Even in spite of Pastor Bob Enyart's best efforts, I still find it prima facie, and also upon deeper examination and reflection, implausible that God "[crossed] an actual infinity".
Theology Thursday: God's Eternal Past This is the show from Thursday January 29th, 2015 Summary: * Infinite Past: Why is it so difficult for us to grasp the concept of God having an infinite past? Bob explains on this week's Theology Thursday. * Years Later: Years after the message...
theologyonline.com
This post should not be taken to mean that I've removed Idolator from my ignore list. It does NOT mean that!
There is one thing I can guarantee anyone reading Idolator's comment: It was ENTIRELY prima facie. It seems that surface thinking is all he is capable of. There was not one second of "deeper examination and reflection" on his part. He would know where to start. Which is ironic given the answer to his "prima facie" objection to the idea that "God crossed an actual infinity".
God has always existed. This much is not in dispute. The question is whether He has always lived through a succession of moments or whether He once existed without any succession at all. Scripture describes Him as existing “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2). His “goings forth are from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2). These describe a God who has always been living and active. Where does Scripture say that God ever existed without time? I does not do so. You have to wait until the Aristotle and Plato to get that idea into human history and another three centuries after that to find anyone attributing it to the God in the Hebrew scriptures.
Consider what it would mean for God to create time. Creation involves something coming into existence that previously did not exist. There is a before and an after. How could God bring time into existence when the act of bringing something into existence already involves a temporal sequence? The same problem arises with the eternal relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Can the Father speak and the Son respond without any succession? Can there be thought, communication or relationship without time? God has always been alive, and time is an aspect of that living existence. (There's more to say on this specific topic time and it's relationship to reality, but doing so here would take it a bit off target, so these basic concepts are sufficient for the purpose.)
The usual objection is that God could never have reached the present because He would have had to cross an infinite past. Cross it from where? What first moment are we imagining God starting from? The claim is that He had no first moment. Pick any moment in His past and He was already there, with a beginningless past behind Him. Someone who begins counting will never finish counting an infinite number of moments. How does that establish that a God who never began existing could not have always existed?
Giving God a starting point and then showing that He cannot get infinitely far away from it does nothing to answer the position being defended.
Think of a geometrical ray extending infinitely into the past, with its endpoint representing the present. It has an endpoint without having a beginning at the other end. That illustrates the claim: an infinite past does not require an infinitely distant first moment, because, for God, there is no first moment.
There is also a consistency problem for anyone who says that even God cannot encompass an actual infinity while affirming that He exhaustively knows every event in an everlasting future. Would that knowledge not involve an actual infinity of known events? If God can encompass that infinity in His knowledge, merely invoking “actual infinity” does not settle the objection to His beginningless existence.
Our difficulty imagining this is understandable. We began existing. God did not. We can more readily imagine living forever into the future because we will share that experience. We have no corresponding experience of a beginningless past. Our lack of experience is no argument against His eternity. God never began living, and there was never a first moment from which He had to start His journey to the present.
The above was adapted from Bob Enyart’s own argument in
“Here’s How God Crossed an Actual Infinity: The Past”,
Bob Enyart Live, January 6, 2015.
