Morality of time travel and would God allow it?

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wjp984

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I am taking a class on the cosmos and the topic being discussed now is wormholes and to a lesser extent time travel. The physics of it defintely seems possible to one day achieve. However, I personally don’t think we will ever be able to change history but more so just be able to view its events past or future when time travel is one day discovered. However, I recently saw the movie De Ja Vu and it got me thinking?

Is it morally permissable to go back and change time to save others or prevent a disaster. Or even more weird is the concept of where is the soul and where does it go? If someone is supposed to die and dies in one course of events they woud be judged accordingly and sent to Heaven, Purgatory or Hell. However, what if you prevent this from occurring and then the person is alive again? Or even worse, is what if you go back in time, get yourself killed only to have your younger self benefit and live on. Would you then get off free for any sin you committed since you no longer exist as a future self? Or is it even morally acceptable to do such a thing. More so, would God even allow it? I know I am rambling but it is just an interesting concept. The person agrees to use time travel because he believes in God and thinks God wants people to be saved. I disagree, I personally think that God would not allow time travel to occurr and change the course of events. More so, I don’t think the universe will allow it either. However, I do think time travel will one day be invented as I mentioned and we will just be observers and nothing else.
 
I think if time travel were at all possible, it would be impossible to change the past, or the future. It would simply be like looking into a projector and viewing the past.

Well where would we be if someone went back in time 2000 years with a machine gun to stop the Crucifixion.
 
As a major sci-fi/Star Trek nut, I have often pondered this. This is how I see it.

If you could go back in time, you would just be doing your part on that particular time. For example, suppose you wanted to go back in time to prevent the Kennedy Assassination. DId you succeed? No, for Kennedy still died. In fact, the reason that you went back to the day and place may have actually caused the assassination to take place! If you had stayed put, then Kennedy would never had died. It would have been an assassination attempt that he survived, but no, you had to go back in time and ended up doing something that caused it all to happen.

So can you change time? No, you just played a part in it wherever and whenever you ended up. Now could temporary timelines happen? Perhaps, but as Star Trek taught, time tends to correct itself, so in the end, the “proper” timeline will be re-established.

Great topic, isn’t it?
 
God does allow it every day at Mass when we are truly present at the Sacrifice of Calvary.

Betsy
 
I often imagine myself going back in time a few years to warn myself of some of the many mistakes, thus, future regrets, I’d make around ages 18-27. Because I get the feeling that would contradict God’s Will and His ordering of time, I’d never actually consider doing it, if it were to become possible. But, there are still those times when, looking back at some of the choices I’ve made, I wish Christopher Lloyd would come screeching up my driveway in a freezing-cold nuclear-powered DeLorean, ready to fix it all… :o
 
I can see no moral problems with time travel, it is just moving through another dimension in the none standard way.
Think of it this way, we can move forward and backwards in space, so why would time be different? The main issue with wormhole time travel is not being able to go farther back then the time the “time machine” was created. So, unless you find a wormhole that was created at the moment of creation, that had it’s other opening temporally shifted, you have a limit on how far you can go back.
As to changing history, every change that ever will happen, already has happened. All time is equally real, so the future time travelers (if they exist) are performing their “changes” right now, and the result is the past that we know. No this doesn’t alter free will. They could choose not to make the change, and then we would know a different past, and would always have known that past and no other.

Yours in Christ,
Thursday
 
porriwiggle said:
I think if time travel were at all possible, it would be impossible to change the past, or the future. It would simply be like looking into a projector and viewing the past.

Well where would we be if someone went back in time 2000 years with a machine gun to stop the Crucifixion.
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I agree.

Actually, I have an unwritten scifi novel in my head. It takes place in a future where a totally secular, anti-all-religion government has discovered time travel, and plotters in the government have sent a team, lead by a man who is actually an underground priest who knows koine Greek well enough to speak it, back to the time of Christ. The supposed purpose of the trip is to debunk the miraculous in His ministry, but one of the team members has been programmed to assassiinate Him so He won’t go to the cross.

The upshot is that the time travelers have a conversation with Jesus in Bethany one of the evenings of Holy Week. During the conversation Jesus says, “It didn’t happen in the history of your time; therefore it won’t happen in this time.”

As much as a I (an ardent sci-fi-er) love the concept of time travel, I don’t think it is actually possible, and if it does turn out to be possible, I don’t think history can be changed. I believe Hawkings’ “arrow of time” flies only in one direction.

DaveBj
 
but what if you go back in time and get yourself killed only to have your future self benefit. Or what if someone was supposed to die in one timeline and then does not. What happens to the people’s souls? Do they cease to exist? Are you off free for any sins you commit in your future non existing self so your younger self can benefit?
 
Prayer and God transcend time. To change events past, future and present all one needs to do is pray.
 
No, God would not allow it.

Infinite complexities and problems would follow.

Only an infinite being would be able to fix it 😃
 
WJP,

I don’t think it would be logically possible to “go back and change history.” What you would find is that the history works itself out logically and consistently, taking into account any possible trips backward in time.

