Time travel and interdemensional travel
A strategy of the antichrist
NOTE: This article includes exerpts and/or summaries from Daniel O'Connor's book " Only Man Bears his Image". Used with permission.
In the near future there may be discussions humans from a future time coming to our time to save us, as in "The Terminator" or "Interstellar". A variation of this is aliens coming from another demension, alternate universe (rather than from a distant planet in our universe).
These will be demonic directions to stear people into the funnel of the antichrist.
The best defense against these is simply to reject the idea that time travel is possible, or that there are alternate universes.
The Time Travel Deception: Impoverishing the Faith
The most zealous of the works of science fiction promoting the Great Deception are not content with promoting only one or two gravely deceptive themes, but instead traffic in several: for they involve not merely extraterrestrials and sentient AI, but also time travel. Among these are the Terminator films, the most popular franchise of all time, The Avengers, the British cultural behemoth of the popular TV series, Doctor Who, and the massive pop-culture phenomenon, Star Trek. Three of those have seen veritable cults generated in their wake, but they are far from alone. A regular stream of standalone films can be counted on as well: recently, for example, films have been released such as Interstellar (2014) and Arrival (2016), whose plotlines (like those of all time travel stories) pretend to mean something but only incoherently propose that the effect of a cause can itself be the cause of that cause, thus robbing their plotlines of any worth. Like the ET Deception, however, this is not new; the Time Travel Deception has long haunted the pages of science fiction. Only two years before publishing the first major work of alien-based science fiction (The War of the Worlds), the anti-Christian English author, H.G. Wells, published The Time Machine (in 1895).
Belief in aliens is a gateway drug. In Part Four, we noted how those who go down the UFO “rabbit hole” quickly find their lives dominated by obsession with extraterrestrials. But that same dark descent does not stop at mere alien belief. It invariably becomes belief in “interdimensional” beings visiting us, as we also saw. Then it descends further still. Most who accept those themes will accept virtually anything from science fiction, and they usually find themselves quickly believing that time-travelling beings (perhaps humans) from the future are also visiting us.
Even the most supposedly “orthodox-minded” of ET promoters are not immune. For example, in his popular 2022 book promoting belief in aliens, Dr. Paul Thigpen (a world-famous Catholic apologist) insisted that we should also:
...be open to ... ultraterrestrials... interdimensional beings (as some would insist) from another dimension of existence altogether that at times intersects with our own; or even time-traveling humans from the future...[399]
Dr. Thigpen is far from alone in this “openness.” It has become almost a proverb in contemporary Ufology circles that, when one is asked “So what are these UFOs and beings visiting us? Are they aliens from space? Are they interdimensional visitors? Are they extraterrestrial AIs? Are they time travelers from the future?”, there is a certain one-word answer they say should be the response: “Yes!” Indeed, there is almost no sci-fi absurdity to which today’s ET-belief phenomena does not engender openness among its devotees.
Once a man has so much as become “open” to the possibility of time-traveling humans from the future visiting us, however, he has just succumbed to an outlandish proposition, which is not only counter to a faithful Christian understanding of Scripture, Magisterium, Tradition, etc. (as with belief in aliens), but is even in stark contradiction to the most basic tenets of logic and common sense themselves. For once one abandons the First Principles of Thought—among which is the fact that no effect precedes its cause—he has opened a Pandora’s Box within his intellectual conscience.
This is the destination the Devil would desire us all to promptly arrive at in order to formally institute the Great Deception: a state of mind so robbed of logical mooring that anything and everything can be suggested to it without the soul so much as recognizing contradictions when they exist. He who believes in time travel can also believe that two and two make five, or that an act can be an intrinsic evil and morally good, or that Christ can be at once necessary and superfluous. Such a man can easily be robbed of the “power of religion, even while holding to its form.” (cf. 2 Timothy 3:5)
For some premises are so infectious that, as soon as they are allowed entry into the mind, they are akin to the entry of deadly bacteria into the body. Believing in the possibility of “time travel” is one such premise. As soon as one believes this is even theoretically possible, he is thereby believing that man might one day create a time machine. As soon as he concedes that man might one day create a time machine, he is committed to the view that whatever has happened is actually entirely contingent upon this time machine’s owner deciding against going back in time and preventing it from happening. This is completely fatal to Christianity, since it is not a merely philosophical religion; it is a concretely historical one. It holds that certain events in the past took place, and it affirms these historical truths with the same degree of certitude with which it holds timeless truths about Gods’ nature (such as His being one nature and three Divine Persons).
