Infinite Regress

There cannot be an infinite number of past moments, and there cannot be an infinite number of events within a finite past.  Infinite regress, as it is called, is logically impossible because nothing in the present--neither anything occuring right now or the moment itself--could have ever arrived.  Infinity cannot be traversed in order for any particular thing to happen or elapse.  Thanks to their pathetic preoccupation with mere practical matters and not with the abstract truths that all practicality hinges on, this might be easier for some non-rationalists to understand when they dwell on versions of more trivial situations.

If someone had to wait until they received approval from another person to send a work email, but that second person first had to obtain their own approval from someone else, and so on infinitely, then the first person waiting on permission would never actually be able to send the email.  If someone had to traverse an infinite distance in order to step outside of their door, they would never reach the door.  An infinite distance cannot be crossed!  It is not even logically possible for it to have been the case that infinite regression in events or could ever occur, as this is an intrinsic logical truth, not a continent truth dependent on God or the universe.

As for the universe, there cannot have been an infinite succession of events in the cosmos, and if the universe does indeed expand and retract in a reversal and reoccurrence of the Big Bang, then this cycle would still have had a beginning point.  Whether or not time came into existence right along with the cosmos when the uncaused cause created them (or when something the uncaused cause created brought the universe into being), it is logically necessary that neither of them always existed without beginning.  No matter what scientific perceptions suggest or do not suggest, it is already impossible for anything contrary to logical axioms and other necessities to be true, and infinite regress contradicts anything ever actually happening.

While the most important truth about infinite regress are related to the impossibility of there not being an uncaused cause that preceded matter, as the universe and time are not past eternal, there are other ramifications for the metaphysics of the physical world.  There might be no such thing as an elementary particle, and thus matter might continually break down from objects we perceive into smaller and smaller particles, but there cannot be an ever increasing scale of particles and objects in both directions.  At some point there is a fixed, final macroscale of matter, whether or not there is an infinite series of smaller and smaller particles that contribute to it, or whether there are any subparticles at all.  Our perceived level of material sizes might be a smaller level of a larger scale of the universe, but this chain could not continue forever both upwards and downwards.

Infinite regression is impossible in all physical events, the passing of time, and even more fundamental metaphysical causality.  There could not be or have been an infinite causal chain where one thing created another until matter sprang into existence and took its current forms.  Either the uncaused cause directly created the cosmos, even if not all at once, or it created other existents which in turn created various contingent things, whether that process was quick or lasted enormous amounts of time.  The most important issue related to this (besides logic dictating all possibility and necessity of truths) is still that there cannot not be an uncaused cause as long as anything which did not always exist, a category time and the material world inherently fall into, has existed at all.