Of Fortune Tellers & Predestination

You'll recall that early on in our little adventure in time here, I made the point that temporal paradoxes were, by definition, impossible.  I concluded that if a concept of time travel could not be conceived that didn't run into these paradoxes, then you would be forced to conclude that time travel itself is impossible.  Well, the inverse of this is also true.  If someone were to suddenly appear out of the blue and toss you the keys to a time machine, then you would be forced to conclude that temporal paradoxes are apparently not a problem.  You may not be able to wrap your mind around how that could be possible, but nevertheless, you would be holding the proof in your hands.  The constant factor is that paradoxes can not happen in reality.  At this point, the simple solution would be to declare time travel impossible.  Being presented with the reality of time machine would force you to cast about for another explanation, but the principle would remain the same.  Well, it appears that there's a very old and familiar phenomenon that raises the issue of a temporal paradox, and you don't even have to bring a time machine into the equation.  All you need is a call to a psychic hot line, and the power to believe.  Whooo Ooooo.

The paradox in question is called the predestination paradox.  I mentioned briefly, while discussing the ontological paradox, that the two were close cousins.  In fact, many of these paradox scenarios involve a combination of the two.  The ontological paradox is where a thing causes itself to exist, whether that thing is a physical object or merely a piece of information.  The predestination paradox is where an event causes itself.  The ontological paradox is like a domino coming into existence out of nowhere, while the predestination paradox is like a domino knocking over the same ring of dominoes that knocked it over in the first place.  It's a bit more subtle and harder to see, because there isn't a tangible object to focus the imagination on like there is with the ontological paradox.  But once you see it, it's a lot easier to understand how one could happen in a time travel scenario.

Let's say, for instance, that when you were little, your grandfather told you a story about a time traveler that appeared out of thin air in his yard one day when he was a kid.  As you grew older, you doubted the literal truth of this story, but it still stuck with you and held a special place in your imagination.  It inspired you to dedicate your life to discovering how to travel in time.  Finally, one day, you succeed.  You travel back to the day that grandfather told you about, hoping to shake hands with the fellow time traveler that inspired you, only to arrive and find no one else there.  It's just you and little grandpa.  Then it dawns on you.  You were the time traveler that appeared to your grandfather that day.  But...then that means that the event that inspired you to travel in time was caused by the event that inspired you to travel in time.  You begin to see how cause and effect become like a run of dominoes looping back on themselves?  Like the pocket watch, the event is self-generated.

Like I said, it's a little harder to see.  Try this one: Let's say that your dog runs out and gets hit by a car.  You're very upset about this, but you just happened to have a time machine and you believe it grants you ability to change the past.  You believe that you can go back and save your dog.  So you hop in your time machine and travel back to that fateful day.  You speed to the scene, hoping to get there before the accident happens again.  You remember the exact time.  You look down at your watch.  Oh no, it's only seconds away!  You look up just in time to see the dog run out in front of your car.  It's too late.  Again, you have the event causing itself.  Your hitting the dog is what makes you go back and hit the dog.  (Sorry about that.  Feel free to take a few seconds to go pet your dog if you have one.)

In most of these predestination scenarios there usually seems to be an element of ignorance and good intentions gone awry.  You don't know that trying to save the dog is what actually resulted in its death.  You don't know that your grandfather was talking about you.  And so on.  Only in completing the circle of events does the twisting turn of fate dawn on you, dun dun dunnnn!  It might be easy to conclude that the predestination paradox is limited to such cases.  The problem is actually far more insidious.  You'll recall that I said that the grandfather paradox could apply to any successful attempt to change the time line.  Well, the predestination paradox could possibly apply to any interaction with the past whatsoever.

Causality is a funny thing.  Every event from the Big Bang up until this present moment is intimately interconnected.  Everything that happens is caused by something else that happens which in turn was caused by something before that.  It's a vast and intricate network of interlocking chains.  It's too big and complex for any one person to see how it all fits together.  Once you grant the premise that a time traveler was always present in the past, that things always happened the way they did, then any action that the time traveler takes, no matter how small, becomes a pre-existing part of this network.  There's really no way of telling how their actions might have affected the intricate chain of events that led them to be there to be there to affect the chain of events.