Therefore, whoever believes in the possibility of time travel has thus placed an asterisk on the very Creed itself. Such a man can no longer say—with the supernatural (absolute) Faith required to give it salvific value—that he believes Jesus Christ “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” He can only say that he believes Jesus became man by the Virgin Mary “so long as no one decides to travel back in time and kill Sts. Joachim and Anne before Mary was conceived.” He can no longer say that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” but only that this occurred contingent on no time travelers successfully convincing Pilate to heed his conscience. Thus, the time-travel-believer’s Faith has undergone a type of death. What was once believed with supernatural Faith (which is, by nature, never contingent on anything), is now believed only in a far inferior sense.
While we could enumerate a thousand other absurdities that arise within the Faith from belief in the mere possibility of time travel, even this brief consideration should remind any Christian to stay far away from ever so much as entertaining the thought that time travel might be possible. It is not possible, and it never will be possible. Let us, however, also consider the matter from a purely logical standpoint.
Basic Logic Repudiates Any Belief in Time Travel
As the impossibility of time travel (much like any basic law of mathematics) is a truth any sincere critical thinker will quickly discover on his own, even honest atheists recognize it quickly. In Part Three, we considered the arguments of PhD physicist Dr. Milton Rothman and what he said against various outlandish Ufology assertions. We did so precisely because he—as an atheist and pioneering sci-fi author—had everything to gain from promoting the ET Deception, but instead shrewdly wrote against many of its premises. He likewise notes the following about the impossibility of time travel:
No one will ever build a time-travel machine. Regardless of this concept’s popularity in fiction and film, time travel violates the principle of causality. It allows a cause to come later in time than the effect, while the universe allows chains of events to go only in one direction—from past to future. If you could travel to the past, you could warn people to prevent a catastrophe that you knew happened yesterday. Thus you would be interfering with events that have already happened. One-way travel into the future would not violate this principle, but there is no behavior of matter that hints how this could be done. The idea of time travel was invented in science fiction during a period when time was thought of as a river that flows along from past to future. If you could only paddle a little faster you could travel into the future. But we no longer think of time so naively. It is not a dimension which allows you to skip over events yet to come. As matter moves along, one particle interacts with another, one object interacts with another. There is a continuity of interactions from past to future. There are no shortcuts. Yet the idea of time travel lives on with a life of its own.[400]
Although Dr. Rothman is here mostly only noting what any reasonable person could adduce, it is helpful to see that even a sci-fi-author physicist is not tempted to entertain the possibility of time travel.
While we can demonstrate the impossibility of time travel—with certainty—through the indirect reasoning above (for such “proof by contradiction” does not suffer any diminishment of its certitude from its indirectness), we should also consider more directly why it is an incoherent notion to begin with.
As traditional philosophy—both Christian and pre-Christian (i.e., back to Aristotle)—has taught, time is simply the measure of motion. There is no need to defer to wild interpretations of modern scientific experiments (whether postulated within Quantum Theory, Relativity Theory, String Theory, or any other field) to discover the nature of time. They can no more discover or alter the nature of time than they can discover or alter the nature of mathematics or logic (which is to say, they cannot do so at all).
Now, if every major orthodox Christian thinker who has ever written before Isaac Newton is correct (and they are), and time is the measure of motion, this means it is not some sort of quasi-substance permeating the universe like air fills a room, and which can itself be manipulated or traversed in any way. There is no “fabric of time” and there is no demarcation of various “timelines;” it is not simply a “fourth dimension” just like the ordinary three, nor are these facts contingent on any present or future conjecture made within empirical science. Time is not even an independent reality at all. It is the word we use to describe the fact that things are moving. Just as we saw in Part Three, space is likewise not a “thing” which can be “folded” (contra wormhole and teleportation pseudoscience), but is more accurately considered a simple potency—a receptacle for material things that actually do exist (any “description of space” is just a masquerading description of some thing in space)—so time is a notion similarly supervenient upon (i.e., piggybacking on) the more fundamental reality of motion.
This does not mean that either time or space are purely figments of our imagination—it does not mean either is “fake”—but it does mean that neither is, by any stretch of the imagination, a substance or even a quasi-substance. As such, one cannot say anything about time itself (or about space itself) because these notions themselves are merely how we speak about phenomena that actually do more concretely exist.
Let us consider some commonsense ruminations on ordinary life experiences we have all had in relation to time. If you were to simply ignore everything that has ever been taught in academia (whether empirical science or philosophy) about space and time since the “Enlightenment,” and instead only consider these concepts with your own intuition, you would almost immediately have a far better grasp of it than most of those scholars.
Some who first read my insistence above, explaining that time itself is simply the measure of motion, may have had a few protestations come to his mind: “But we measure time! How, then, can time itself be a mere measure? My watch measures time! My phone measures the time. Atomic clocks really measure time.”
