[clarification needed] The philosophy of Aristotle, expressed in such works as his Physics, held that although space was finite, with only void existing beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens, time was infinite.
This caused problems for mediaeval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers who, primarily creationist, were unable to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the eternal with the Genesis creation narrative.
This view was inspired by the creation myth shared by the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Some of Maimonides' Jewish successors, including Gersonides and Crescas, conversely held that the question was decidable, philosophically.
[3] John Philoponus was probably the first to use the argument that infinite time is impossible in order to establish temporal finitism.
Contra Aristotlem has been lost, and is chiefly known through the citations used by Simplicius of Cilicia in his commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and De Caelo.
But since Aristotle holds that such treatments of infinity are impossible and ridiculous, the world cannot have existed for infinite time.
The second skirts around this; the analogous idea in mathematics, that the (infinite) sequence of negative integers "..-3, -2, -1" may be extended by appending zero, then one, and so forth; is perfectly valid.
"[15] More recently though physicists have proposed various ideas for how the universe could have existed for an infinite time, such as eternal inflation.
But in 2012, Alexander Vilenkin and Audrey Mithani of Tufts University wrote a paper claiming that in any such scenario past time could not have been infinite.
"Some of the criticism of William Lane Craig's argument for temporal finitism has been discussed and expanded on by Stephen Puryear.
An article by Louis J. Swingrover makes a number of points relating to the idea that Craig's "absurdities" are not contradictions in themselves: they are all either mathematically consistent (like Hilbert's hotel or the man counting down to today), or do not lead to inescapable conclusions.
He also points out that the Tristram Shandy paradox is mathematically coherent, but some of Craig's conclusions about when the biography would be finished are incorrect.
Ellery Eells[23] expands on this last point by showing that the Tristram Shandy paradox is internally consistent and fully compatible with an infinite universe.
For it to be useful to the temporal finitism side, a version must be found that is logically consistent and not compatible with an infinite universe.
Oppy then lists the different versions of the Tristram Shandy story that have been put forward and shows that they are all either internally inconsistent or they don't lead to contradiction.