Suppose you travel back to 1955.  You're walking down a street and you briefly brush against a woman's shoulder.  She stops and looks back, you apologize, and she continues on her way.  It's a small, momentary incident, lasting only seconds.  But that brief delay causes the woman to be a few seconds late getting home, and she misses the woman her husband has been having an affair with leaving the house.  Their marriage endures, instead of ending that day.  The husband keeps his assets instead of dividing them in the divorce.  He has those assets invested in stocks that increase in value.  He leaves a fortune to his grandson who starts his own company.  The company funds various research projects, including your ground-breaking time travel device.  So again, you caused the chain of events that caused you to be there to cause those chain of events.  And that's an easy one.  There's always a chance that the traveler's actions could somehow be connected to what eventually leads him there, no matter how long and complicated the chain.  Once you move cause and effect out of its chronological place in the network, the problem is nearly inevitable.

So where does this psychic hot line come into all this?  Well, so far we've only discussed ways that a traveler returning to the past can create a self-caused event.  The problem can also work in the other direction.  In fact, the name "predestination paradox" implies a future destiny that fulfills itself.  If you learn of a future event and you knowledge of that event is what causes it to happen, then you're faced with a predestination paradox.  It's an identical situation.  Let's say that instead of owning a time machine, a psychic tells you that at 3:15 tomorrow your dog is going to get hit by a car.  So, tomorrow you leave work early, and rush home trying to stop this tragedy from happening.  You're almost home.  You look at your watch.  It's almost 3:15.  You look up just in time to see the dog run out in front of your car.  It's the exact same thing, except this time the psychic is the time machine, receiving information from the future.  (Go pet the dog again.)

You've probably heard of the term "self-fulfilling prophesy".  Taken literally, this is basically the same thing as the predestination paradox.  Fictional accounts of this particular time paradox are far older than The Terminator or 12 Monkeys; they go all the way back to Ancient Greece.  In the famous story of Oedipus, Oedipus is warned by an oracle that he will one day kill his father and marry his mother.  Horrified by this idea, he flees home and gets as far away from his parents as he can.  Well, it turns out that those weren't his real parents.  They live in the kingdom that he flees do.  He kills a man on the road, his father.  Then he marries his widow, which turns out to be his mother.  Rather than post their escapades on the internet, he stabs his eyes out instead.  (It was a different time.)  So the oracles prophesy is what causes the very thing that the oracle prophesied.  Predestination paradox.

So, you see, this issue of paradoxes don't just raise the question of whether time travel is possible.  They also raise the question of whether any kind intuition of the future is even possible.  This recent study seems to suggest that it may be possible.  So where does that leave us?  What do you think?  What do you believe?

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)         

The Infinite Pocket Watch

Consider the following story.  On your eighth birthday your grandfather gives you a gift.  You unwrap it and find an antique pocket watch.  It hangs from a silver chain, and it has a beautiful carving of a clipper ship on the lid.  The back is engraved with the words, "The Best of Times."  It's a nice gift, but you're eight.  You wanted a toy truck.  From that day forward you vow revenge on this old coot.  If it takes you the rest of your life, you're going to crack the secret of time travel and then travel back and give him a present when he was eight, a bullet to the head.  Sure it's little extreme, and sure you might be nullifying your own existence, but to hell with the consequences!  You were really counting on getting that truck.  So, you tinker away in your basement on your time machine, plotting your revenge, and you carry the watch for thirty years, as a reminder of your vow.  Finally, everything is ready.  You travel back sixty years to the day your grandfather turned eight.  You find him playing in the dirt in his front yard, playing with a toy truck of all things, what nerve!  You walk up to him and throw the pocket watch in his face and yell, "Happy birthday Jerk!", as you raise the gun to fire.  Just then, a meteor falls from the sky and lands right on top of you.  Your eight year old grandfather blinks in surprise at the giant smoking rock in his front yard.  Then he notices the pocket watch laying in the dirt beside his truck.  He picks it up and dusts it off.  He holds on to this watch for the rest of his life, as a memento of this strange incident.  On his grandchild's own eighth birthday, he presents it to you as a gift.

So now you see the new can of worms we've opened.  We've disposed of the grandfather paradox with the idea that whatever happened in the past, already happened and can't be changed.  You can't kill your grandfather because you already tried and you ended up getting flattened by a meteor.  That's what happened.  But now we have a new problem.  In the process of your assassination attempt, you gave your grandfather a pocket watch, the same pocket watch he gave you.  So this raises the obvious question: where the heck did this pocket watch come from?

