#876 Divine Foreknowledge and the Paradoxes of Time Travel
February 25, 2024I have a question on whether the paradoxes of time travel would apply to Theism or not. Suppose that person x prays to God to kill his Grandfather before his father was born, and Suppose that because God knew the future. Suppose God heard him and listened to the prayer (for good reason) would that result in the grandfather paradox or somethinglike it?
Thomas
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
Thomas, you would really enjoy the chapter on time travel in my book The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (rep. ed.: Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 1999). You are absolutely correct that divine foreknowledge bears a very close resemblance to the effects of time travel. For example, just as the time traveler could journey back into the past and prevent Jesus’ prediction of Judas’ betrayal, so Judas by changing his mind about betraying Jesus could prevent Jesus’ predicting his betrayal because Jesus would then have foreknown that Judas would not betray him.
In fact, Christians sometimes actually engage in retroactive prayer. People in my Defenders class, for example, have occasionally requested prayer for something about the past, e.g., “Pray that my father came to faith in Christ before he died.” Given divine foreknowledge, I see nothing incoherent about retroactive prayer.
This raises the worry of the paradoxes of time travel, where the time traveler tries to do something incoherent like kill his Grandfather before he had children. Fortunately, since God is all-knowing, He cannot be suckered into such self-defeating situations as issuing a prophecy about someone’s future action which that person then decides not to do, or answering a foreknown future prayer that someone later decides not to pray. It is therefore impossible that God should be tricked by such “bilking experiments.”
- William Lane Craig