In fact, none of those statements are correct. None of those devices measure time. Your watch counts the vibrations of a quartz crystal exposed to voltage from its battery. Your phone simply reads out a signal it receives from the nearest cell tower. “Atomic clocks,” which give a nation’s “official time,” count the number of oscillations exhibited by a Cesium-133 atom when exposed to radiation (and they advance one second about every 9 billion oscillations). But we can never measure time because there is never anything there to measure.
We can measure inches, because there really is such a thing as spatial distance to measure. We can measure kilograms, because there really is such a thing as mass to more or less directly gauge. We can measure temperature, because there really is heat existing in things. But there is no actual reality called “time” against which we can ever place any actual or even theoretically possible device in order to measure it.
The point is not merely something so banal as “time is not a literal physical substance.” Most are aware of that. However, heat and distance are not physical substances either, but they are actual realities. Time, on the other hand, does not even amount to that. Since it is fundamentally contingent upon the motion it is measuring, if there is no motion, there is no time.
Consider your car’s various instruments. Suppose your car has a compass displaying the direction you are facing and a thermometer indicating outside temperature. Suppose, next, that on a given day your car’s battery goes completely dead. You proceed to get a jump-start from a friend, but you notice that your car’s clock is now wrong. Why did this happen? Why will your car’s clock not just measure the time? Your car’s compass still works fine and accurately: it still just measures the magnetic field that exists in the space it inhabits, thus inferring the direction of north. Your car’s thermometer still works: it just measures the temperature of the ambient air and displays the reading. So why can’t your clock likewise just measure the time and conveniently display it for you to read?
We already know why: there is nothing there to measure. There are only two ways any clock can function; by measuring some motion that it has access to, or by having some external source indicate to it what it should say the time is. However, when your car’s battery is dead, there is no available voltage to allow for the quartz crystal in its clock to continue its own continuous voltage-induced vibration. No more motion exists within the car itself that can be measured. [††††††††††††††††††††]
There is another protestation based on one’s car that might be brought to the fore. For any car also has a speedometer with which it measures its speed. Here, one might suppose he has again stumbled upon a refutation: “but motion itself—speed, or velocity—uses time within its own expression; for example, speed can be given in miles per hour. How, then, could you invert this reality and claim that it is actually motion which is more real, and time is just the measure of it!?”
The answer is simple: measures of speed do indeed include the measure of time—but those measures of time, themselves, are still nothing but measures of motion. An hour is nothing but a one twenty-fourth part of a day. A day is nothing but the measure of the earth completing one rotation on its axis—dawn to dawn. When, therefore, we speak of an “hour,” we are doing nothing but measuring motion. And when we speak of a car travelling at, say, 60 miles per hour, all we are doing is comparing this car’s motion to the earth’s motion. We are simply saying that while the earth completed a rotation of 15 degrees (1/24th of a complete 360 degrees—”one hour”), the car managed to traverse 60 miles.
Yet, still more protestations may be offered. One might say: “Isn’t that all a bit arcane? We don’t use sundials anymore to measure time. We’ve got atomic clocks now. A day isn’t even exactly 24 hours!”[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Unfortunately, the illogic of statements like this reveal just how low modern education has sunk; and how obsessed it has become with technicalities, even when the inferences drawn from these technicalities contradict the realities on which these technicalities rely. An hour is measured, defined, and rightly understood insofar as it is a certain fraction of a day; not vice versa. In other words, an hour is just a 24th of a day—nothing more. It has no reality apart from that understanding. Whoever seeks to instead define it in terms of a certain number of oscillations of a Cesium-133 atom has only arbitrarily changed his definition; he has not somehow discovered some deeper truth about the notion of an hour. A day, on the other hand, is what it is; it is a given in nature. To pretend that we can claim a day is not actually exactly 24 hours is logically analogous to pretending we can claim that ”one” is not actually “twice one-half.”
It is worth considering that, in ages past, it would have sounded silly to ask, “what time does the sun rise?” The question would not have made sense because sunrise is the time. The “first hour of the day” is simply the first one-twelfth portion of that day’s period of sunlight following sunrise. In the 1800s, rail transport and telegraph lines made the creation of “time zones” important (to enable coordination across large distances due to the once unfeasible rapidity of transport and communication). Once a time zone is established, a certain locale’s own time of sunrise can be measured against something other than itself. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but we must understand how this is yet another factor that has contributed to the modern world’s delusion about the nature of time. Saying “what time does the sun rise?” inclines one to regard time itself as some sort of independent reality, existing apart from the motion of the heavenly bodies (and motion in general); when nothing could be further from the truth. This delusion reaches a truly comical level when it comes to “Daylight Savings Time.” Some people really seem to think that changing what their clock says influences time itself—somehow “making the sun set earlier or later.” In fact, this is nothing but a game we play.
