A Potentially Infinite Past

A few days ago, whilst discussing with a friend the second premise of the Kalam cosmological argument (that the universe began to exist), he proposed an idea that I had not before come across. Instead of the universe having a beginning, or an actually infinite past, he claimed that it was perhaps the case that the universe has a potentially infinite past. Depicted below shows this theorem along side a universe with a beginning, and a universe with no beginning.

Fig 1. Three theories for a past, where O indicates the present; an arrow indicates a potential infinite; a | indicates a beginning; and a vertical ~ indicates an actual infinite. Top: An absolute beginning. Middle: An actually infinite past. Bottom: A potentially infinite past.

The Ontological Argument

INTRODUCTION

The ontological argument is a philosophical argument which claims that by reason alone, one can determine the existence of God to be true. It is a priori (depends on no debatable empirical conditions), formally valid, deductive, and is metaphysically superlative: that there must be an existent God. There are many forms of the argument, of which two of them are the most prominent and convincing. These are the Classical approach and the Modal Logic approach.