Can God change the past?

[paintlady1]

Hello,
I am so glad I found this forum and this thread. This is the exact question I have been wanting answered. The funny thing is, as I read the posts I knew the answer all along.

“For nothing is impossible with God.” Luke 1:37

How much simpler can it be? Like when the disciples didn’t understand how the masses were fed with 5 loaves, and Jesus practically says DUH, What don’t you guys get here? Hello, I’m the son of God, I can make anything possible!

God making a past for us and then changing it in no way means God made a mistake. If God does this then that was his intent all along. He wanted us to see the results of our actions and give us a chance for change.

Jesus said “If anyone shall say to this mountain, 'Remove and heave thyself into the sea, and has no doubt about it in his heart, but steadfastly believes that what he ways will happen, it shall be granted him.” How can we argue one and not the other? How can we say God can do this but not that? God is the creator and owner of time and he can do with it what he wants.

God would not be contradicting himself, or making a mistake. He would be creating a learning experience for a human soul and I think that’s why we are all here, so God can teach us about his power and his love. What better way for my soul to learn that to see two outcomes from one decision. I think God changes our past whenever he so chooses and we are none the wiser until the day we are with him, and we can say “Oh, now I understand.”

I hope this makes sense to you. It’s all clear to me now!

Paintlady

 

[Starwynd]

If He can not change the past then that means he can not be omnipotent and has some limitations.

However, how would we be able to tell if He had or not?

 

[paintlady1]

Everyone may not, and probably wouldn’t, be able to tell. Many times when Jesus performed a miracle he told the person not to tell everyone. A miracle can be for an individual and does not have to be shown to or understood by all.

I like to think that God sees that our freewill many times hurts others and not ourselves. By changing the past he can undo things, like a bystanders death in an accident, that He chooses. In effect, He is correcting our mistakes, not His.

Just my opinion!

 

[tm30]

If He can not change the past then that means he can not be omnipotent and has some limitations.

However, how would we be able to tell if He had or not?

God cannot be a contradiction of Himself. Anything and everything that occurs in fact is a reality that God exists within. He cannot “change” the past, because, in doing so, He would change Himself, his knowledge. That’s an impossibility, since His knowledge is simple and based on all that has already come and gone and will come in our temporal realm.

The only similar situation where God can, so-to-speak, “change the past”, is in the application of retroactive saving grace with the Immaculate Conception and the graces won for the souls in timeless Purgatory through our prayers here on temporal earth. But then, it’s not really “changing” anything, but adding to a previous condition.

 

[jimmy85]

1. I’m not quite sure what to think about that. I guess there’s nothing too problematic, but I’d still like to make sure it’s not terribly disputed in the scientific community. At any rate, it’s a very limited sort of “precognition”, so nothing tremendously earth-shattering.
2. That’s dealing with quantum entanglement anyway, which is fine. It’s actually a rather well-known phenomenon, from what I understand. But it doesn’t really apply to the whole Copenhagen vs. MWI interpretations of quantum mechanics debate. If anything, I could even see it being problematic for MWI, if it seems to indicate that there’s one objective reality in the future. But I don’t know… I’m not too worried about quantum entanglement.

hey, I support the Copenhagen interpretation, it is the standart one and one of the older interpretations, however something good about MWI is that it explains the wavefunction collapse with quantum decoherence.

In the Copenhagen interpretation, the mathematics of quantum mechanics allows one to predict probabilities for the occurrence of various events. In the many-worlds interpretation, all these events occur simultaneously. What meaning should be given to these probability calculations? And why do we observe, in our history, that the events with a higher computed probability seem to have occurred more often? One answer to these questions is to say that there is a probability measure on the space of all possible universes, where a possible universe is a complete path in the tree of branching universes. This is indeed what the calculations give.

I realize that sound really difficult to believe though, It actualy sounds like the science of free will. but I guess it is still a popular approach after the Copenhangen interpretation, especialy nowadays.

I also like the Participatory anthropic principle. Hope that on future sicentists could do more experiments to test these interpretations in order to clarify them, it might help to finding the theory of everything as well.

 

[Starwynd]

God cannot be a contradiction of Himself. Anything and everything that occurs in fact is a reality that God exists within. He cannot “change” the past, because, in doing so, He would change Himself, his knowledge. That’s an impossibility, since His knowledge is simple and based on all that has already come and gone and will come in our temporal realm.

If God cannot change himself he is not omnipotent and has limitation.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Far be it from me to question the philosophers in here, let alone St. Thomas Aquinas. But there is something in this that intrigues me just a bit.

Man’s nature was fallen after the sin of Adam. No one was admitted into the presence of God. Nor could anyone be. Man was man and God was God, and that was that.

Jesus then came into the world. After his death was the “harrowing of hell”. However we might think of hell in that context; some parts perhaps being more like Limbo, something really did change, and it changed retrospectively. Man was no longer inadmissible to the presence of God and was, in fact, admitted into His presence. The nature of man, then was changed, and changed retroactively due to the infusion of the Divine into the human. Now, of course, God intended the Incarnation from all eternity, and in a sense, since God’s intention and act are one, man was redeemed from eternity before he was fallen in time, and was “unfallen” from eternity because redeemed in time.

Doubtless others can make better sense of this. But it really does seem to me that we might be utterly incapable of seeing things that are not on a timeline like the one we are on. This does not necessarily argue against St. Thomas, since he was talking about the concept in a logical (that is to say “human”) way. Our logic and our reason may be as lacking in dimension as a line on a piece of paper lacks dimensions. If so, we cannot, in a sense, see what is “behind the paper” or even imagine that there is anything behind it.

