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    Philosophy: Infinite change

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    JME McTaggart argued in the 1920s that everything changes when anything changes: “If anything changes, then  all other things change with it.  For its change must change some of their relations to it, and so their relational qualities.”

    David Weberman finds this “perfectly consistent,” but concludes that “it offends our sense of economy and good common-sense to suppose that I and everything else change in virtue of a butterfly’s slightest move.”

    Yes, it is an offense to common sense.  But I wonder if that “sense of economy” is simply a passion for control. If everything changes when anything changes, then there’s no way we can conceptualize it all, no way to capture it all in a theorem.  If infinite change happens, then perhaps the world manifests the infinity of its Creator.  And we can’t have that.

    posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 2:18 pm