Friday, July 14, 2006

Determining the Past

According to cosmologist Thomas Hertog the universe consists of many pasts, and it is not until an observation is made in the present that one of these fuzzy potential pasts becomes actual. It's as if the universe is like a vast quantum event made real by a particular observation.

It sort of reminds me of the movie Frequency where a man is able to communicate with his father in the past and change what actually occured. Every time this happened, however, it changed the present.

This raises a fascinating question, at least for me. If God is not bound by time, and if the present can determine the past, and if God answers at least some prayers, is it possible that God, in response to prayer, might change the past? Of course, as in the movie Frequency, if He did change the past it would revise the present and we would never know that the past had been altered, or even that we had prayed for it to be altered.

The universe is certainly a strange place.