P1. An infinite amount of anything is inexhaustible.
P2. There is an infinite amount of past events.
C1. An infinite amount of past events is inexhaustible (not exhaustible).

P1. Given A-theory, to be possible to get to the present moment, an infinite amount of past events is (has to be) exhaustible (traversable).
P2(C1). An infinite amount of past events is not exhaustible.
C2. Getting to the present moment is not possible.

Modus tollens. If P, then Q. Not Q, therefore not P. P = possible to get to the present moment, Q = infinite amount of past events is exhaustible

This is now a valid argument. Can you evaluate?

I’d like to get back to the past infinity once more, as I can explain in detail why I find the view to be absurd.

Absurdity is a not a truth criterion. Plenty of absurd things are nevertheless true.

If you want to convert “absurd” into “false” you need either evidence that something is false (which does not appear to be what you are presenting or even could present) or a formal demonstration of a logical contradiction entailing it is false. I do not see this in anything you have presented.

Yet without either of those, you have no epistemic objection to the absurd to offer. This is not a trivial point. Human intuition is simply not epistemically reliable in domains beyond human experience. It does not matter what feels absurd. What matters is what is logically possible. Because everything logically possible, can be actual.

Hence, for example, Cantor was correct to conclude that there are even infinities larger than other infinities (and in fact an infinite number of yet larger infinities). That sounds absurd. It is nevertheless true and all mathematicians accept now that it is the case.

P1. Infinity is (by definition) inexhaustible.
P2. Given a past-eternal universe, any point in time has an infinite amount of past events preceding it.
C. Infinite amount of past events cannot be exhausted.

That is not a valid syllogism. Replace the terms with symbols and you’ll see.

P1. If A, then B.
P2. Every point on line L has infinite points preceding it.
C. If every point on line L has infinite points preceding it, then not B.

Notice that your major and minor premise don’t connect. This makes it a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow. You are trading on an undefined relation you call “inexhaustible” but you never establish that this word has any sense in which it is true of all infinities, or true or not true in the specific case of any point on line L. Your argument is thus gobbledygook.

You need something like:

P1. If A, then B.
P2. If L, then not B.
C. Therefore, if L, then not A.

(a form of modus tollens)

But…how can you get that?

Obviously any line L can have infinite points before it, and finite points after it. This is a perfectly sensible geometric figure. So there is no sense of “inexhaustible” that does not describe that figure or that describes all infinite figures. P1 therefore can be read in a way such that P1 is false or else in such a way that P2 is false. Either way, the argument fails, and the conclusion does not follow.

And please note: this fact about L does not require those previous points to still exist (that is irrelevant to the geometry; functions do not require the phenomena they graph to always exist; that has never been a condition of logical coherence in any calculus).

Meanwhile, your second syllogism is so unintelligible I cannot even figure out how to fix it. It resembles no logical formula I am familiar with.

You need to reformulate it into some recognizable and valid form. Because as written, its conclusion doesn’t follow from any of its premises, and its premises are too convoluted to make any sense.

Try to simplify the premises there into an “if A then B” format like I sampled above, and then try to complete either a modus tollens or a modus ponens, or any other standard formula. Then I can evaluate it.

I’d like to get back to the past infinity once more, as I can explain in detail why I find the view to be absurd.

Note that this is only if A-theory is presupposed, otherwise there doesn’t seem to be a problem.
I don’t think anyone should have a problem with actual infinities in reality.
It’s easy to imagine an infinite space with infinite amount of apples in it, just to give a banal example.
What is problematic is when you combine it with the A-theory and the infinite past.

I can write this as an argument:

P1. Infinity is (by definition) inexhaustible.
P2. Given a past-eternal universe, any point in time has an infinite amount of past events preceding it.
C. Infinite amount of past events cannot be exhausted.

Therefore, the next conclusion is that any point in time is unreachable.

To reconcile past-infinity with the A-theory, there has to be something wrong with the argument, but I can’t see what it is.

Now I’m left with this:

If I choose a specific point in time B, then for every point A that comes prior to B,
A to B is exhaustible. Since there is no point in the past A such that A to B is inexhaustible,
B is reachable from every point in the past, so B is reachable.
And yet, from the argument above, B is unreachable.

This is a contradiction.

And the only way out of this, as I see it, is not to go against the argument, but against the idea that there can ever be any point in this
past-infinite A-theory time. So, if there cannot be a possible point A in the past of B, then B cannot be reached after all.
So, now there is no contradiction.

I’m left again with the conclusion that A-theory combined with past-infinite is incoherent.
I’d like to get your thoughts about this. Is there a flaw in my reasoning?

That would be A-Theory, yes.

And the reason we have a hard time imagining transfinite circumstances is that our brain did not evolve to. Transfinite quantities evade our biologically- and experientially-limited intuitions. That’s why it took eons to invent any mathematics capable of incorporating them correctly, and even then, centuries to get from Newton and Leibniz to Cantor and Russell (setting aside the progress made thousands of years earlier by Archimedes, because it was lost, but even that took thousands of years of civilization and hundreds of years of formal logics to get to, and only the one genius got there so far as we know).

