Quote Originally Posted by ghollisjr
From your example, what I'm doing is not asking you "why is the racquet lighter?" but rather, "how do you know it is lighter?" Once you say that you weighed them on a scale, or that the manufacturer reported weight is such and such, then I can get a level of confidence for the statement that the racquet is lighter and thus that the racquet is better. What you are doing is claiming that the racquet is better because it is lighter, and then I'm asking how do you know it is lighter? And then you're telling me that you don't need to give an explanation of the explanation.

To draw the connection more clearly, you are saying that an eternity of past causes entails that the current moment is not actually the present moment, but must have happened in the past. I ask you not "why?" in the causal sense which you referred to in your racquet example, but "how so?" in the justification sense, as in how do you know that this is the case? Clearly, one can ask this question until one comes to basic assumptions/definitions. We have not arrived at that level because you refuse to provide justification for your claim that an eternity of past events implies that the present moment should have already happened. I then attempted to guess that your reasoning was that there was a time in the past which was infinitely far away from the present time, which would mean that it would take an infinite amount of time to reach the present moment from that infinitely far away moment in time. I then showed that this is not necessary for there to be an unlimited amount of time in the past; i.e., that infinity does not have to be an actual time for there to be no limit to how much time there is. You then say that I'm confused and refuse to provide justification and say that it is somehow improper to ask for an explanation of the explanation.
The problem is that you are never satisfied with the explanation since you always need an explanation of the explanation, thus you require yourself to be all knowing, but only God could be all knowing, so your approach is fallacious.

Justification has already been given that nature if it had an infinite regress of cause and effects would mean you had an eternity to come into being before now as eternity would entail. No need for an explanation of that.

You are just confusing yourself. Simplify it. Picture an event with its commensurate causes; then take one of those causes and picture it with its causes and so on for an eternity of the past of cause and effects.

To make the lesson even clearer, consider if I made the following claim: "God cannot exist." You then ask "How so?" I then say "it's because God's existence means he can't be immortal, which contradicts God's definition." You then ask, yet again, "How so?" I then say "I already explained it, God's existence means he can't be immortal, and this means that God does not exist since it contradicts his definition." You then say "But this is not at all obvious, and doesn't follow from the usual definitions of God and immortality. Sure, God is immortal, but how does this imply a contradiction? You need to give justification for your claim." I then respond by playing your game, "I don't need to give an explanation of the explanation, the explanation is the answer." This is a way of shifting the burden of proof, trying to get out of providing justification for one's claims.

And the fact of the matter is that infinite regress does not entail an eternal past. Infinite regress refers to an unlimited number of sequential causes in the past and says nothing about the amount of time which is in the past. My "fuzzy math" example is not fuzzy math at all, just the limit of a geometric series which has infinitely many terms and yet a finite value. I could very well ask for justification as to how my math is flawed, but I'm not sure that would be remotely productive.
Your example is fallacious, because God is uncreated. What you are describing is a god that is not uncreated. We are discussing the uncreated, not the created. Leave out the word God for the moment, we are talking about the uncreated, so you are using a red herring approach changing the subject. Try to stay on topic. My explanation here is that you are off topic, so that is my satisfactory answer to your misapplication of the word God.

The problem is you keep needing an explanation beyond the satisfactory answer.

You don't need to mention how much time each event takes places, because no matter how big or small, short or long, all that is contained within an eternity is infinite regress of cause and effects. Each event or object or happening is preceeded by another.

Thus, we can render this an impossibility because if there was an infinite regress of cause and effects, you would have had an eternity to come into being before now, so you should have already happened; thus nature needs a cause outside of itself, outside of time and space, being uncreated.