This is what is known as the ontological paradox.  This is where information or objects loop through time without a clear origin.  The ontological paradox and its close cousin, the predestination paradox are the result of the theory where the time traveler was always in the past.  The grandfather paradox arises from an inconsistency between cause and effect which results from a change in the time line.  The effect cancels out the cause.  With these new paradoxes you have the opposite problem.  In the predestination paradox, you have the effect causing itself.  In the ontological paradox, you have an object or information originating with itself.  In both cases, you have a closed loop where the past is fulfilled by the future that has resulted from it.  The constant and unchangeable nature of time, which was once the handy solution, has now become the problem.  Sure, it's already happened, that's why it's going to happen.

Now, my first, intuitive reaction to the ontological paradox is simply to dismiss it as a cute little trick of fiction.  Yeah, it's neat and everything that the grandfather gives you the watch he got from you, but is this really a legitimate concern?  Could it actually happen in the scenario?  Well, remember the "links" I put in the post at the beginning of the month?  Suppose I had been able to read the posts before I wrote them.  I'd know what I was going to write, and then I could have just gone back and written it based on what I read.  But then, where would the words and ideas have actually come from?  They would loop around through time, originating with themselves.  I would just be copying from myself what I had already copied from myself, without ever actually writing the original material.

Okay, so that covers information, but what about an object.  Well, suppose you stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.  Then you take it back in time and leave it on Leonardo Da Vinci's  doorstep.  Now, Leonardo could preserve his integrity and simply throw the thing away, but even so, he couldn't forget what he saw.  The Mona Lisa would inevitably influence his painting of the Mona Lisa, perhaps even giving him the idea.  So, at the very least, you'd still have information running in a loop.  But what if Leonardo wasn't so scrupulous?  What if he just looked this way and that, took the painting inside, and then eventually passed it off as his own?  Now you've got a solid object, paint and canvas, looping around through time, and God only knows where it came from.  So yes, the ontological paradox is definitely a real problem.  All it would take is setting the Mona Lisa on Da Vinci's doorstep.

If you look closely, you'll notice a mathematical problem that arises from this as well.  Take a look at our pocket watch again.  Between the day your grandfather picks it up and the day you take it back in time with you, sixty years elapses.  The hour hand has made 43, 800 rotations around its face.  So that means that the watch is at least sixty years old when you throw it at your grandfather.  So it was already sixty years old when he picked up, then  it was carried around for another sixty years before it was taken back in time.  Okay, so the hour hand has made 87,600 rotations and the watch was at least 120 years old when your grandfather picked it up.  But then it was carried for another sixty years, so it was really 180 years old.  Round and round it goes until you're forced to conclude that the hour hand has made an infinite amount of rotations around the face.  Not even the best made watch could last forever, let alone one that wasn't made in the first place. 

The problem here is that you have no starting point to calculate the watch's age from.  It's not that the loop itself keeps repeating.  The events only happen once, but yet the numbers keep piling up.  You can never establish exactly how old the watch is at any one point, so you're forced to keep compounding the time it traveled around the loop.  So, not only does this watch have no beginning; it has no ending either.  It exists for eternity in an isolated circle of events.

Or how about this: Let's say you work as a scientist in a lab.  You come in on Monday and find a mysterious petri dish on the table.  You take the dish back to Sunday and leave it on the table for yourself to find on Monday and bring back to Sunday.  The microbes in this dish double once a day.  So, if there were at least two microbes on Sunday, then there were four by Monday, which means there were at least four on Sunday, which means there were eight on Monday, which means there were at least eight on Sunday, which means there were 16 on Monday, which means....Yes, quite a can of worms indeed.

I wish I had a solution to offer for this, but honestly, I'm stumped this time.  I have no ideas or theories at the moment.  Even the multiverse won't save us this time.  We can't skip over to the universe next door, because we aren't changing anything.  And yet, solve it we must, for one could argue that our entire existence is the ultimate ontological paradox.  You know the old conundrum: what caused the thing that caused the thing that caused The Big Bang?  Where did the stuff come from, that all this...stuff came from?  You could go around with it forever, but here we are, the most infinite pocket watch of all.  So, the solution is out there.  Maybe I'll find a note on my refrigerator tomorrow morning, explaining it all.  After I read it the next day, I just have to remember to travel back to yesterday and leave it on the refrigerator.

