Medieval proponents of the Kalām cosmological argument thought that they could prove this idea by showing the absurdity of what philosophers called “actual infinites.”7 If the past is infinitely old, then getting from the past to the present would be like trying to climb to the surface of the earth from a hole infinitely deep—from a bottomless pit. As one contemporary philosopher has characterized the problem, “one could get no foothold in . . . [an infinite temporal] series to even get started, for to get to any point, one already has to have crossed infinity.”8 Nevertheless, other medieval
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