Excerpted: Time-Travel and Trinity

Excerpted from Omniscience

Time-fictions that imagine oneself traveling to the past or the future and being able to see oneself as another self only cash on the imagery of a realistic video playback. One can go to the past in the same way that one can go back to a time frame in a video and playback from there, they imagine; the exception in this reality playback: one can interfere. Similar is the imagination about the future. Of course, this involves the paradox of going back and killing oneself and yet being able to survive in the present. Some have even tried to suggest theories about several parallel universes and possibility worlds, which look interesting to the mind, but pose an interesting plurality. Of course, this could be one area where fiction allows for man to imagine a unity of being and yet a plurality of persons at the same time. For instance, in this imaginary time-trip, I find myself in 2010 at a University campus where I am presenting a paper. I (standing under a tree) see myself (near another building) on way to the Seminar hall inside. There is a duality here. I am standing under a tree and yet I am near another building on way to the Seminar hall. It doesn’t appear very problematic to those who think this could be possible in time travel; because, at least from one point in time (2016), I have gone missing. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem impossible to the imagination to allow two different persons of the same one being in the same place with two different personalities at the same time. Also, in this view, the present is meaningless; for, 2010 is as really present to me (both me standing under the tree and myself on the way to the Seminar hall) in that framework as 2016 was real to me “earlier” (i.e. in my past). At the same time, due to the possibility of time-travel, I (2016) and myself (2010) are both at the same place and the same time, fictionally speaking. This temporal imaginative permission is incredulous. This violation of reason, perhaps, should forbid us trying to question how the eternal Godhead cannot be three persons in His eternal being.