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This article was nominated for deletion on 22 December 2007. The result of the discussion was keep through nomination withdrawn.

A fact from Temporal finitism appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 28 December 2007, and was viewed approximately 4,015 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the philosophical question of temporal finitism has never been fully settled?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2007/December.

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—Yamara ✉ 21:31, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Modern?

All the stuff under "modern" looks pretty broken to me William M. Connolley (talk) 23:13, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Modern?

I don't have the time to find references and things, but i'm fairly sure that this is presenting some fringe ideas as mainstream. William Lane Craig, in particular, does not find general acceptance of his ideas amongst the secular philosophical community, and yet his ideas are presented as if they were accepted.

From a mathematical point of view, there are a number of points that should be made to tighten up the modern part: 0) Mathematics has more-or-less stopped debating whether "infinity" exists because the question is somewhat meaningless.

in some situations, sets are defined for which an attempt to count them would never end. They are described as infinite, but

the statement that "infinity does not exist therefore that set doesn't exist" is meaningless.

1) The entire argument appears to be against "actual infinity" as the duration of the universe, an idea which is clearly nonsensical. The text seems to imply that that means that the universe therefore has to have a beginning, which it doesn't. Therefore, it's not clear what relevance the statement that actual infinity cannot be reached by adding 1 successively to the conclusion they draw that therefore the universe had to have a beginning.

2) It is easy to imagine a logically consistent universe that has no beginning: for instance, it might be homomorphic with the set of natural numbers, and so any statement that appears to logically disprove the idea of a universe with no beginning must include a discussion of counter opinions.

3) The article neglects to point out that physicists are in agreement that the universe logically could have turned out to be infinite, but that the position has turned out to be difficult to defend against the evidence for the big bang (and thermodynamic questions)

4) It might be worth pointing out that current cosmological theories suggest that the universe will be infinite in time in the direction of the future.

5) All of the "absurdity" arguments such as the man counting from infinity to zero, should have their criticisms voiced:

     a) It is easy mathematically to conceive of a man, who at time t is currently counting down and is at the number of days until 2015-04-30. If you ask him why didn't he finish yesterday, he will simply reply "because I was at the number 1". Therefore, it is not clear in what way this is absurd, and in what way that absurdity has any relevance to whether time can be infinite in the past. You may as well ask what would happen if a man counted forwards from 1, starting today (since WLC seems to accept that the universe might be infinite in the future too?), and ask him why he started today.

6) The vast majority of the references in this section are from a small number of philosophers with a strong religious bias.

86.129.36.2 (talk) 18:23, 30 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Able to be Clarified?

In the lede is the phrase "[...] who were unable to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the eternal with the Abrahamic view of Creation."
Would it be more clear to the reader if that phrase was altered to "[...] who were unable to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the eternal with the Abrahamic view of Creation, which held that time as finite." or some variation (exact phrasing isn't important as long as it conveys more clearly what the opposing views, that are being compared, were)? The only problem I see with the choice of words, that I above suggested being added, is that "finite" may not be the best choice since the Abrahamic concept of Creation only speaks about a beginning, and not about an end (which leaves the possibilities of both single-ended finite time, as well as double-ended finite time). Hopefully my explanations here were not too confusing (I don't think I expressed my thoughts too well here). — al-Shimoni (talk) 17:03, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]