Question:
Could time travel be hazardous to the Christian faith?
Billy the Rabbit
2010-11-08 06:17:39 UTC
The possibility of time travel seems to eliminate the cornerstone of that any religion has to offer: faith. A time traveler could go back in time to the era of Jesus and discover first hand if he existed and if he preformed the miracles like raising Lazarus from the dead, coming back to life himself, etc. If none of it ever happened, then there's the proof that it's fantasy, and that ends the debate. On the other hand if it's all real like the Bible depicted, then faith is no longer required to believe, because there would be evidence, and that would cancel out 'faith,' something Christians have always stressed as being important.

And Stephen Hawking said 'that time travel may be possible.' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3337049/Prof-Michio-Kaku-on-the-science-behind-UFOs-and-time-travel.html
Sixteen answers:
Jabber wock
2010-11-08 06:55:28 UTC
Time travel for humans is essentially impossible, as the quantum outcomes needed for it to happen are so unlikely. The most we might hope for is to send information through time, but massive bodies would be completely unrealistic.



In the world of classical physics it would defy causality. If I travel to the past and shoot my younger self, then how could I have existed to make that journey? Similarly the conservation of properties would not be conserved - if I travel back in time, then the universe at my original time suddenly has less mass and energy, while the earlier universe has more.



Now such variations are possible at the quantum scale (with certain constraints), but the probability of non-deterministic outcomes means that it would be increasingly unlikely for anything on the scale of even a few atoms and upwards.



What Michio Kaku is describing is not genuine time travel, but experiencing time passing at a different rate. The passage of time is relative, and depends on the inertial reference frame. This is based on Einstein's Special Relativity. It is possible to be in a reference frame where time passes quicker/slower than elsewhere, but effectively that means that a person might live far longer compared to his fellow humans if he moves to a different frame. To him, though, his local time would appear normal, and his clock would keep local time normally. However, one minute of local time might be a whole day back home.



This is not a case of 'disappearing' from one time and 'reappearing' at another, which is the normal meaning of time travel. He would continue to exist continuously through time, and there is no prospect of going backwards in time. That part of Kaku's article is pure fantasy speculation. "If we could journey back into the past..." - note no explanation of how that could be possible.
no1home2day
2010-11-08 06:36:52 UTC
On the contrary, it would shut up all the atheist mockers who disbelieve anything and everything the Bible has to say! I would welcome a time travelling machine that could view the past! Maybe THEN these foolish questions would be put to a dead stop!



Look, there have been others who have tried to disprove Christianity with some serious research, and in every single case, the person ended up becoming a Christian!



- Lew Wallace ended up writing the novel, Ben Hur. He started out writing an expose against Christianity, but as he researched, his expose slowly changed.

- Mortimer J. Adler was a philosopher.

- Steve Beren was a former member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.

- Kirk Cameron is an actor from the TV show, "Growing Pains" who became a Christian

- Francis Collins was a geneticist who was an atheist until age 27.

- Lee Strobel is now a writer, Christian "apologist", was a former journalist.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Nobel Prize-winning dissident and author.

- Gerald Priestland is a news correspondent who was once an atheist.

- George R. Price a genetics who became an Evangelical Protestant.

- Rosalind Picard director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab was raised atheist, but converted to Christianity in her teens.

- Charles Péguy, the french poet, essayist and editor, went from agnostic humanist to pro-republic Catholic.

- Marvin Olasky, former Marxist turned Christian conservative, edits the Christian Word magazine.

- William J. Murray, son of Madalyn Murray O'Hair became a born-again preacher

- Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist and author, went from agnosticism to the Catholic church.

- Nina Karin Monsen was a Noregian moral philospher and author who grew up in a humanist family, but later converted to Christianity through philosophic thinking.

- Claude McKay, a bisexual Jamaican poet, went from Communist atheist to a devout Catholic Christain.

- C. S. Lewis was an atheist who later returned to Christianity. He said that he was "very angry with God for not existing!" He wrote such books as Mere Christianity, etc.

- Joy Davidman was a poet, and the wife of C. S. Lewis.

- Larry Darby is a "holocaust revisionist" and a former member of the American Atheists.



The list goes on and on, including heavy metal and punk musicians, actors and acresses, etc; but the point is, when people honestly and seriously search for themselves instead of blinding believing what they are told like lost little lambs who can't think for themselves, they discover God!



I hope that time viewing (if not actual time travel) becomes real while Dawkins is still alive! I would LOVE to see the shock on his face when he discovers the truth!
2010-11-08 06:23:54 UTC
1) The possibility of time travel seems to eliminate the cornerstone of that any religion has to offer: faith.



I disagree - though, admittedly, with certain knowledge of past events less faith would be required **regarding the past**.



But imagine if the people whom Jesus healed KNEW that he had healed others. If they did not have faith that he would or could heal them, wouldn't that affect what happened? Wouldn't faith still be JUST as important - merely easier to come by?



And consider all of the Christians throughout history who have trusted in God and been devastated in battle or by natural catastrophe. Wouldn't the knowledge that God does not always save people from disaster make *ongoing* faith in God more difficult for people rather than less?



I think the only thing time travel would remove is the need for faith in past events - not the ongoing need for faith in God to do as he promised.





Of course time travel may be possible - but, then, so might visiting parallel dimensions. Also, it's far more likely that time travel (of a sort) into the future is possible than it is that time travel into the past is possible.



