I got a problem in my head and I wish Duffitusta was around to help me because it's gonna need a cross between a philosophy graduate and someone well versed in logic to maybe get a handle on this problem.
The problem itself isn't a complex one, in fact, it's alarmingly simple but it made an unexpected appearance in my brain about a week ago and it won't leave me alone, hence this post and request for help.
Let's assume there is a god, let's also assume that if there is a god, he/she can do anything he/she damn well pleases.
In other words, god is omnipotent ....nothing is beyond the power of him/her upsatirs....so far so good?
Well, you'd think so but I got a nagging problem and it's to do with time and causality; in reality, it might well be I am not thinking straight and some bright-ass punk can point me in the right direction, let's hope so; any way, here it is:-
Let's take an incident, any incident, it doesn't matter, and for the sake of exploring this problem, let's talk about something that everyone will remember and would have wished didn't happen, the deaths of those two girls in Soham a few years back.
It horrified all decent people; I am pretty sure that seeing that pic of them with their football jerseys on bought home the tragic waste of life and the misery inflicted on their respective families.
Whenever I see cr@p like that, it makes my insides turn and depresses me and I sorta play a game in my head where I imagine if I could go back in time to just before that incident, then I'd kill that Huntley guy who murdered them thus allowing the girls to live on happily.
Of course this is impossible ... but if I had a word with him upstairs, he could let me go back and I'd do the necessary bad stuff to ensure the kids' safety.
I of course realise all the moral problems associated with this but let's ignore them for a bit please.
This all sounds a bit weird but bear with me please ..... it will all fall into place soon enough.
And so, God rewinds time for me, I pop back in time, strangle Huntley and the girls live on ....job done - the world's a better place for allowing those two girls to live on. I might have a problem with God afterwards for killing Huntley but I'll deal with that as and when...
Well, here's the thing .... if we think about that new time-line whereby the girls live on, there will be no murders, nobody on earth will know a damn thing happened apart from some nonce called Huntley is found strangled somewhere, just me and God know, he could of course wipe my memory of the whole incident but that possibility is academic here.
And so, this is the dilemma, if we propose God can do anything and everything, and the thing we ask him to do is to rewind time, he can of course do it.
He can certainly rewind the time-line back and the following time-line doesn't have the murders in it but...the murders still happened in the original, the time-tape just got rewound and events went onto to do something else.
I am suggesting here, God cannot undo events that have happened, he can certainly rewind the tape to a place prior to the event and then another time line is embarked upon but then those girls still got killed albeit in the original time-line, it just got rewound to create a new one....you can talk about differing time-lines etc but if you think about it, these are still academic because the event still happened !!!
It seems as though God can't do everything...or can he/she?