August 26, 2010
Treasure of the Broken Land
(Jimmy Akin)
Every year in August I have a series of special days. First, the 22nd (Queenship of Mary) is the anniversary of my reception into the Church. Then comes my birthday. Then, on the 26th, it is the anniversary of my wife's death.
Renee passed eighteen years ago today after a two-month battle with colon cancer. She had just turned 28.
You can read about it if you like.
I realized that I'd never put a picture of her online, and so I scanned this one.
You don't know it from looking at the picture, but she's actually standing on phone books to make her look taller.
In the words of a Mark Heard song,
I see you now and then in dreams
Your voice sounds just like it used to
I know you better than I knew you then
All I can say is I love you
I thought our days were commonplace
Thought they would number in millions
Now there's only the aftertaste
Of circumstance that can't pass this way again
Treasure of the broken land
Parched earth, give up your captive ones
Waiting wind of Gabriel
Blow soon upon the hollow bonesI can melt the clock hands down
But only in my memory
Nobody gets a second chance
To be the friend they meant to be.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (37)
Atheists Don't Have No Songs
(SDG)
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August 25, 2010
Okay, Liturgical Rant Time
(Jimmy Akin)
This Sunday when I went to Mass there was a guest priest, someone I'd never seen before. As soon as I head him speak, I knew there was going to be trouble. While everyone as saying the Gloria, this is what the priest said:
Glory to God in the highest And peace to hisGod's people on earth.
"Oh, great," I thought. "We're already off to a bad start."
Things went downhill from there.
Not only did Fr. Gender Edit tamper with the Gloria, he also was seemingly unaware of the existence of the subjunctive mood in English. Thus whenever the text called for him to say, "The Lord be with you," he would instead say, "The Lord is with you."
This is wrong for so many reasons.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Liturgy | Permalink | Comments (14)
August 19, 2010
Theological Connections IX: Back to the Future!
(Jimmy Akin)
No matter how much fun it is, Back to the Future is one of those movies that treats time travel in a really silly way. That's not too bad since it is, of course, a comedy, but some things in it detract from even the suspension of disbelief needed for a comedy. The siblings disappearing from the photograph one body part at a time is an example.
There is one thing, though, that the film gets quite right: When Marty McFly gets back to 1985, having "repaired" the timeline by getting his parents back together, his life is not exactly as he left it. His parents now have a happy marriage, his siblings aren't losers any more, Biff no longer dominates his father, and Twin Pine Mall has become Lone Pine Mall (because Marty ran over one of the pines in 1955).
This is all as it should be. The past is a complex system, and any interference with a complex system is going to produce unanticipated and unavoidable changes.
It's the temporal equivalent of the Butterfly Effect, and it is far more powerful than fiction writers typically imagine. Sometimes writers propose workarounds to limit its impact in time travel stories--like Dr. Who's oh-so-convenient nexus moments where history can't be changed, thus keeping the overall framework of history in place while allowing the characters to make changes in other parts of the timeline.
The reality is that any significant change in the past will ripple outward with the result of profoundly changing the future. It isn't like those Harry Turtledove alternate history stories where the South wins the Civil War and then you can go forward to see what later historical figures, like Roosevelt and Hitler, were doing almost a century later. While those may be interesting exercises in alternate history if a timeline change like the South winning the Civil War had occurred then FDR and Hitler would never have existed.
Consider: Given the fact that in each human conception there are around 40,000,000 (forty million) potential genetic packets from the father vying for a chance to merge with the one genetic packet provided by the mother, if your parents had done anything--even a tiny thing--different on the night you were conceived then either no conception would have resulted or, with 40,000,000-to-1 odds, a different genetic packet from your father would have joined with the one from your mother, and you would not have been conceived. Instead, an unimagined "half-twin" would have come into existence in your place--a possible sibling that could have been but wasn't in our timeline.
Making even small changes in the timeline would thus produce significant changes in the future, and the farther back in the past you went, the greater the impact of the change would be today.
I don't buy rationalizations to the contrary. Mess with history, and history gets profoundly messed with--fast.
This is especially true with big changes. South wins the Civil War? Word of that gets to Austria, where Alois Hitler reads it in a newspaper and the course of his life changes at least a little so that something different happens on a particular night in 1888 and he either has no son or a different child comes into existence and Adolf Hitler is never born.
The conditions leading history to unfold as it has are so sensitive that, my suspicion is, you yank even one person from the timeline and eventually the waves of that change will ripple out--growing in strength--until the whole history of the world is profoundly changed with time.
Or at least that's my theory.
I think the sci-fi writers have been playing it safe.
History is very, very fragile.
This raises the question of what would happen if you really did travel to the past and the return to the future. What would you find?
Before I go into that, please allow me to offer one of my biggest complaints about Back to the Future--not because it is relevant to the topic, but just because it annoys me so much and is so easily fixable.
