(Migraine)genesis

      If the whole is greater than any of its parts, is there a limit to anything?

 
      The nature of origins is as old as thinking. The cosmological argument--the so-called prime move argument--was first introduced by Aristotle in the West. In Arabic, the word Kalām means "words, discussion, discourse." The Kalām argument comes from the Kalām tradition of Islamic discursive philosophy through which it was first formulated. The Kalam cosmological argument states: everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence. This was also propounded by Averroes. His premise was that every motion must be caused by another motion, and the earlier motion must in turn be a result of another motion and so on. The basic premise of all of these is that something caused the Universe to exist, and this First Cause is what we call God.

      This is not new. And it appears it will never get old.

      But doesn't this just move the question back a square?  Does infinity have a start? And is infinity a reasonable concept in our real world anyway? (This, of course, ignores the question can "reasonable" and "real world" define the truth?) In an example that sounds eerily like the ancient question of a javelin thrower at the edge of the universe, the philosophical theologian William Lane Craig imagines a library containing infinitely many books, numbered from zero onwards. Infinity thought games create some serious problems. For example, one could add infinitely many books to such a library without increasing the number of books in the library. One could remove the first three books, and the library would not have any fewer books. One could even remove every other book, and it would not have any fewer books. Craig thinks it is obvious that such a library could not exist in reality. Even God could not create a library with infinite books.

      Some cosmologists and physicists argue that a challenge to the cosmological argument is the nature of time: "One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation" says Carlo Rovelli. (You can look the Wheeler-DeWitt equation up but it made my teeth hurt.) The Big Bang theory states that it is the point in which all dimensions came into existence, the start of both space and time. Then, the question "What was there before the Universe?" makes no sense; the concept of "before" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. This has been put forward by J. Richard Gott III, James E. Gunn, David N. Schramm, and Beatrice Tinsley, who said that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole.

      But Polaris is north of the North Pole. See, anybody can do this.