But you can never reach it, so at any given point in time, you will only have as many as you have at that moment of counting and which will never be an infinite quantity. So infinity exists as a real concept, but not as a real quantity of anything. (It’s nice for definite integrals though. ; - )
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Well - or how bout this? Infinity is the very real, very physical distance I have to travel around a circle to reach an actual end of it. Or … infinity is seen in the number of very real numbers there are between zero and one.
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It’s nice to see you giving this a try 
or very real non-numerical values
Indeed! And I’m looking over at you with that infinite gulf of numbers right there in the gap between us, wondering what it is about that very physical and real space that you find so difficult to accept! Granted, it’s only a conceptual existence. I don’t think I’ve anywhere conflated that with a claim that there are infinite numbers of physical objects.
I am open or agnostic to infinite space. That’s the part, like time, that confuses so often.
Infinite space or time does not equal infinite objects or events.
Whether it’s the reals between 0 and 1 or 0 and 0.000000000000000000001, it is the same gulf of numbers.
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That’s right! That’s how infinity works.
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Sure. Which goes back to what I’ve been saying. There is an infinite being, but not an infinite number of things (in that space).
I added the parenthetical remark.
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The circle’s circumference is a real physical distance, but the infinity of the circle is conceptual.
But you are still never going to have an infinite number of actual real things, just conceptual things.
Okay, lets start measuring, you first. Let me know when you’re finished, since it’s real.
Perhaps behind this disagreement lies an old assumption: the real is rational and the rational is real. Scientists and philosophers of science have been divided over that one for a long time. Some take only one part of it - maybe that the real is rational (knowable). Einstein, for example, commented on this with a famous quip: Not everything that counts is countable, and not everything that’s countable counts.
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Gentlemen, if I may: the idea of infinity as it arises in math & physics is not at all what the rationalistic Xn theologians & philosophers meant by the term when they used it of God. It never means a thing’s having no limit to its quantity. From Augustine on, it meant possessing (or being) every perfection. Perfections are the highest possible degree of those qualities that make whatever possess them better than it would otherwise be. On this view, God is defined as the Being with all and only perfections. So God is thought to have the highest possible degree of goodness, justice, knowledge, mercy, power, etc.
St Anselm tried, on the basis of this definition, to argue that from the definition of God it follows that there is such a thing. Thinkers as widely apart as Aquinas, Kant, and Dooyeweerd agree that can’t be done. But rationalistic thinkers, such as Plantinga, still defend Anselm.
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Yes and no. There is what reason can and cannot determine to be true about the world.
Sproul and Gerstner rejected the ontological argument as able to prove a perfect being exists from the idea of a perfect being. But showed successfully that a necessary being exists due to the contradiction of supposing nothing exists. Being is and nonbeing is not.
The cosmological argument shows, as I have been able to understand it, that this necessary being is not an infinite number of things.
I don’t believe any of this proves God, but it does prove something.
Agreed. But we don’t need to cosmological argument to see what can be known. To wit: something is self-existent. Consider the sum total of reality. The sum total of reality must be self-existent in part or whole, because there is nothing else for it to depend on.
We have 3 traditions that say it is the whole of reality, not any one part, that is self-existent: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. They teach that there is a divine (self-existent) reality behind all the things we encounter in the cosmos. In fact the things we experience are made of that divine reality.
We also have 3 traditions that teach it is not the whole of reality but one part that is the self-existent reality all else depends on: Judaism, Christianity, & Islam. There is also a tradition of naturalism, that teaches it is (some part of ) the cosmos itself that is the divine reality.
All three positions are religious, since all are beliefs about the self-existent reality and self-existence is the central characteristic of what it means to be divine.
In my opinion none of the arguments for God’s existence succeeds in showing that the God revealed in scripture is that divine reality. That something is self-existent seems secure but doesn’t tell us what that is or how to use that knowledge. Theories use some such assumption in order to explain the world. Religions claim to know the proper way humans can relate to that reality so as to obtain true happiness.
Roy
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I would agree with you if there was no disagreement about there being an infinite number of past events.
What difference would that make? A set that is infinite in quantity could still fail to be self-existent. Likewise, if the universe were temporally infinite (everlasting) it could still be dependent at every moment. It’s the issue of self-existence vs. dependence that is the key issue.
A set that proceeds to infinity or is it a set with an infinite number of objects?
If it’s a set with an infinite number of objects, then that is something that has been said so often that it seems plausible, but it is not possible.
Like I said earlier, the objects don’t trail off the existential plane and still count.
“But precise definitions aren’t wrong just because they are disturbing or because they are not what we already thought was true. We form them in order to learn more about what we’re trying to define, and that can also mean correcting something we’d mistakenly thought to be true.”
The Myth of Religious Neutrality