Near the beginning of the movie, Marty sees Doc Brown shot by the terrorists who gave him the plutonium that he used to make the 1.21 gigawatts needed to power the DeLorean, right?
Then, back in 1955, Marty is completely torn up over the apparent death of Doc Brown and he repeatedly tries to warn his friend about his future fate. Doc won't listen to him, refusing as a matter of principle to know anything about his future. This happens over and over, and eventually Marty writes a sealed letter and forces it upon Doc Brown at the last minute before he returns to 1985. Doc indignantly tears the letter up.
Once back in 1985, Marty runs to the now-Lone Pine Mall and sees Doc gunned down by the terrorists, who drive away, fleeing the scene. Marty runs up to his fallen friend, expecting him to be dead--and Doc does at first seem to be dead, but then he smiles and opens his eyes.
How can this have happened? Doc is wearing a bullet proof vest under his hazmat suit, and he pulls out the letter Marty wrote him in 1955, which he has taped back together, casually dismissing all of his previous "principles" regarding whether one should have knowledge of one's own future.
GAH!
NO!
BAD WRITING!
You don't have a character casually betray deeply held personal principles, which have been reiterated over and over in the movie, just to pull off a happy ending. Doing that betrays the character and shows that all of the protestations the character made earlier were just "juicing" the emotional situation and the writers always intended to take the cheap "he just betrayed his principles" way out.
It's especially lame because there were other, EASY and much more satisfying endings available. If I had a DeLorean with a flux capacitor and could go back to the writers' room and tamper with the script, something like this would have happened:
Marty runs up to Doc and cradles his body in his arms. Doc opens his eyes and smiles weakly at Marty.
MARTY (overjoyed): Doc! How can you be alive?
Doc opens his hazmat suit to reveal the bullet proof vest.
MARTY: A bullet proof vest! Does that mean you decided to read the letter I wrote you back in 1955?
DOC BROWN: Read the letter? No, Marty! I tore that letter up. It's like I told you then: Nobody should have knowledge of his future.
MARTY: But then how?
DOC BROWN: Marty . . . I'm not stupid. You didn't think I'd be dealing with terrorists without taking precautions, did you?
I hate it when writers miss easy dialog-level fixes. (Like in that final episode of Battlestar Galactica.)
That's how Back to the Future would end in my alternate universe.
It also might star Eric Stoltz. I dunno, though . . . the last might be a little too on the "Fringe" as a casting choice.
NEXT: GET BACK TO WHERE YOU ONCE BELONGED.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Apologetics, Philosophy, Theology | Permalink | Comments (72)
August 18, 2010
How to Make Low Carb Pizza: The Movie!
(Jimmy Akin)
The other day on Facebook (where you can friend me if you'd like) I posted a picture of some low carb pizza I had made over the weekend. I got a number of requests--online and off--for the recipe, and so I made the following video (my apologies for the camera work at a few points; it's not easy to make pizza with one hand while holding an iPhone with the other).
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Diet | Permalink | Comments (8)
Theological Connections VIII: Can God Change the Past?
(Jimmy Akin)
Despite what you might think, the title question of this post is not something that people have only been wondering in the last hundred years, with the advent of modern science fiction and Einsteinian physics and all that.
In fact, the medievals wondered about it, and Thomas Aquinas has an article devoted to it in the Summa Theologiae.
YOU CAN READ IT HERE, but I'll give you the upshot: He says no.
The reason that he says no is that it would involve a logical contradiction. Something can't have happened and then, at a "later time" not have happened. It either happened or it didn't.
With the modern view of time travel--or more specifically, travel to the past--looking more possible than previously thought, it's worth revisiting the question and asking again: Can God change the past?
If the Novikov self-consistency principle holds, according to which history cannot be changed, then it might look like God could not change the past.
But maybe not. Novikov's principle isn't proposed as a logical necessity but as a natural law. Maybe the Novikov principle (or its equivalent) is a mutable law of nature that God himself established--in which case he would be the one ultimately causing the world to conspire to keep history from changing. He himself, though, is not bound by such laws, and so could suspend it just as he could suspend the law of gravity.
If he did suspend it then, to keep the Grandfather Paradox from resulting in true logical contradictions (at least in principle) then we would seem forced toward the alternative timelines interpretation of changing the past.
On that view it would seem that God could change the past, in the same way we could, by making a change in history which only branches off a new timeline. No paradox would result because the original timeline is still "out there."
Aquinas's answer would thus appear false. God could change the past via branching off new timelines.
But maybe Aquinas isn't so wrong after all. Maybe what he said is itself consistent with the alternative timelines view. Maybe his answer is correct, only on a deeper level.
Suppose that you were with God in eternity (E) looking at time, seeing the whole sweep of history. You might see something like this:
In this diagram T represents the original timeline and T' (T-prime) represents an alternate timeline that branches off of T at T1. It shares the same history up to that point, but then something went different at T1, leading to the creation of T'.
