Bulletin Q&A Article; Published 4-21-24:
Is time travel a sin?
Someone stopped me after Mass a couple of weeks ago with this question. It caught me off guard and I simply responded that I didn’t believe in time travel and he turned and walked away. In hindsight, my response was very abrupt and probably a bit rude. If the person is reading this, I apologize for not showing proper respect for your question.
The question did cause me to pause and then do a little research when I got home. I was amazed and confused by all the various concepts of time that are currently being considered by respected physicists and philosophers. Many think that time travel is a real possibility, although very far from reality. Some say that Einstein accepted the possibility, and others say that Augustine and Aquinas denied it.
But if time travel were to exist, would it be sinful. First we should look at the motivation for wanting to travel into the past or into the future. There could be good motivations such as changing events of the past to avoid a major catastrophe. But if you could do that, then the present would be different. The present then would require that you had in fact time traveled and changed things. What if someone went back to biblical times and changed an event, maybe you could stop Moses from killing the Egyptian. Moses would have never gone into exile and experienced God in the burning bush. It would change salvation history. A person changing history would be, in fact, trying to play God.
There can also be bad motivations such as travelling into the future so that you could determine the winning lottery numbers and then come back and cheat the system. That would be, of course, sinful. But even with good intentions, looking into the future is also sinful as indicated in the Catechism. Looking into the future is a form of divination. In its discussion on the 1st Commandment, the Catechism states: “All forms of divination … conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone” (CCC #2116).
The only time travel that I can imagine that is not sinful is the time travel we encounter every time we participate at Mass. We travel back more than 2000 years as Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary is re-presented.
God is eternal and is outside of time. God created everything in the past, and time is part of His creation. We are bound to it, He is not. My weak mind still denies the possibility of time travel, but I again apologize for not treating a serious question with respect.