We cannot rely on our intuition in matters for which we have no experience-base and no neurogenetic foundation.

In those affairs, we have to defer to logical formulae to determine what “makes sense” and what does not. Hence the importance of the work of Newton, Leibniz, Cantor, and Russell.

So I don’t agree that the obscurity of transfinite conditions counts against A-Theory, any more than it counts against B-theory (both are compatible with transfinite conditions). What kills A-theory is Relativity, through which we have even empirically confirmed that there is no singular time: time flows at different rates for different observers, and simultaneity differs for different observers, and antimatter is matter moving backwards in time, and photons are their own antiparticle, because light traverses all the time it exists instantaneously, which is why no matter how fast we go, light speed still remains the same for us in all directions, contrary to the predictions of classical Galilean relativity. So it is logically impossible now for A-Theory to be true. Only B-Theory remains to make sense of current observations.

What I meant by “passage of time” is the view that past and future don’t exist, only present, and that there is a real flow going on in the external world in the sense that NOW disappears when it becomes the past, and the next future moment comes into existence in the form of NOW. So, the subjective sense of time in the mind does not correspond to the actual flow in the external world because there is no flow, only these relations between different “frames” in this “ever-existing” hyperdimensional tube. That would be an example of what an illusion is, not that there isn’t anything, but that it isn’t what it looks like it is.

I have to admit, I still have a hard time reconciling the A-theory with transfinite timeline. The view is so absurd, although not logically impossible. However this (how it appears to me) absurd view, I would point against the A-theory, and not against the possibility of a past-infinite reality.

Not necessarily.

It is true that transfinite timelines are more at home in block theory (B-theory of time). Then existence is just an infinitely long hyperdimensional tube. Location and direction in time is then merely a product of relative position and patterning in the tube. I discuss this in some detail in my section on time in Sense and Goodness without God.

But it would not be logically impossible for an transfinite moment to exist in A theory. Then it’s just a train that has always been running, in much the same way God is supposed to have been (in whatever hypertemporal dimension he is supposed to live in).

However, you should not mistake B-theory as entailing “passage of time” is an illusion. It is only in the same way colors are illusions: nothing outside your brain has a color, but colors do track something that really does exist outside your brain (directly, photon wavelength; indirectly, the physical qualities of objects that affect photon wavelength). So it is not strictly the case that “apples are red” is an illusion; it’s only an illusion at the literal definition of red, but there is still something not at all illusional about why apples register as red. The color codes for a real thing about apples.

The same is the case for time. How it feels and appears to be in time is an illusion (like color), but it still tracks something real (there is still a difference between past and future and things actually do change from past to future). You just have to resituate tense in the context of relativity (what “is” past or present or future is relative to the observer, just like Earth’s velocity is relative to the observer—and yet Earth’s velocity is still very much real).

No. You are correct. Alvaro never fixed this problem despite my urging him to repeatedly. It is logically impossible for something to exist before time so as to have “brought it about,” which means P1 cannot apply to time and is therefore, again, false precisely in the condition it needs to be true to produce his P3.

There can be semantic ways around this (as you note, embracing simultaneous causation, or what I call “ontological causation”), but they don’t rescue his goal (which was deism, even though he never presented any argument for deism).

Once you allow simultaneous causation, time can then cause itself to exist—or anything else could (since the first cause need no longer predate time, it can literally then be anything)—and there is no route to needing an epicycle like god.

Still no formally valid and sound syllogism.

I already told you I will not reply to anything but that from you until you comply.

Until then you are wasting everyone’s time here.

Anyone who denies that causality always applies and claims to be able to conceive of an acausal universe denies the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Thus, denying that everything that begins to exist has a cause is to deny the PSR. But to immediately claim that universal causality is caused by an acausal principle, and therefore must be considered contingent, is the height of absurdity.

Nothing changes if, instead of using the term “caused,” you say that the PSR or causality are “grounded” in another principle. This is because what you are challenging is the foundation of the contingent (namely, of that which begins to exist), regardless of whether it is a body or a principle.

In other words, you have managed to demonstrate the universality of the PSR. And you have done so in a rather comical way, since you intended the opposite.

In your final statement, you argue as follows:

Premise 1 (P1) of the argument establishes that everything that begins to exist has a cause.

However, even if this is the case in our universe, for it to also be true in all possible universes and to be always considered true, P1 must be a logically necessary truth.

It has not been proven that P1 is a logically necessary truth.

Therefore, P1 is a contingent fact and, as such, a caused or grounded fact. That is, it is not always true, but only after being caused or grounded.

Now, your arrogance prevents you from seeing the obvious, namely, that you intend to refute the PSR using this very principle. For, if P1 is a caused fact that begins to exist, it confirms that, were P1 not logically necessary, it too would have to begin to exist and thus would also require a cause. Since you have not found any exception to the PSR in this universe and have done nothing but confirm it outside this universe through a vain thought experiment, there is no reason to abandon this principle or limit its applicability.