6/30/2023 0 Comments Infinte regressWilliam Lane Craig admits that there could be things that are potentially (not actually) infinite. In the same way, if the past is actually infinite, the present would never have happened, because an infinite amount of time must have passed - this is traversing an actual infinity, which is impossible. If you tried to count to infinity, you would never get there. For example, if you set of on an infinite journey, you would never get to your destination. See the Wikipedia article on Infinite regress.Another argument tries to show that actual infinities are paradoxical by showing that actual infinity cannot be traversed (crossed). Stalinist examples include Khorloogiin Choibalsan of Mongolia, Georgi Dimitrov of Bulgaria, Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, Enver Hoxha of Albania, Kim Il Sung of North Korea, and Konstantin Chernenko of the Soviet Union. :178 More recently, Daniel Kalder has used homunculus to refer primarily to the heads of puppet states who felt compelled to follow the party line while at the same time not showing any innovation from the party canon. In the Eastern Bloc, homunculus has referred to attempts to remold people to be "without sexual, high intellectual or high emotional 'centres'". In folklore and in literature, the term "homunculus" often refers to a miniature fully-formed human. The term "homunculus" first appeared in Paracelsus' writing on alchemy, De Natura Rerum (1537), referring to what later became known as sperm after the invention of the microscope. The "Turtles all the way down" anecdote illustrates a popular example of infinite regress: No evidence for this has ever been presented for peer review, or critical analysis of any kind. One example of a viciously infinite regression arises in intelligent design creationism, which states that there are problems in the theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection which can only be resolved by invoking a designer or first cause without proposing a solution to the immediate question, " Who designed the designer?" Despite that, the response to this is an example of special pleading: creationists assert that every being needs a cause, but God is an eternal presence which did not need a cause. Given the definitions of the terms and the logical validity of the argument, Aristotle concluded that there exist no infinite numbers.Įxamples Intelligent design Aristotle says that if a number is truly infinite, it can't be traversed because the end of the number can't ever be reached. So, if a number is countable, then counting the individual parts and finally reaching the number is traversing, which means the number is traversable. If Aristotle had thought of the number 42, he would have thought that it was composed of 42 individual parts. Aristotle regarded numbers as made up of composite parts. Now, 'countable' and 'traversable' need to be defined. Ix) reads "there exists an x such that x is a number and x is infinite," and is a supposition for the sake of argument.Nx⊃Cx reads "if x is a number, then x is countable." Cx⊃Tx reads "if x is countable, then x is traversable." Ix⊃~Tx reads "if x is infinite, then x is not traversable." ∃x(Nx ∴There does not exist a number that is infinite.Formed using predicate logic, the proof reads like this: To count what is countable, it would be possible to traverse the infinite.Īristotle posits an argument that shows an infinite regress to result in a contradiction. “ ”Neither can there be a separated infinite number: for number, or what has number, is countable, and so, if it is possible
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