For purposes of our thought experiment, suppose that God directly caused the branching off. In T, God parted the Red Sea, but in T' he didn't part it and got the Israelites out of Egypt another way.
Did God change time?
On one level, it seems so. There is now a new sequence of events than are different than the ones in the original timeline. But the original timeline is still "out there"--it still exists--being observed by God from eternity. So it also seems that God did not change time. He created an alternative timeline, but he left the original alone.
And it seems that there is a theological reason for that as well.
The original timeline is present to God in eternity. He sees it from Point E in our Wheel of Time diagram. For him to cause timeline T to cease to exist would mean that he would no longer see it from Point E.
And that is an impossibility. It would imply a change not in time but in eternity. Something would have "at one time" been visible to God in eternity and then "later" ceased to be visible to him in eternity. And that cannot happen because in eternity everything happens at once and there is no passage of time. There is no "later" in eternity.
Thus if something ever exists in time then it is always visible to God in eternity. It cannot cease to exist in time. An alternate timeline might exist in which it does not happen, but if it occurs in any real timeline then it cannot be yanked from existence because that would involve God changing eternity, which is a logical contradiction.
So while you can say that God is capable of changing time, if by that you mean creating an alternate sequence of events in which some from the original sequence do not happen, you can't say that God can destroy a sequence of events once he has created it. He may be able to change time, but not eternity.
NEXT: BACK TO THE FUTURE!
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Apologetics, Philosophy, Theology | Permalink | Comments (20)
August 17, 2010
Theological Connections VII: I'm My Own Grandpa
(Jimmy Akin)
I'm My Own Grandpa is a song that was originally performed by the country commedian duo Lonzo and Oscar (pictured, but that's not the original Lonzo) back in 1947 (or 1948; Wikipedia accounts differ). It's been recorded a number of times over the years, including by Ray Stevens (though that one isn't as up tempo as the original, which makes it musically less nice but perhaps easier to follow).
Here's Ray's version:
And here it is with a chart, in case that helps:
Now, I bring these up in the context of a discussion of time and eternity because of a well-known puzzle: The Grandfather Paradox.
Most commonly the Grandfather Paradox involves going back in time and killing your grandfather before your father was born, thus (apparently) making your own existence impossible, in which case you shouldn't be able to go back and kill him, in which case you exist and can do so, and so on.
Or, if you're in the cheesy 1980s movie Timerider, you go back and become your grandfather.
The Grandfather Paradox--at least the first version--isn't just the stuff of science fiction. It's something that philosophers and physicists puzzle over, too--in part because time travel into the past looks more possible than many previously gave it credit for (at least on the theoretical level; nobody is going to have a time travelling DeLorean any time soon).
If travel to the past is even theoretically possible then that raises the question of whether you can change the past and, if so, what the implications are.
There is a good bit of science fiction in which time travel is handled badly. (Doctor Who, I'm looking at you!)
One way that it is often handled badly is when it is presented as if there is only a single history which can be changed, so that if something in the past changes your history is rewritten and you find yourself living in a different world (sometimes with memories of the previous life you led, which goes even further off the tracks scientifically).
In this kind of fiction, it seems that the Grandfather Paradox would result in a real temporal antinomy--something that would involve a logical contradiction and thus an intrinsic impossibility.
It thus appears that, however travel to the past might work, it can't work like that.
(In the next post, I'll give you a theological argument for why that can't happen, too!)
The scientists and philosophers looking at this question have therefore come up with two models for how to handle this issue.
The first way involves the assertion that, while travel to the past may be possible, changing the past is not. Anything you do once you get to the past has always been part of history. Thus if you go to Dealey Plaza in November of 1963, you won't be able to stop the Kennedy assassination. You were always back in 1963 and you always failed to stop it.
This solution, postulated by Russian physicist Igor Novikov, is not much fun, fictionally. It's also hard to see what kind of chronology protection principle would really keep you from changing events. It seems arbitrary. If I'm back in Dealey Plaza, why would the universe suddenly conspire to stop me from stopping the gunman on the grassy knoll? . . . uh . . . ahem . . . (cough) . . . I meant Lee Harvey Oswald.
It also seems hard to square this view of history with free will, though Ted Chiang's wonderful tale The Story of Your Life
The second way of handling the Grandfather Paradox is to posit the existence of multiple timelines. Thus, as soon as you appear in the past, a new timeline branches off, and if you kill your grandfather in the new timeline then it generates no antinomy because your origin is in a different timeline, where your grandfather did exist and did have a son (possibly with a widow who had a grown up daughter with hair of red).
The multiple timelines view is easier to square with free will and, as much or more importantly, it doesn't require the universe to magically conspire against you to stop you from changing the past. Changing the past--understood as branching off a new timeline--would thus be possible.
NEXT: CAN GOD CHANGE THE PAST?
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Apologetics, Philosophy, Theology | Permalink | Comments (23)
