A Rational Cosmology: The Impossibility of First and Last Entities

There never was nor can there ever be a moment at which no entities exist. It follows that entities have always existed and will always exist -- though entities that exist at one time need not be the same entities as those that exist at another time.

Entities cannot arise in any other manner except through some relationships among other entities. To claim anything else would be either to concede that there are such things as "pure qualities" outside of entities that give rise to entities, or to hold that entities could originate spontaneously, ex nihilo.

The former notion has already been refuted in prior essays, and the latter claims, at its root, that A does not equal A. Such a scenario would propose that, at one instant, an entity has zero measurements of every quality, i.e., that the entity does not exist, then, at the next instant, some of its qualities suddenly have measurements of nonzero magnitudes.

Where did they get these increased quantities of qualities? Why, nowhere, of course! This leads to two possibilities, the first being that 0 does not equal 0, since zero equals a series of nonzero numbers which represent the measurements of the qualities of the spontaneously generated entity, for, if that entity did not get those quantities from any other entity, it must have gotten them from itself, i.e., always had them. This is, of course, an outright concession of logical error.

The second possible implication of the theory of spontaneous generation is that the entity actually did get the new nonzero quantities of its qualities from nowhere, i.e. did not get them. Under this implication, the entity that did not get any qualities cannot possibly exist! To speak of an entity without qualities is in violation of the first ontological corollary, which states that an entity is the sum of its qualities.

We have thus proved that all entities are originated by other entities, that the universe always contained some sorts of entities, and that all entities have certain ubiquitous qualities, including time. This clearly implies that the quality, "time," cannot have an origin, because no entity could ever conceivably be called the first entity with that quality. Moreover, these insights imply that no entity could ever conceivably be called the first entity to exist.

By similar logic, because the universe cannot have an end, neither can there ever be an end to entities altogether, nor any entity that could be deemed the "last entity in existence." Because time is a ubiquitous quality of entities, it will follow that there will always exist entities that exhibit the quality of time. Thus, time can never end.

When devising a mathematical model for our proposed time scale, we then can firmly assert that such a scale will assume the form of a Euclidean line, that is, a one-dimensional tool with an unending expanse in both directions. Individual entities can only "move" in one direction on that scale, i.e., the direction of increasing magnitude.

However, we are able to mentally compare entities that lie in either direction on the scale. This is integral to the human understanding of entities, their histories, and their possible futures, but this understanding cannot alter the constant, uniform, and unceasing accumulation of the quality "time" within every entity.

Read other parts of "A Rational Cosmology" by clicking here.