He can, but he doesn't need to, since he's omnipresent and omniscient, meaning that every point in time already has a God who knows everything that any time-travelling God might know.
Aren't there a lot of places in the Bible where God apologizes for something (Noah's flood?) or where the Israelites go and do something stupid and it takes God decades to respond? It seems like these things would imply God can't just go back in time and fix them before they become a problem. Unless he already did, and that was the best time to fix it.
Never mind. I change my answer from "no" to "the answer is unknown and unknowable".
Part of the conversation leading to this post involved speculating on what God's character sheet would look like. (That and he likes LJ poll answers better than any answers I can give him on subjects like these.)
I have't answered the poll question because it doesn't quite address the nuance of the issue, in my view. If there is is a Judeo-Christian God, drplokta's response covers what it's capable of.
No, no. "There is probably not a God." There may be none, there may be two, there may be thousands. It only suggests - and even then is rather uncertain - that there is not only one of him/her/it.
I think those ads are a useful public service. I mean, if you'd run out of God, you'd appreciate being reminded to pick some up on the way home, along with a pint of milk.
IIRC, Einstein suggested that time travel would only be possible (in this universe) if one set off from Earth at a significant fraction of C, so that one would travel relativistically slower and thus be able to return to Earth, not before one had left, but having aged less than those left behind.
So we must all hope that this god person is still speeding away from the Earth, getting ever closer to the Great Chinese Walls which mark the edge of the visible universe, fifteen billion light years away, and that his oxygen will run out long before hesheorit starts to loop back towards us.
It occurs to me that if God was outside of time then he/she would already know what people would do in response to certain actions and wouldn't get so sad or angry about it. On the other hand, it may just be that the people who wrote the bible were struggling to explain it from a human perspective in which case a lot of that didn't really happen that way anyway.
I'm always reminded at this point of an analogy made by Philip K Dick. He was describing beings that occasionally popped into existence in our reality by comparing it to the experience of a 2D being who encounters one of us putting our finger on its plane of existance. The 2D being only perceives the 2D impression made by the end of the finger and is unable to draw enough information from its own perceptive abilities to accurately describe what is really going on.
My more-religious-than-the-rest-of-us brother has spoken of his interpretation of parts of the Bible like this, too. He uses the part where God is making Adam as an example: the Bible tries to explain how God did it, but if you're God trying to explain to ancient man - "So first I had to assemble some proteins out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, y'know, and then I've got to sequence the DNA, and your cytoplasm's got to be sort of a saline solution, and..." and ancient man probably says something like, "What?" And God's like, "Yeah, ok, sorry. I made you out of mud. Just think of it as mud."
It's probably hard to interpret with modern knowledge what God's actually capable of when all our data comes from a much older account. If it didn't occur to them that time travel might even be possible, any evidence for it from their stories would have to be picked up from bits and pieces scattered throughout.
Of course, it depends on whether you regard God as ever lasting or eternal, in or outside of time, but he seems to be most commonly regarded as outside of time, in which case the idea that God travels through time (even in the sense of simply enduring it) wouldn't seem to make sense (in that the concept would be incoherent).
But hey, I'm as an atheist, it's all academic to me...
Going with the Judeo-Christian concept of God, since that's the one I know most about.
Free will for the humans is a critical point. If God can travel forward in time (at more than one second per second), that tends to imply, and back again. The that seems to imply that the whole universe is deterministic, and we don't have free will, but just follow a set course (which God can alter).
Well, if one accepts the Many Worlds theory, God simply travels up and down all the various chains of causality. Free will isn't interfered with because somewhere, every result of every possible choice is played out, and God can hop back and forth along each link.
But I don't really think it's a question of time travel, per se. The sort of God we're talking about must exist outside time and therefore perceives every instant, from the beginning of the universe to the end, simultaneously. Without that problematic moving backwards through time thing, free will is again not compromised.
Many Worlds If you use the Many Worlds theory, the same argument holds. If he can whiz up and down all possible timelines, then all possible actions are predetermined (and occur) in some sense. So again no free will. Breaks the rules.
The sort of God I don't think that is the sort of God we are talking about. I could be wrong, the "outside of time" bit isn't in the Bible. Doesn't the Bible just say that he's eternal, and kind of imply by his actions and speach that he's experiencing time linearly too?
Well, I suppose the question of free will in the Many Worlds multiverse remains, whether or not God is involved. If all our possible choices are ultimately played out, are we really making choices at all? But that, perhaps, is a discussion for another time.
As for the type of God under discussion, I'm hardly a Bible scholar, being cheerfully agnostic myself, but while the Good Book might imply God experiences time as mortals do, I've seen modern philosophers and theologians discuss Divine nature in the terms I was suggesting.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
no subject
or possibly a few departments-worth of minions.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Never mind. I change my answer from "no" to "the answer is unknown and unknowable".
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
So we must all hope that this god person is still speeding away from the Earth, getting ever closer to the Great Chinese Walls which mark the edge of the visible universe, fifteen billion light years away, and that his oxygen will run out long before hesheorit starts to loop back towards us.
no subject
no subject
no subject
On the other hand, it may just be that the people who wrote the bible were struggling to explain it from a human perspective in which case a lot of that didn't really happen that way anyway.
I'm always reminded at this point of an analogy made by Philip K Dick. He was describing beings that occasionally popped into existence in our reality by comparing it to the experience of a 2D being who encounters one of us putting our finger on its plane of existance. The 2D being only perceives the 2D impression made by the end of the finger and is unable to draw enough information from its own perceptive abilities to accurately describe what is really going on.
no subject
no subject
It's probably hard to interpret with modern knowledge what God's actually capable of when all our data comes from a much older account. If it didn't occur to them that time travel might even be possible, any evidence for it from their stories would have to be picked up from bits and pieces scattered throughout.
no subject
Assuming that God exists, and is the one of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ... he doesn't need to, because he is outside time and omnipresent.
It's an interesting twist on the question of predestination, though.
no subject
But hey, I'm as an atheist, it's all academic to me...
no subject
no subject
Mutants and Masterminds has a pretty good system for dealing with that. God's Character sheet would look like this:
God - PL X
Other characters with similar character sheets are The Devil, Gallactus, and Q.
no subject
Free will for the humans is a critical point. If God can travel forward in time (at more than one second per second), that tends to imply, and back again. The that seems to imply that the whole universe is deterministic, and we don't have free will, but just follow a set course (which God can alter).
no subject
But I don't really think it's a question of time travel, per se. The sort of God we're talking about must exist outside time and therefore perceives every instant, from the beginning of the universe to the end, simultaneously. Without that problematic moving backwards through time thing, free will is again not compromised.
no subject
If you use the Many Worlds theory, the same argument holds. If he can whiz up and down all possible timelines, then all possible actions are predetermined (and occur) in some sense. So again no free will. Breaks the rules.
The sort of God
I don't think that is the sort of God we are talking about. I could be wrong, the "outside of time" bit isn't in the Bible. Doesn't the Bible just say that he's eternal, and kind of imply by his actions and speach that he's experiencing time linearly too?
no subject
As for the type of God under discussion, I'm hardly a Bible scholar, being cheerfully agnostic myself, but while the Good Book might imply God experiences time as mortals do, I've seen modern philosophers and theologians discuss Divine nature in the terms I was suggesting.