In a certain sense we can say that time does not exist. As we have noted, this does not mean it is fake or a mere social construct, but it is certainly not a “substantial thing” or “cosmic fabric” which can ever be jumped around within, travelled within, folded, etc. Such feats would not be merely technologically implausible or impossible: they are absolutely logically ruled out just as a square circle is ruled out. Just as the fact that God is outside of space (and geometric shape) does not mean a square circle is thus a palatable concept or that He could make one, so too the (very important) fact that God is outside of time does not give us grounds for entertaining absurdities related to “time travel.”
Sts. Aquinas, Augustine, and Jerome Against the Uniquely Perverse Notion of Time Travel
Aquinas was so certain of this truth about time that he even rightly taught that God Himself cannot change the past. Nor does he teach this only on his own conviction (which is unqualified), but on the authority of St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and Aristotle:
[As] Jerome says: “Although God can do all things, He cannot make a thing that is corrupt not to have been corrupted.” Therefore, for the same reason, He cannot effect that anything else which is past should not have been...there does not fall under the scope of God’s omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction. Now that the past should not have been implies a contradiction. For as it implies a contradiction to say that Socrates is sitting, and is not sitting, so does it to say that he sat, and did not sit. But to say that he did sit is to say that it happened in the past. To say that he did not sit, is to say that it did not happen. Whence, that the past should not have been, does not come under the scope of divine power. This is what Augustine means when he says: “Whosoever says, If God is almighty, let Him make what is done as if it were not done, does not see that this is to say: If God is almighty let Him effect that what is true, by the very fact that it is true, be false”: and the Philosopher [Aristotle] says: “Of this one thing alone is God deprived—namely, to make undone the things that have been done.”... [to change the past] is more impossible than the raising of the dead; in which there is nothing contradictory, because this is reckoned impossible in reference to some power, that is to say, some natural power; for such impossible things do come beneath the scope of divine power. (Summa Theologica. First Part. Question 25. Article 4.)
While the AI Deception’s blasphemy derives from supposing that man can create what, in fact, only God can, the Time Travel Deception takes it a step further by supposing that man might one day be capable of what not even God can do. Aquinas notes that raising the dead is “impossible,” therefore, by doing it, God shows us He has miraculously intervened. Time travel, however, is not merely impossible in that sense; it is also logically incoherent. It is impossible not only naturally but also supernaturally. With God all things are possible, but time travel is not a “thing.”
Whoever wishes to abide in the truth must categorically reject any belief, whatsoever, in so much as the possibility of time travel. Note that it will not work for a sci-fi deceiver to claim that he is leaving the past alone, and only asserting the possibility of men from the future coming to our own day. That is contradictory. Our own day would be “the past” for such men, so we have already refuted that notion. “They” cannot change “their past” any more than we can change our past. The entire question of time travel is ridiculous, logically incoherent, and even implicitly heretical—however one presents it or modifies it. This Deception, in fact, is so uniquely perverse that one should even toying with it much. The various paradoxes that time travel works of fiction are ever foisting upon their readers and viewers are quite harmful to the soul when entertained, and can by themselves elicit needless existential crises. Jesus is surely displeased when a Christian begins welcoming the same premises that would also compel him to wonder if he can actually be certain Christ became Incarnate in the first place. Granting any credence to those premises, even if only “toying” with them, is like a married woman fantasizing about being married to another man. It is unfaithfulness, even if it does not degenerate beyond mere contemplation. While works of fiction about alien civilizations can be quite dangerous, they also can simply be settings with which to analyze questions relevant to our own lives. This is not true with time travel works of fiction, for it is a theme that cannot present any meaningful morals or teachings due to its categorical incoherence. It is wise to avoid works of fiction built primarily on the notion of time travel.[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§]
Not only, however, does this belief destroy his Christian Faith; it also constitutes a major avenue of the same apocalyptic Great Deception we have been addressing throughout this book. Although the Time Travel Deception is not a direct application of the NHI Deception, it nevertheless effectively becomes an avenue for the same type of dark seduction. For one may be wise enough to reject aliens and sentient AI, but somehow fail to reject time travel. The demons, then, can simply seduce this soul just as they seduce others with those illusions, by appearing to him and claiming to be some human from the future. The same results can thus be achieved. This man has wandered outside of those boundaries clearly given by both Faith and reason, and therefore stepped squarely within the radius of the Devil’s chain. He has done this under the deceitful premise (promoted by no few “orthodox Catholics”) that doing so was merely a “humble openness.” But in so doing he has invited the “lying signs and wonders” (2 Thessalonians 2:9), that Scripture prophesies for our times, to dazzle and delude him.