In one sense, this already happens as God is independent of time and can “move” forward and backward through history as He wishes.
  • Liberian
 
IF time travel were possible, and you traveled back in time… first would you not be putting yourself into an infinite loop (you travel back, history moves to the time when you travel back again and once again you travel back and repeat it all over again…ad infinitum)…

and second would you not then be creating duplicates of yourself each time you travell back as in 'Back to the Future".

Traveling forward in time would not be a problem (you simply skip the time -or on’t exist in the time that you skip over), but you could not return or once again you would put yourslef into a loop.
 
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wjp984 said:
but what if you go back in time and get yourself killed only to have your future self benefit. Or what if someone was supposed to die in one timeline and then does not. What happens to the people’s souls? Do they cease to exist? Are you off free for any sins you commit in your future non existing self so your younger self can benefit?
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**## **It’s not possible, though, AFAICS - because the “you” existing at 9 p.m. on July 4th in whatever exact location one is at that time, is the result of all the previous yous - so if one is displaced, the others are affected: & so, in consequence, is the whole network of relations one has so far constructed with the external world, by existing within it. There would be a massive ripple effect - so the changes made in the past, would change the present, so the “you” getting into your time machine, would not exist exactly in the way it was existing the present - so the you travelling into the past would not be you, at all, but an alternative, possible version of you who did not in actuality exist 🙂 To exist, is to exist in relation to other beings - change, & they are changed. **

**ISTM that, without being materialist, one can say that talk of time is a useful convention; but no more than a convention. We are aware of succession - but even then, only sometimes: as we say, “How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself”. When we are thoroughly absorbed in something - we don’t notice the passage of time, nor do we notice succession. And if time is a convention, & nothing else - how can we travel in or by it ? **

**And: it is not a discrete thing, but an undivided thing - we parcel it out into centuries, decades, years, seasons, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds: not because it is called those things, but because it suits our life on earth for us to do so. 1500 AD is before, and different from, 1960 AD, not in itself, but because succession & change indicate to us that it is convenient to distinguish them: it makes life make sense, if we distinguish them. But the names & numbers do not correspond to reality: the division of times is of our making; there is nothing in whatever-it-is that we name 1500, to make it not-1960 - except from our POV. **

So: how can one travel from one point in an undivided medium, to another point in the same medium ? And from what point is one beginning ? If succession is (as implied) metaphysically simple: how does a composite thing such as a human being tell one moment in it apart from another (since these moments exist only from his POV) ? (OTOH, as motion in place is possible despite the difficulties in defining place, that metaphysical objection may not be insoluble.)

**ISTM there is no starting-point, & no terminus - so no possibility of time-travel. Especially as one is talking of travel in an unglorified body. One might as well travel in the body from one thought to another, ISTM. **

**The idea is self-contradictory, because it implies that the relations between things that have made the would-be traveller that person existing in that moment, can be undone so that he can escape the conditions of life as that person: that he can unloose the billions of causal connections which make him that man at that time in that place. If he did, he would cease to exist. So: time-travel is possible only if one is non-existent 🙂 **
**Richard Wurmbrand said we all have a time machine - the soul. IMO he’s right - for it gives us access to everything in creation, & to God the Creator; & we can travel into possible but unrealised futures, as well as into futures which are impossible. **
 
There are serious logical problems with the concept of time travel. Logically speaking it is not possible. Theologically speaking it is not possible. Just because the math works does not mean that such mathematical postulates are consistent with reality.
 
These are just some scattered thoughts on the matter. If time travel is possible, why aren’t there 15 million visitors from the future at the crucifixion of Christ watching? On the other hand, if I understand correctly, psysicists have found particles that travel backwards or forwards in time.
I am a long-time science fiction addict and the sorts of questions raised on this thread have long been faced by it. Here is the sort of problems it has raised: what if you go back time and kill your own grandfather? If he is dead, you could not have been born, then go back and kill him. One solution that it has provided though is that changing the past creates a whole new universe, the original one existing also.
In the movie “Back to the future,” Michael J. Fox goes into the past and by altering the course of events, changes the present noticeably. If there is only one universe, I would question the morality of this. For example, to act in a way that would prevent the births of people would would be born, by, for example, inadvertently causing a chain of events that would prevent a couple that would have married from meeting at all, would be in effect killing those people.
 
mosher said:
There are serious logical problems with the concept of time travel. Logically speaking it is not possible. Theologically speaking it is not possible. Just because the math works does not mean that such mathematical postulates are consistent with reality.
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There is no disputing that the passage of time is influenced by velocity. This has been shown through experimentation. If I go at .95c relative to you, time will pass much slower for me, and I will experience 1 year for every 3.2 you experience. Do you consider this time travel?
And, if we consider that the two ends of a wormhole are moving at different speeds relative to one another, if you went through one, you would come out in a different time.
As for looking at this theologically, God is eternal, meaning He sees all time as one big “now.” This means all times are equally real to God, just as all space is equally real, why can’t we travel through time?

Yours in Christ,
Thursday
 
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