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)                   

Stop Trying to Kill Your Grandfather

If you're familiar at all with the concept of time travel, then chances are good that you're also familiar with the concept of the temporal paradox.  This is where a time travel scenario leads to a situation which violates the rules of logic and the laws of causality.  In spite of what you may have read in books, seen in movies, or been told by a certain goofy, bearded blogger in his last post, the problem with these paradoxes is not that a time traveler might inadvertently cause one, threatening the integrity of the space-time continuum or the existence of the universe.  By its very definition, it's impossible for a temporal paradox to happen.  There's about as much danger of you causing a paradox, as there is of you eating your own head.  It just can't happen.  Paradoxes do pose a legitimate problem for time travel, however.  As long as it can be demonstrated in any conceivable way that time travel could potentially lead to a paradox, then either the issue has to be resolved, or you're forced to reach the inescapable conclusion that time travel is impossible.  The problem is solved at the source.  It would be like someone trying to build a house from an M.C. Escher drawing.  The problem isn't that the staircases that loop back on themselves or the support beams that connect this corner of the floor to the far corner of the ceiling would destroy the universe if you built the house.  The problem is simply that the house can't be built.  So, before you go packing your extra plutonium, these paradoxes have to be addressed.

There are three basic types of temporal paradoxes: the predestination paradox, the ontological paradox, and the grandfather paradox.  As the title suggests, it's primarily the grandfather paradox that I want to deal with in this post, because it's based on a very common misconception about time travel.  Once the misconception is laid to rest, it should take the grandfather paradox into the ground with it, leaving no ghost to haunt us.  Unfortunately, it's the resolution of the grandfather paradox that makes the other two paradoxes an issue.  Those two are a little trickier to deal with, and quite honestly, at this point I'm not sure that they can be resolved.  We'll just have to see where we're at when we get to them.

So anyhow, the grandfather paradox is the basically the idea that a time traveler changes the past in such a way that it negates the cause of the change.  The most famous example, and the one from which the paradox gets its name, is a scenario where a time traveler goes back in time and kills their own grandfather when he's a baby.  I'm not sure why someone would ever want to do this, but hypothetically, if they did, it would mean that the time traveler had just canceled out his own existence since without his grandfather he never would have been born.  This would mean that he would never have been around to kill his grandfather, which means he couldn't have canceled out his own existence, which means that he would have been around to kill his grandfather, which means...Well, I'm sure you can appreciate the can of worms this opens.  Although this grandfather murdering scenario is one of the more drastic versions of the paradox, it's hardly the only one.  Once you introduce the concept of changing the past, it becomes practically inevitable.  One could even make the argument that any successful journey to the past with the deliberate intention of changing anything at all, would automatically result in a grandfather paradox.  After all, why make that trip back in time to stop Kennedy from being shot if he's already alive and well this time around, thanks to you?

Some people have tried to solve this paradox by postulating the existence of separate parallel universes for every possible outcome of every event since the beginning of time.  Then they cast our grandfather murdering scenario with a couple of different actors from different universes to play the part of our time traveler and voila', paradox solved.  Yeah, nice try.  Not only does this messy idea have more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese, but the actual solution is so much simpler, and we don't need to resort to an absurd multiplicity of countless universes for all the infinite places where I could have set my glass on a table or all the infinite ways I could have put my socks on this morning.  To be consistent, every slightest fraction of a micrometer difference would have to be accounted for by these continuously spawning universes.  Luckily, we can ditch all of this tedious redundancy once and for all.  These parallel universes were brought into the picture to solve a problem that doesn't exist, because, you see, it would be impossible for a time traveler to change the past.

Now, I'm certainly not the first person to realize this.  I'm just here to explain it, so buckle up.  The first thing that you need to understand is for a time traveler to change even as much as the position of a blade of grass in the past, it would be necessary to assume the existence of two separate time lines: one in which the traveler visited the past, and one in which he did not; one in which he touched the blade of grass, and one in which he did not.  This concept is usually presented to us in such a way that the problem with it escapes our attention.  First, we have history running its natural course.  The cavemen draw some bison on a wall...fast forward...Julius Caesar rules over Rome...fast forward...Benjamin Franklin flies his kite...fast forward...Hitler kills a lot of people...fast forward...We land on the moon, etc.  Then one day Dr. Stumblebum builds a time machine in his basement, and he decides to go mucking around in history.  He knocks into Ben Franklin, ruining the whole moment with the lightening and the key and forever changing one of our treasured moments of history.  See, did you catch the problem?  Probably not.