 

[Pauljosphpatrk]

I believe that God can do anything He wants. We can’t even imagine the things Our Father can do. When we ask for something in prayer, we usually get an answer which seems contradictory to our expectations, yet it works out for the best. Just trust Him and don’t “do your head in” thinking about things. You’ll never second-guess Our Father, thats for sure.
Happy Christmas, one and all!

 

[WmJackP]

Can God change the past? I don’t mean change the consequences of some past action, but actually change the past so the action never took place.

Perhaps there is no past. Perhaps it is the case that what we perceive as the past is simply our memory visualizing what seems to be a past.

It could certainly be that existence is like an endless series of frames from a film and it is consciousness which manifests throughout the series, making it seem like there is time and that we are moving through time.

Stephen Hawking wrote recently that what seems to make sense to us is only a function of our limitedperception. We may be like fish trapped in a fishbowl and looking out we see a distorted view of reality. Plationic thought from which much of the intellectual backing for Christianity is culled,afterall, provided us with the allegory of the cave which is not at all dissimilar to Hawking’s fishbowl.

Before I worried about whether God can change the past, I’d answer the question of whether there is anything other than the experience of “now”.

 

[Viki63]

Better question: If man can change the future our the current “here and now” and future consequences through prayer (as we believe) is it possible for man to change history through prayer?

My understanding (per C.S. Lewis) is that we can pray for the outcomes of past events as long as we don’t know what happened – for example, I can pray that no one was injured in a collision, when I don’t yet know. Because once I know, I realize that God has allowed certain events to happen, and knowing His permitted will, we shouldn’t pray for it not to have happened. What we can do is give thanks, because He can work even tragic events out for good. This is not always easy to do, of course, for example in the case of murder or death. But we can be sure God is in control, and thank Him that He is in the midst of the situation with us.

 

[Yeoman]

Interesting discussion, there’s another that is similar to it that’s up that I ran across, also old like this one.

I wonder if its somehow sinful to pray for the change in a singular past event? Let’s assume that the event isn’t massive (i.e., praying that World War Two had not occurred or something), but rather personal, (i.e., I wish I’d taken that other fork in the road at Time X). Granted, if the prayer was granted, we’d likely not know in this world, but I wonder if we can make the prayer at all. I know that I personally have one fork I really wish I’d taken rather than another, and if I could reach back and take it, I would. But can a person pray to God to cause that to occur?

 

[fisherman_carl]

God wouldn’t need to change the past because he has already seen the future. So he already knows what will happen. So there is no need to wait so to speak for it to happen and then try to fix it after the fact.

The problem with changing the past to fix one thing is that you end up changing it with 10 other things as well. So you could end up making things worse.

 

[jonathan_hili]

Can God change the past? I don’t mean change the consequences of some past action, but actually change the past so the action never took place.

I think the proposition is meaningless from a divine perspective. If God is outside of time, there is no “past” for Him: all moments are present. Consequently, since all moments are present and all moments are, they cannot be changed.

 

[Yeoman]

The problem with changing the past to fix one thing is that you end up changing it with 10 other things as well. So you could end up making things worse.

Or, I suppose, making things worse for other people. Perhaps even leading them to sin, or preserving them in it.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . I know that I personally have one fork I really wish I’d taken rather than another, and if I could reach back and take it, I would. But can a person pray to God to cause that to occur?

I don’t see what happens outside of our relationship with God as being very important.
Our bodies, which can give us so much pleasure, end up causing us pain.
Any riches we accumulate will be spent by others.
All honour is ultimately forgotten.
And fat bellies cannot keep us alive indefinitely.

What you did was what you did in those circumstances.
Praying to God will not change your choice.
But, it can change the outcome, the consequences for yourself and the world.
Do good now.

 

[ericc]

Can God change the past? I don’t mean change the consequences of some past action, but actually change the past so the action never took place.

It would be hard to know if God had changed something in the past, because we wouldn’t remember it, i.e. as far as we were concerned it didn’t happen.

There’s an old song that goes, “Today will be yesterday tomorrow.” So perhaps in guiding the events of today God is changing the past of tomorrow, and likewise in guiding the events of yesterday he changed the past of today. In other words, our lives are different to what they could have been. God saw the future and changed the past of that future.

However, that’s not the same as God allowing something to happen and then going back and not allowing it to happening. That would be tantamount to God contradicting himself. So I guess the question is: can God contradict himself? Looked at this way the answer would be No.

This means that there are some things God can not do. This is ture, of course; God can not do anything that is contrary to his nature. God can’t stop being God.

What do you think?

That is a contradiction. The meaning of “past” is something that has happened previously or a state of existence of a prior time. To change the past is to make time go backwards. The definition of time is forward moving in the same manner as a definition of a triangle is a 3 sided shape. God can not change the past in the same manner he can’t make a square a triangle or a stone too heavy for him to lift.

For someone outside of time, there is no necessity for Him to change anything. Because he is changeless and he sees past, present , future all at once. If one knows all the answers of the future, one couldn’t get the past wrong, can he?

 

[wmw]

All things happen as God has allowed.

He would never allow what He didn’t want to allow.

In allowing sin he has a fix for each one; a remedy of His Son.

With all things improved in the remedy of His Son, why would He want to undo the greater good achieved by grace? Of course He would not. He just wants the best for us.

It’s just far too wrong to start doing wrong for the sake of the greater grace God would bestow; such thinking is diabolical and only Satan thinks he’s smart enough to pull that off and yet in the end he will fail too.

 

[thinkandmull]

Aquinas in De Eternitate Mundi says that there were many holy writers who said can could change the past and so Aquinas said there that it was not heretical. He disagrees with that idea in principle though. He writes about that in the First Book of the Summa