It is widely popular to believe that, if time travel were possible, the timeline can be altered and it would affect all future events. Perhaps you accidentally travel back to 1955 and make out with your hot mother, hence preventing her from marrying your doofus of a father and giving birth to you. However there is a paradox here: if your mother never gives birth to you, you never exist to go back in time. And if you never went back in time, your mother marries your father and gives birth to you, and then you go back in time and stop them, and the loop continues forever. Whoops, you just destroyed the whole universe. Nice going, Marty.
However I agree with a theory called monotemporalism: that time only has one line and cannot ever be changed. It exists forever in each direction, past and future. To address the despair of those who fear the grasp of fate: even though the timeline ahead of us is already written, we're the ones writing it with our own choices and decisions. In essence, if you go back to 1955, no matter what you or your wacky old scientist friend accidentally do, your mother will still marry your father and you will still be born, so don't worry about it. Just get back in the Delorean and get your ass back to good old 1985 and listen to some Huey Lewis and the News.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse 5 that we as humans can only travel forward through time at a constant rate. He compares it to being in a railcar on railroad tracks, moving very slowly through a landscape. And we can only look sideways at the things passing by at that very moment. We can't look behind us – everything we know about the past is strictly from memory or record. And of course we can't look forward down the railroad tracks, we can only guess and hypothesize about the landscape to come.
The way people describe God to me, it seems that he is a timeless being, in that he isn't bound to the timeline like we are. It seems that he would be able to see every moment in time whenever he wanted. It's like God created a great book about the universe, but only the foundations of the book – the cover, the pages, the binding – not the story itself. People have free will and we make our own choices. So we are the ones actually writing the story. Now because it's possible for God to flip ahead a few pages and see what will happen next (or no doubt just read the entire book cover to cover), he already knows how the story ends. But we are ultimately still the ones who make the decisions and write the story every day.
For an interesting short story on time travel, see my friend Mike's page:
ReplyDeleteStrawberries (time and time again)
http://www.insignifica.org/works/strawberries.shtml
You may be the only person who enjoys that film more than me.
ReplyDeleteThe rub with the Christian God is that he's supposedly also all powerful - meaning he can change things. Unless the timeline is too immovable a rock for Him.
The other God issue is that he supposedly knows how everything's gonna end up, yet he creates billions of non-Christians who he KNOWS will suffer forever in a literal hell. Even if we make the choices, that's still pretty messed up if it's his show.
Hah, let me edit that page before the nasty 1999 web coding scares your readers.
ReplyDeleteIf you use the argument that he created people with free will, then you could say that even though God knew these people would choose to be non-believers, it was still their choice and God just watched them choose it.
ReplyDeleteNow that raises the question that, if God is all-powerful, he could make us all believe in him if he wanted to. But it seems he would rather us decide that for ourselves for some reason. I'm still not clear on that one myself.
The link is fixed and pretty.
ReplyDeleteFree Will has its own set of logical problems. If God was somehow responsible for the creation of our souls (or the placement of our souls in our bodies, I'm not sure when the "soul" is created in modern Christianity), then God allowed our creation KNOWING we wouldn't be saved. That's really odd to me. Are we to serve as example to His followers? If He is truly loving, why create the damned at all?
I've also always wondered why God had to make us decide here on Earth, specifically WITHOUT evidence (at least evidence that I could believe in). Why not let us decide in His presence, laying out what would be expected of us in heaven? Why the game of faith?
In the end, for me, it's all just silly things to think about, because none of it is real. But it's hard for me to fathom what it takes to believe in (and worship!) in a system SO fraught with huge logical issues.
I quote C.S. Lewis
ReplyDeleteFrom Mere Christianity
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
From The Problem With Pain
This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall. For the difficulty about the first sin is that it must be very heinous, or its consequences would not be so terrible, and yet it must be something which a being free from the temptations of fallen man could conceivably have committed. the turning from God to self fulfills both conditions. It is a sin possible even to Paradisal man, because the mere existence of a self - the mere fact that we call it 'me' - includes, from the first, the danger of self-idolatry. Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to myself. This is, if you like, the 'weak spot' in the very nature of creation, the risk which God apparently thinks worth taking.
Okay, think of this Chris.
ReplyDeleteWhen you are in a relationship, you want the person to love you for you. You don't want some robot chick loving you because she has to. Like a slave or something. That's not very genuine. That's where freewill comes in... keeps things very real. The right to choose to love is way better than forced. I personally believe that that's what God was going for.
Seems to me the question here is: What is God capable of, and Why does God do what God does?
ReplyDeleteWhat is God capable of?
I could no sooner tell you what a new born child is capable of.
Why does God do what God does?
Why does anyone do what anyone does?
Answering a question with a question is B.S. so in essence we can figure out each other let alone ourselves. What makes us think we could begin to understand a being who's very existence is so different from our own? I'm not saying we shouldn't wonder.
Perhaps your reading this thinking I'm full of it and if so I ask you the simple question of describing yourself fully in all ways. If you can do that then you probably ARE God.
"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
-Frank Herbert, Dune"