The Paradox of Finite Existence Throughout Eternity

When something is eternal, it endures forever. When something endures forever, it will never end. The only thing that truly enjoys the luxury of eternal presence is time itself. Time is a wondrous force; it gives an opportunity for matter to exist in a particular form, as well as providing for its travel through space. In fact, we would be quite lost without time, as our particles would be unable to move from one locality in our body to another. What is quite interesting is the fact that there exists a point when no time exists at all, but this is contained within time itself. There is no duration within an instant of time, and thus it is only the point that exists, and nothing else.

Allow me to first, describe the nature of my paradox. I call it mine because I thought of it myself; although I am not certain if, I am the first to conceive of its notion. Let us make a man and call the beginning of his existence, his birth. All of a sudden, he exists.We know that he never existed before we made him; after all, we can be sure of this, since it was we who created him. Now let us look at him on an infinite time scale. he exists now, and there was a point at which he did not exist. Now let us look into the future and suddenly we see that there is also a point at which he must die. Therefore, we look at hiz life and see that it began at one point in time, and ended at another, in between we have his exact maximum age. We see that we are traveling forward through time, but if we are going forward then logic demands that there is also something which we are traveling away from, or out of; the past. Whatever lies in the future will eventually exist in the past as well, so we see that whatever can exist in the future must also be able to exist in the past. Finally we see that if we travel forward into time, we also know that on some level, infinity will exist into that direction. This must be true no matter what our view might be on existence…time simply will never end no matter what, it must be carried on over into something else…eternity can just simply not cease being eternity. Now let us recall that our man we made has died, and there is an eternal amount of time after his existence. Suddenly we realize our man will never again exist, because he is bound to the past, although there is still a finite, yet infinitely increasing amount of time between his existence and whatever chosen point in time after his death. We realize that there is an eternal amount of time after his death. Suddenly we see a big problem when we reverse the situation and say there is an eternal amount of time before his birth. This is quite a problem indeed, because that means that, there is an eternal amount of time before he could begin existing, and since an eternity is forever, there was a never-ending duration of time that transpired before he could enter existence. This would mean that he cannot begin existing until that eternal amount is ended, which it will never do. According to this paradox, our man could never begin existing because there is eternity before him. If someone were to travel backward into time, they would never reach the point again they started out at unless they stopped and came back to that point.

There are a number of ways we could choose to deal with our problem, but there is only one conclusion that would completely satisfy the paradox, since all of the others would not neutralize the problem, but merely shuffle it to another part of theoretical reality. Since time itself cannot possibly have an absolute beginning, we cannot say that time began with the big bang, because even God must have some sort of time in order for him to accomplish anything. Anything he does would have to have a point in time preceding it where it unaccomplished, or else it would always be done, and God would never have done it. By saying god created the beginning would still be to no avail, because it would be merely shifting the problem over onto God's shoulders, and it would remain a problem all the same. I thought about this for quite a while and, as all good solutions seem to come to me, it came to me while I was in the shower. I realized that there was one way for our man to have a finite (mortal) existence, while being contained within an infinite time scale. The solution is, that he has existed before, an infinite amount of times. It seemed almost to simple to be correct, yet it allowed for something to begin existing within eternity. Eternity demands by its very nature that nothing genuinely unique come into being. It merely allows for every possible combination or form of particles to happen. It makes a lot of sense if you consider it. The big bang was the beginning, but what if our universe's beginning was the ending of another universe?