Again, we have two versions of the time line.  We have the original version, where Franklin flies his kite in peace.  Then we have the "new" version where Dr. Stumblebum shows up and ruins the whole thing.  Here's the question, though: When was this new version created?  Well, that's easy enough to answer, right?  It was created the day Dr. Stumblebum decided to load his clumsy ass into his time machine and travel to the past.  It makes sense, or at least it seems to as long as we keep looking at everything from Dr. Stumblebum's point of view. 

Let's try instead to look at from Ben Franklin's point of view.  It's a cloudy day, somewhere in the middle of the 18th century.  Storm clouds are rolling in, and Ben decides this would be a great time to fly his kite.  From his point of view, the day is today.  What else would he ever consider it?  Anyway, he grabs his kite and heads out.  Lightening hits the key, Ben craps his pants, and all is right with the world.  But, wait a minute?  Where was Dr. Stumblebum?  Well, that was a different time line, and it doesn't get created for another 200 years or so.  Oh, okay then.  Wait, hold on.  I've got another question.  Exactly when is that day he flew his kite ever going to be 200 years in the past from Franklin's point of view?  I guess Dr. Stumblebum can't show up from the future until the future happens.  When's that going to be?  I don't know, but I have a feeling Ben's going to be waiting for a long time.

Still not seeing it, huh?  What does Ben Franklin know, right?  He's too stupid to even know that it's really 2011 and he's been dead for hundreds of years.  So, let's try a different example.  Let's say that there's a knock at your door right now.  You can go get it.  I'll wait.  You open the door and a guy in a shiny silver jumpsuit gives you the Vulcan hand sign and tells you he's from the year 2598.  What the hell?  I guess that must mean it's really 2598, because this new time line couldn't have existed until then, right?  But then, where were you when it was really 2011?  How did you miss it?  Did you oversleep?  I tell you, you have one extra White Russian and you wake up and find that it's six hundred years in the future and you're living six hundred years in the past.  Ain't that a bitch?

If all this seems just a little too confusing, don't worry.  It's not supposed to make the slightest bit of sense.  That's the point.  You see, once you put time travel on the table, the "present" is no longer a privileged, objective position.  It becomes entirely a matter of perspective.  To Ben Franklin, the day he flew his kite is the present.  To you, as you're reading this and rubbing your temples it's the present.  To our silver jumpsuit guy, 2598 is the present.  None of us are in a position to prove the others wrong.  So, when the silver jumpsuit guy shows up at your door, it's not a new version of today, six hundred years in the making.  It's just the same old today it always was and everything's going to turn out the same way it always did.  On Feb. 2, 2011 a man from the 26th century showed up at your door.  It may be ancient history to him.  It may be the present for you.  It may be the future for Ben Franklin.  But no matter who's point of view you look at it from, it's still the one and only version of this day that it's ever going to be.   

There is no new time line.  There is only one time line, and it happened the same way it always did, and it can not be changed.  If Dr. Stumblebum gets into his time machine and travels back to the day when Benjamin Franklin flew his kite, then he was always there that day.  He can't ruin Franklin's experiment, because he didn't ruin it.  The kite flew just like it was supposed to, and we all read about it when we were kids.  For some kind of change to take place in the time line, it would have to happen from some point in time that the universe itself considers the present, and I get the feeling that the universe is staying out of this one.

So does that mean that this isn't really, really the present?  Not necessarily, and in fact, we'll be considering that very thing in the next post.  For the moment, what this means is that once you grant the premise that someone can move around in time, backwards and forwards, then time has to be viewed as a line that one can travel on, and the position that we call the present is only one possible point on that line.  If you can land in the 18th century and meet a man that thinks the date is today, or land in the 26th century and meet another man that thinks that date is today, then the mere fact that you're the one with the time machine hardly puts you in a position to argue with them.  When in Rome, it's today in Rome.  As for your grandfather, you can't kill him because you didn't kill him.  The day you tried only happened once, and you clearly failed.  If you can figure out when you'll ever be able to make a new version of that day, be sure to let me know. 

