More evidence that time travel is impossible
So, what happens if someone invents a time machine and the Pope uses it to go back in time to the reign of a previous Pope? There can only be one Pope at once, right? My friend Jeff thinks the opposing Popes should have a Pope war, started with the words “This Vatican isn’t big enough for the both of us!” But after pondering it for a while, I’ve decided that this thought experiment only lends more weight to the sad probability that time travel is impossible. After all, the Catholics don’t have any theological doctrines dealing with time traveling Popes. Catholics are pretty smart when it comes to theology–even when I disagree with them I have a hard time finding flaws in their reasoning–and I can’t imagine they’d overlook something so fundamental as time traveling Popes if there was the least bit of possibility that they could exist.
December 7th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Yeah, and how long did it take the catholic church to admit the world was round and not flat? If time travel did exist and was a obvious and frequently used technology, it still would take the catholic church at least several hundred years to admit it that it was true. Of course, while they denied it, they would be using it to take over the world. They might want to bring back the good old days of burning people alive for reading the bible.
December 7th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
I could be wrong about this but I seem to recall a split in the church at some point that resulted in there being two popes at once….
December 7th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
I tried looking it up. Apparently when there is more than one pope, the one in the losing party is historically known as an antipope. Perhaps some of the antipopes are time travelers?
January 18th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Time Travel:
If a pope from the 21th century visited a pope in the 17th century there would still only be one pope in the 17th century… the current serving pope. The other would be pope of the world in the 21st century. Just as if G.W. were to time travel back to the days of Washington’s presidency, we wouldn’t have two presidents… we’d have one: Washington.
Boring, as laws of time go, but that’s all I got. (I thought about jazzing it up, but it would look silly.)
Popes:
There were as many a three popes… if I recall my history correctly (and jokes from Black Adder).
Flat-Earth:
By the way, where exactly did the Catholic church say the world was flat… I’m not so sure that folks actually believed in the flat-world theories as late as some of you might want to believe.