Indeed. And I appreciate your doing the work to add that quotation and citation here. That’s helpful to everyone reading this thread!

Vilenkin argued that the “tunneling from nothing” universe happens spontaneously and simultaneously with the beginning of time. In his book Many Worlds in One (pp.181, 186), he explains his proposal:

Augustine grappled with the question of what God was doing before the creation—a quest he eloquently described in his Confessions. “For if he was idle and doing nothing, then why did he not continue in that state forever—doing nothing, as he has always done?” Augustine thought that in order to answer his question, he first had to figure out what time is: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” An analysis led him to the conclusion that time could be defined only through motion and could not, therefore, exist before the universe. Augustine’s final conclusion was that “the world was made not in time, but simultaneously with time. There was no time before the world.” And thus it is meaningless to ask what God was doing then. “If there was no time, there was no then.” This is very close to what I argued in my tunneling-from-nothing scenario.

…

If there was nothing before the universe popped out, then what could have caused the tunneling? Remarkably, the answer is that no cause is required. In classical physics, causality dictates what happens from one moment to the next, but in quantum mechanics the behavior of physical objects is inherently unpredictable and some quantum processes have no cause at all. Take, for example, a radioactive atom. It has some probability of decaying, which is the same from this minute to the next. Eventually, it will decay, but there will be nothing that causes it to decay at that particular moment. Nucleation of the universe is also a quantum process and does not require a cause.

If it’s true the human mind was unable to grasp the ineffability of God as you claim, then every human explanation of the existence of God is necessarily false. Game over.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-sina-metaphysics/

but elswher attemptid t pruv god
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_the_Truthful

whum “Historian of philosophy Peter Adamson called the argument one of the most influential medieval arguments for God’s existence”

whu also sez

“Unthinkable: The Islamic thinker who ‘proved’ God exists Medieval philosophers don’t get much attention these days but Avicenna deserves it, says Prof Peter Adamson”

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/unthinkable-the-islamic-thinker-who-proved-god-exists-1.2931754

as Avicenna states in the Kitāb al-Išārāt (Dunyā, III vol., 95), creation is not conceivable in terms of time because a time before the creative act of God would end up being an intermediate between the First Principle and the world:

The action of the First Cause must therefore be conceived as exempt from any mediation. Nothing (neither a matter, nor an act of will, nor even time) can be inserted between the Principle and Its effect (see also Ḥudūd: 42–43). An image often occurs in Avicenna’s writings: the causality of the First Principle is similar to that of the hand that moves the key in the lock of a door: the movement of the hand and that of the key—respectively the cause and the effect—are simultaneous, and yet one is prior to the other. Priority is essential, not temporal (Ilāhiyyāt, IV, 1, 165).

Aguirre is talking about George Ellis model where “the inflationary universe emerges from a small static state that has within it the seeds for the development of the macroscopic universe. The universe has a finite initial size, with a finite amount of inflation occurring over an infinite time in the past, and with inflation then coming to an end via reheating in the standard way.”

The initial static state can be thought of as a small “cosmic egg” of spacetime that exists forever until it spontaneously breaks open to produce an expanding universe.”

Source: “The Emergent Universe: inflationary cosmology with no singularity”

This does not apply to other models, like the “He-Gao-Cai model” because their model do not claim any classical space-time; only a quantum state. Which is different from the Emergent Scenario, because it predicts small Einstein Classical space-time existed forever.

In addition to that, the paper by Aguirre is not an absolute fact. If you search in the Google Scholar, “Instability of emergent universe” you will find a lot of more than just Aguirre’s opinion. And if you google “Stability of emergent universe” you will also find a lot of proposals solving the said instability. One example is this “Stability of the Einstein static universe in f(R, T) gravity”

Where the author cited the work made by Aguirre and wrote:

“Though the main component for constructing emergent scenarios is the ES solution, the original model does not appear to be successful in solving the singularity problem, since there is no stable ES solution in classical GR. In other words, owing to the existence of perturbations, such as quantum fluctuations [70], it is too difficult for the universe to settle down for a long time in such an initial static state [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. However, it is a general belief that in its earliest stages, the universe is presumably under extreme physical conditions, so that new effects, such as those coming from quantization of gravity, modifications of GR theory or even other new physics, may become significant. As a matter of fact, dealing with the cosmological equations of modified gravity theories may leave us with many new static solutions, whose stability properties would crucially depend on the details of the theory.”

