Hmmmm.  It think you are looking a infinity wrong... it's STILL a time line, it's just the odds of being at that specific point on the time line are very small.  We are, and even things with low odds happen.