Theology

[owlfish]

C. has a question for you:

[Poll #1336349]

Comments

[drplokta]

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.

[taldragon.livejournal.com]

considering God is supposed to be omniscient, s/he'd kindof *need* time travel - like Santa - to be everywhere at once all of the time.

or possibly a few departments-worth of minions.

[ladybird97.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a "this question gives me a headache" option to check? :)

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Seeing as God exists outside of time, one presumes asking if He can participate in it is beside the point.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Only Yog-Sothoth knows the answer...

[thirstypixel.livejournal.com]

No, on account of not existing.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

The question has some elements in common with "Can I travel along my own circulatory system?"

[tammabanana.livejournal.com]

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".

[haggisthesecond.livejournal.com]

Haven't you seen the buses? There is probably no God.

[gillo]

By definition, any god who exists is omnipresent in all conceivable dimensions, of which time is one, so yes, He can. Or the nearest thing to it.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

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.

[celandineb.livejournal.com]

*shrugs* Since there is no god, there is nothing TO be traveling in time.

[kashmera.livejournal.com]

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.

[lazyknight.livejournal.com]

The ability to do something has a necessary prerequisite of existence, so no.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

*laughs at how well people can reiterate Augustine*

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.

[rhube.livejournal.com]

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...