In the the abstract they wrote: “We also investigate homogeneous scalar perturbations for the mentioned models. The stability regions of the solutions are parametrized by a linear equation of state (EoS) parameter and other free parameters that will be introduced for the models. Our results suggest that modifications in f(R, T) gravity would lead to stable solutions which are unstable in f(R) gravity model.”

So, it’s clear the new Emergent Scenario is a viable model.

It’s not that there is “no total” but that there are infinitely many “totals” that we call “infinity.” We have no tools with which to distinguish them; and they all have the same properties peculiar to all infinities, so there isn’t even any meaningful difference between them in the sense there is for finite numbers.

And that’s just for aleph-1, the basic infinity. There are actually infinities that are larger than other infinities, but only because they have infinitely more things added, rather than finitely more things added; and only in particular ways.

And indeed, this is all well beyond our regular experience-base and thus mind blowing.

So if I’m understanding correctly, with respect to infinities, it is possible to add to and subtract from but (unlike with finite numbers) doing so has no impact on the total (because there is no “total”).

That is some mind blowing sh*t man

That’s one way to put it. Once you are off the number line, you no longer are talking about numbers that are “this many and no more”; you are talking about numbers that are by definition beyond that, quantities that can be added to or subtracted from and still have more than any finite number possible. That’s what an infinity is.

“So lets consider the example of an infinite number of universes existing before our own.”

“in other words it can be said we have “this many and no more”.”

These are contradictory statements…

Note your mind is finite. So you will only be able to grasp transfinite set theory with conceptual difficulty. You should expect that, not be surprised by it.

As to the first question, what do you mean by “a fixed quantity”? If you just mean a finite quantity, you’ve already dropped off the map of your own example; the scenario is of a transfinite quantity, so operating from an assumption it’s finite is an error. There is no “highest number” yet there are infinitely many numbers. We never “run out” of numbers. There is no sense in which we can say some number doesn’t exist because it’s too large or whatever. They all exist, insofar as any do. This does not make numbers impossible. So neither would it make infinite universes impossible. (Indeed, if God is omniscient, he knows all numbers, and therefore an actual infinity exists in God’s mind. And if it can exist there, it can exist anywhere.)

Once you acknowledge we are only talking about transfinite quantities, and therefore the rules only provably true for finite quantities do not apply, you do not get the same results with adding and subtracting. Once you are in the field of the transfinite, you are off the number line.

Consequently any adding and subtracting does not get you a number on the number line. It remains transfinite. This is the difference between finite and transfinite quantities. Finite, adding or subtracting moves you on the number line. Transfinite, there is no number line, and consequently nowhere to move. You can have more and still be infinite. You can have less and still be infinite. This is what “infinity” means.

Only if you subtract an infinite quantity do you have a chance of getting to a finite quantity, and even that depends on how the subtraction operates. Not all subtraction is the same anymore once we are in transfinite sets. Because the axioms of finite arithmetic do not apply. This is what happens when you get infinite stuff. It behaves like infinite stuff. Not finite stuff. It would be illogical to expect it to act like a thing it is not. That would be like expecting a square to have the properties of a circle.

In the given case you describe, it would take infinite subtractions to get to “zero universes.” If you are doing it in sequence, one at a time, it will take you infinite time. You’ll thus never complete the task. As one should expect. If you get to do it “all at once” then you get to delete all existence. Just the same as if the number of universes were finite. Again as one should expect.

So I don’t see anything contrary to expectation here.

Everything else looks like you want infinite quantities to act like finite ones. But that’s itself illogical. If “fixed” only means “exists,” then you can subtract forever and still have universes left over; unless you are allowed somehow to actually get to the end of forever, then you can get rid of them all. There is no “finite” subtraction that gets you there. Only infinite subtractions can. Because it’s an infinite number. But if “fixed” means “on a number line,” then you just aren’t talking about transfinite quantities at all.