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)                                    

Time Travel Month

This month I thought I'd do something a little different.  Instead of the random assortment of nonsense that I usually post, I've decided to post a random assortment of nonsense with a running theme: Time Travel.  I've been planning this for a while.  If you recall way back, I mentioned that time travel has been an obsession of mine since I was a kid and that I was going post some thoughts on the subject one of these days.  Well, today is one of these days.  Actually, it's a whole month of these days.  So, let's get things started off on the right foot.  In the spirit of this theme, I'm going give you the links to all the posts for this month so that you can go into the future and read them before I write them:

Time Travel Month

Stop Trying to Kill Your Grandfather

Superman & the Wave Model

John Titor

12 Monkeys: Mental Divergence

Correspondence with My Future Self

The Infinite Pocket Watch

Possible Methods

Of Fortune Tellers & Predestination

If I Had a Time Machine

Grant Me the Serenity

Trying to Understand Relativity(part 8)

Ah, so you're back.  How was it?  Wait...don't tell me the details.  It's probably better if I don't know.  I'm sure you can well imagine the temptation for me to click on the links myself.  I could take a peek, see what I wrote, maybe even just copy and paste the posts as "new posts" as I go along.  That would certainly save me the trouble of having to think of what to say and the effort of having to write it.  Unfortunately, this would result in what's called an ontological paradox.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Literally.  Hmm, I wonder if maybe I could just take a quick glance at that first link, just to see how this post is supposed to end.  Ahhh...Really?....Like that?....Well, that's lame.

(p.s. Doug Stevens @ I Like Cheese has decided to match me post for post on this, doing his own riff on the above titles.  I'll post the links to his versions at the bottom of each post.  Atypical Scott @ Atypical Read is also doing...something.  It involves insanity, I know that.)       

The Future's So Bright....

This might be old news, and I might be the last person on the internet to hear about this, but whatever.  In looking for pictures for my last post, I came across this photograph:

The photo was supposedly taken in 1941 at the opening of a bridge in Canada, and it supposedly hasn't been tampered with.  Notice the guy in the middle of the crowd with the sunglasses.  Given all the buzz this past week about the person with the "cell phone" in that 1920s film, I figured this was worth mentioning.  Naturally there must be a logical explanation.  Maybe his outfit isn't as modern as we might think.  Maybe someone is just really good at Photo-shop.   Maybe this guy woke up from a really bad hangover, and found himself about 50 years in the past.  We've all been there, haven't we?     

The Devil & The Information Paradox

According to Christianity, long before the foundation of the universe was laid and the seeds of physical existence sown, there was a war in Heaven.  The archangel Lucifer led a revolt against God.  As punishment for this attempt to overthrow him, God cast Lucifer into Hell along with all the angels who followed him.  The question has often been asked: Why didn't God simply destroy Lucifer?  Why allow him to exist and eventually come to corrupt and cause trouble for mankind?

Well, to look at the story as a simple mythology, the obvious answer would be that the story represents the origin of Evil and its adversarial relationship with Good.  It is a cautionary tale of envy, pride, and defiance.  The story is not constructed around any sort of final, complete victory over evil, because the conflict is meant to be an on-going one.  The Devil is allowed to persist in the tale out of a certain necessity, because the story is told in retrospect.  War, disease, pain, and death are all still with us.  Evil still exists, and its agencies are still at large, engineering sorrow and disaster all over the world.  The story is not an ending but a beginning, with the battle lines drawn and the world itself at stake.  

But this sort of answer only works if you treat the story as a fictional one, and it considers the question above as a matter of plot-construction.  It steps outside the reality of the story.  It deals not with the action on stage, but instead with the scaffolding that supports the stage.  It doesn't really address the problem of why God didn't destroy the Devil.  It merely points out that you bought a ticket for four-hour play, and so the main conflict can't be resolved in the opening act. Needless to say, this answer is an unsatisfying one for those who take the story literally, those who believe this didn't take place on a stage, but in the open air of reality.  Aside from that, it only confesses the necessity of the plot hole.  It does nothing to fix it.  

Now, I'm not here to debate the literal truth of the story.  I can't say that I've reached the point in my life or my consideration of these issues to make any sort of claim one way or the other.  These things, of course, go far beyond the scope of the matter at hand, and hopefully I'll be able to get into these things gradually down the road and reach some kind of satisfying conclusions.  For the time being, I don't mean to offend or mislead anyone about where I stand on these issues.  All I can say is that I'm still in the process of working these things out myself.  For now, I only wish to make a hypothetical proposition concerning the problem above; a proposition that might even lead to some kind of real truth one way or the other.                     

