Time-travel in Calvinism

Turretin Fan has done an interesting little post on the perennial issue of freedom and foreknowledge:

http://turretinfan.blogspot.com/2008/11/seers-choice-open-theism-molinism-and.html

Although he doesn’t specifically discuss it, this intersects with the issue of time-travel in SF.

Since I’ve written a number of short stories about time travel, and since I know a number of other Calvinists who’ve done the same, this issue is worth exploring.

Turretin Fan is correct to point out that popular scenarios of this sort often involve an indeterministic view of time. So can a Calvinist write a novel or short story about time-travel that’s consistent with his theological commitments?

Several comments are in order:

1.I use the SF genre for a couple of reasons:

a) As a modern American, I grew up with SF, so it’s a literary genre that comes naturally to someone of my generation (or younger).

b) The SF convention is also a useful way of exploring the consequences of our actions. Indeed, I think that’s one reason God endowed human beings with an imagination. It’s a precondition of moral deliberation.

Take the attitude of regret. Although some people suffer from vain regrets, I think that, in general, regret is an edifying attitude. Only a morally obtuse individual can make his way through life without looking back on some of his actions (or inactions) with a twinge of regret.

An imaginative faculty is also a precondition for human creativity. God created us. But he created us with a creative ability of our own.

And the Bible itself appeals to hypothetical scenarios.

So time-travel is a convenient, literary convention to explore alternate possibilities. At that fictitious level, it’s perfectly consistent with Christian theology. The very fact that we can do it means that we have a God-given capacity to do it.

2. Many SF stories use time-travel as a stock convention which they don’t bother to justify. It’s something which the audience is expected to accept. The willing suspension of belief.

Some SF stories make a token effort to justify time-travel. They offer a pseudoscientific explanation.

These stories are not so much about the possibility of time-travel itself, but about the possibilities which time-travel creates. So they don’t focus on the mechanics of time-travel, beyond a perfunctory explanation to make it seem a bit more realistic.

Other SF stories are more interested in the possibility of time-travel. And they attempt to offer a serious scientific or metaphysical explanation for time-travel.

Of itself, the use of this literary convention does not entail any ontological commitment to the possibility of time-travel.

3. Moreover, the theoretical possibility of time-travel is not all of a piece. Perhaps traveling into the future is theoretically possible while traveling into the past is theoretically impossible. Perhaps traveling into the past is theoretically possible, but altering the future is not. You can go back in time, but you can’t change the outcome.

I’m not saying that any of this is possible. Just that, if we’re going to discuss the possibility of time-travel, then this question breaks down into a number of separate issues.

4. From a Reformed standpoint, is it hypothetically possible to change the future? The answer depends on how you ground that possibility.

If that possibility is grounded in a view of time as indeterminate, then that would be contrary to predestination and providence. (Indeed, it’s contrary to foreknowledge.)

On the other hand, it wouldn’t be difficult for a Reformed novelist to gloss this possibility in a way that’s congruent with predestination and providence. If a character changes the future, he can ony do that because God decreed more than one outcome. God decreed the time-machine. God decreed the time-traveler.

God didn’t decree more than one outcome at a time (which is incoherent), but decreed them to eventuate in serial fashion: one future after another.

So time would still be determinate. God would predetermine the eventuation of one alternative possibility, and then another—using the character as an agent to effect that outcome. That would still be consonant with foreordination and providential second causes.

We don’t ordinarily think in these terms since, as a matter of fact, that is not how God chosen to structure the timeline.

I’m also not discussing the question of whether time-travel is physically or metaphysically possible. The point, rather, is that if, ex hypothesi, time-travel is physically or metaphysically possible, then you can ground that possibility in a Calvinistic framework.

I myself haven’t discussed the nuts-and-bolts of time travel in my own short stories since the narrative begins to sag under too much philosophical exposition.

5. Finally, I’m not entirely sure if I agree with Turretin Fan on the coherence of prophecy. The potential problem is this: if a prophecy is too detailed, it generates a dilemma. For it thereby invites its own failure.

If you know too much about the future, that puts you in a position to thwart the foreseen outcome. If the prophecy says that you will get out of bed at 7:00 AM, you can spite the prophecy by getting out of bed at 6:59 AM or 7:01 AM.

But, in that case, you can’t foresee the future in detail. If a prophecy is too detailed, it undercuts the necessary preconditions for such a prophecy to accurately forecast the future.

This doesn’t mean that prophecy is impossible. But the prediction must be sufficiently vague in certain details that doesn’t present a defeasible target.

Now, it would still be possible to fatalistically fulfill a detailed prophecy. God could make the alarm clock run fast or slow, so that when I look at my alarm clock, I think I’m getting up at a different time than the actual time.

God could take control of my body and make me dress myself against my will. Make my hands on the steering wheel turn right when I want to turn left. Make my foot press the accelerator.

I’d be trapped in a body that forces me to fulfill my fate. Or God could trick me through a series of optical illusions.

However, Calvinism traditionally rejects such a coercive model of fulfillment.

Prophecy is coherent, but only if certain restrictions are in place—restrictions on the knowledge of the affected parties.

There’s nothing very subtle or remarkable about this. It’s like a police tip. The tip doesn’t work if you tip off both parties—the policeman and the crook. The crook can’t know the police are on the way.

If you tell the police that you can find the crook at a particular address, at a particular time of day, and you also tell the crook what you told the police, then they won’t find him there when they go looking for him.

Mind you, this also depends on whether the affected party has an incentive to thwart the prophecy. In some cases, he welcomes the prophecy.

But if it’s a prophecy of doom, and he’s foredoomed, then you’ve given him an opportunity to escape his fate by revealing the details of his fate. So you can have a destiny as long as you don’t know what it is.

We can see this restriction in Biblical prophecy. The Bible doesn’t contain one big long prophecy, in which are the details are given and presented in such a way that you can see how it all comes together before it all comes together.

Instead, bits and pieces of the future are selectively revealed so that you can only see how they all fit together after the fact.