Jim, http://www.bible-reviews.com/
?
2016-02-26 08:05:31 UTC
Why do Christians have to explain to you what Jesus Christ has already explained? He said clearly that many false Christs will arise. There is your answer - direct from Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus Christ was well aware that stories would arise in an attempt to keep men from the pristine and eternal gospel of God and cause confusion. I know who the author of confusion is. Do you? It makes no difference whatsoever whether these stories proceeded the incarnate God or followed Him. Dec 25h has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and was chosen by the Catholic Church fully independent of Scripture. Surely you know this. Are you prepared to address the Catholic Church for what they have put forth as truth as you have me? If you feel Jesus Christ's statement can not stand on it's own and requires some back up with further explanation from Christians, I would most certainly be interested in hearing why. You seem almost fascinated and a bit skeptical that Jesus Christ is right in this matter as in all things. Thank you for your email regarding this but I would appreciate an explanation from you on the assumption that my beliefs are "so called truths" as you stated and at odds somehow with Biblical Scripture. What are these points exactly please? I am a 20 year blood bought and crucified woman owned outright by the sovereign God. You have assumed a great deal. I too assumed much from a question appearing to be posted by a mocker of God. I ask you - why is your question not only worded this way but here at all when the Word of God has addressed it and you profess Jesus as Lord? I see more and more as I re-read and re-read again your question - the need for explanation is falling on your shoulders. Will you be emailing all those that have used (and thoroughly enjoyed using) your question as yet another opportunity to mock God - or am I the "safe" one?
Little praiser
2010-11-08 20:45:18 UTC
It would be a blessing. If you are looking for Jesus you will not find him.



Yeshua is the original Aramaic proper name for Jesus the Nazarene, who lived from about 6 B.C.E. to 27 C.E. (A.D.) The word "Jesus" is actually a mis-transliteration of a Greek mis-transliteration. The Emperor Constatine even mistook Jesus for Apollo, the son of the Greek god Zeus. In Hebrew Yeshua means Salvation while the name Jesus has no intrinsic meaning in English whatsoever.



Christmas is not the birthday of Christ Jesus!

Christ Jesus was born in what we, today, call 4 BC --- In the Jewish year 3758.

On our modern Gregorian calendar, which did not exist at the time of Christ Jesus' birth, He was born on October 4, BC 4.



Wednesday, Nisan 14 Passover is was 28AD. Nisan 1 (cresent new moon as sighted from Jerusalem).



Knowing these people they would have a place like Universal City. They don’t believe what they do see. What make you think thery will believe even then?



The Philosophy of Tommaso Campanella believes that man not only loves what he actually is, but he acts for his own conservation and tends toward an infinite being. He imagines an ideal republic professing a natural religion. Natural religion meaning the system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws without attributing moral, spiritual, or supernatural significance to them. Do you believe in the natural religion? Good you also believe in the politics of Campanella is a practical application of his philosophico-religious concept. He dreams of a universal society with the Pope as head of the religious aspect and the King of Spain as head of the civil, assisted by a Senate made up of all the princes of the world.



Nicholas of Cusa a German prelate, scientist, and philosopher who emphasized the incompleteness of the human knowledge of God and nature. Basis of their activity that all events can be explained it is because of this desire to bring into subjection the occult forces of nature that during the Renaissance we find so widely diffused the science of "magic," which professes to know the good and evil spirits of nature, and to make them allies in good and evil enterprises. Nicholas of Cusa was a Neo-Platonist in thought, and this led him to formulate a new type of logic and a new interpretation of nature metaphysics. Metaphysic is an underlying philosophical of theoretical principle. Basic; fundamental are given to theorizing; reason based on speculative wisdom based on a system of inconclusive evidence.



The spirit world is still here.
Joel V
2010-11-08 06:32:40 UTC
There would still be faith involved--in this case, faith that the 'time traveler' is telling the truth in what he or she sees in the past. It's the same as anything in the Bible: eyewitness testimony. Anyone who doesn't believe the gospels now will be unlikely to believe any time-traveler.
2010-11-08 06:28:36 UTC
time travel may be possible, but we will never acheive it, because if we were going to in the future we would already have heard about it on the news or in the papers when someone traveled back into our time....

so it doesn't really matter whether time travel threatens religion because it is likely that religions will get proved wrong eventually anyway (some of them already have), but if time travel were possible, yes it would threaten a lot of peoples religions
?
2010-11-08 06:23:15 UTC
Time travel is possible and happening!

As I typed this I traveled another 30 seconds into the future.

I think the only safe way to prevent time travel from harming the Christian faith

is to remove all Christians from the timeline immediately!
Joe
2010-11-08 06:20:24 UTC
We would still have to take it on faith that the time traveler told the truth. Even if we were there, we would have to take it on faith that our eyes told us what we saw correctly. Despite this, I don't see how this disproves Christianity.
great gig in the sky
2010-11-08 06:20:08 UTC
Stephen Hawkins is smoking a glass pipe about the whole time machine and evil space aliens things.
°•.Røwan.•°
2010-11-08 06:22:15 UTC
A parallel universe theory is more plausible than time travel.



Hawking must be doing some real *good* stuff
Robert T
2010-11-08 07:54:43 UTC
No, It's already happening in various forms & by christians.
Matthew
2010-11-08 06:20:56 UTC
Time travel will never be possible. It's just a pipe-dream.
Invisible Pink Monster
2010-11-08 06:20:46 UTC
That 'could' make the "terminator vs jesus" video real though. xD
Chris Northfield
2010-11-08 06:19:59 UTC
It would be more hazardous when someone goes back and discovers that Jesus was fake and never performed any miracles
2010-11-08 06:25:42 UTC
LSD comes to the same conclusion.


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