So, the question was: Why didn't God destroy Lucifer and his followers?  I thought about this for a long time, and then it hit me...maybe he did destroy them.  Maybe the idea of being "cast out of Heaven" is really a metaphor for annihilation. But the problem is that destroying them created another problem. It created a void in existence.  Prior to this God had only created.  He had made Heaven and all the angels in glorious perfection.  Then this insurrection took place, and it had to be dealt with.  Out of necessity, God was driven to do something he had never done before, destroy.  This would have an unavoidable side-effect.  For the first time, something that was would be no more.  For the first time, there would be a nothingness. This nothingness would come to haunt existence, like an inexhaustible vacuum threatening to draw everything into its own annihilation.  Satan, the adversary, is the negation of Lucifer.  He is the nothingness, the void, the hole in existence that was caused when Lucifer was destroyed. His whole problem is that he doesn't exist.  He lurks about reality, trying to consume it and give himself substance.  He wants to exist again, even if it means destroying everything in the process.

There is something in the natural universe that provides an excellent example of the process at work here, the black hole.  When a star dies it collapses in on itself.  In scientific terms it condenses to an infinitely diminished point of overwhelming gravity.  This gravity draws everything that comes near it, even light, into it.  In effect, it is the void created in the absence of the star.  Relativity says that gravity is the manifestation of mass warping space, a curvature drawing matter in.  The black hole takes this to its extreme.  It's more than a curvature; it's a hole sucking things into the void.

These black holes pose a problem, known to scientists as the Information Paradox.  The Law of Information basically states that information can not be destroyed.  If you burn a log in the fire, even though the log is consumed, the information of that log still exists and could conceivably be reconstructed on the quantum level from the ashes, the fire, and heat.  Black holes seem to violate this law.  When they consume something, the information it was composed of seems to be destroyed completely.  But this impossible.  The information must persist in some form or another.  Scientists have proposed various solutions to this problem, but they're still working on it.

Likewise, God's initial act of destruction caused its own paradox.  Lucifer and his followers could be annihilated, but the fact of this annihilation could not be erased.  The information of their existence could not be destroyed altogether.  It was merely inverted into nothingness, consumed like matter in a black hole, but impossible to obliterate completely.  An afterimage of their existence remained, like a lingering shadow of a light.  This caused a small crack in the fabric of existence, a tiny seed of corruption.  It was a problem that had to be solved or it would eventually threaten to undo everything.

So here we are again at the beginning, and maybe we've gained a fresh start on the story.  But it's only a start.  I plan to go much further with this down the road.  For me, this idea, starting as it does with the premise that God was driven out of necessity to create an unavoidable problem that had to be solved, provides a possibility to shed a light on some of the conundrums of Christianity.  It gives a reason why there's still evil in the world. It provides a possible driving motive to the overall divine plan and a meaning to the purpose of our existence.  The universe, rather than being created on a capricious whim, might play a part in the solution to this problem.  The fall of man, which I touched on in an earlier post might not be just a regrettable misfortune, but instead an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle.  But these are all matters for future posts.  As I said, this is just a beginning.    

                                

The Coin Experiment

I have always been fascinated by the idea of time travel.  It's been an obsession of mine ever since I was a little kid.  I have some thoughts on the subject that I plan to post eventually, but in the meantime I have a thought experiment for you all to think about.  Consider it a kind of prologue; something to stir the water and stimulate speculation.  It's just something to bear in mind and something that will serve as a frame of reference when I finally get around to delving deeper into the matter.

Alright, the experiment begins with a large vault.  The vault has a combination lock on the door, and you are the only one that has the combination.  Inside the vault there is a time machine and a table.  On the table there is only a single coin.  Now, on Friday evening you set this coin so that it is facing heads up on the table.  You seal and lock the vault and leave for the weekend.  No one else can enter the vault while your gone, since no one else has the combination, and no one else is able to disturb the coin.  On Monday morning you return and open the vault.  Then, depending on what you find, you plan on doing one of two things:

1. If you find that the coin is still on heads, you plan to get into the time machine, travel back to Saturday afternoon and flip the coin to tails.  That being the case, the coin should have been on tails when you opened the vault on Monday morning, having already been flipped by yourself on Saturday.  However...
2. If you find that the coin has been flipped to tails, you plan to destroy the time machine, rendering it impossible to have ever traveled back to flip the coin.  But if that's the case, then how did the coin ever come to be on tails?

This is not a riddle.  I have no simple answer for it.  It's just a deliberately engineered paradox, either way you look at it.  Just some food for thought for the time being.