WHAT DO YOU THINK? Is the Multiverse Theory Just A Comic Book Fantasy?
If you think about it, as Sean McDowell and Dr. Stephen Meyer do in the following interview, the Marvel Comics fantasy pantheon of heroes like Spider-Man and Iron Man represents a sort of multiverses.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “multiverse,” it is a theory of origins for the universe in which we live that is derived from a segment of Quantum Physics. Not being a physicist, I won’t venture to describe the theory except to say that it posits our universe is but one of many, maybe even an infinity, of possible universes. Be advised, too, that there are emerging, competing versions of the Multiverse idea.
Thus, while humans dominate our Earth, under the Multiverse theory, there are other universes in which humans are subordinate to a master race of robots, hunted down and killed as food, born with superpowers, or just about any other scenario you can conceive.
McDowell is a professor of apologetics at Biola University, while Meyer is one of the world’s preeminent philosophers of science and the author of multiple books, including his latest, “The Return of the God Hypothesis.” This interview is 55 minutes, which is much longer than the norm here on HillFaith, but you can be assured of making a solid investment of your time in watching it through to the end.
Well, we know as believing Christians that time travel is definitively involved in the causation of biblical events (the Transfiguration — Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah, while apparently with the apostles).
One wonders if the repeated events of the people of Israel falling back into their ungodly ways are not the roots of other histories than our own that are rescued by the prophets intervening with divine urging, or as in the case of Mary, Mother of Jesus, her cooperation with the divine plan to radically alter all histories entirely. It is not irrational to imagine that such events might well echo back to alter the history of her people up to that time in such a manner to properly fit her for the divine task she has willingly undertaken.
I find it more rather than less persuasive of the fullness of divine mercy. It also forces one to take a different view of the concept of a purgatorial process of redemption.
What is the basis of your assumption that “time travel” was necessary for Moses and Elijah to be present with Jesus at the Transfiguration?
> Well, we know as believing Christians that time travel is definitively involved in the causation of biblical events (the Transfiguration — Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah, while apparently with the apostles).
I don’t see time travel as necessary to explain that, though it could be, perhaps.
2 Corinthians 5:8 “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”
Moses was absent from the body for over a thousand years, and so would have been present with the Lord. We presume Elijah was also present with the Lord, though the jury may be out as to whether he ever suffered physical death.
Either way, they both have a spirit and I would think they would meet with Jesus if that’s what the Lord wanted.
God has clearly said he is of God of the living, not of the dead. Moses and Elijah appeared living and corporeal as Jesus was, and were evidently conversing with Him from different points in the timeline.
If on the other hand you posit that they were both in an after-life state, there are two scriptural problems:
1) Elijah does not appear to have died but to have been “taken up” in some uncertain state, but clearly not conventional death (compare Enoch perhaps?);
this may not be an insuperable problem but Elijah’s status after his disappearance event across the Jordan is unclear from Scripture;
2) while Moses plainly died and was buried, Jesus had not yet risen at the Transfiguration to redeem the righteous souls of Israel from Sheol (however Sheol may be understood) and so your objection merely displaces the extra-temporal problem to that between the Resurrection and the Transfiguration.
So, the Transfiguration is fairly plainly an event in which Jesus draws several different times to Himself — i.e. — a form of time travel for the participants involved. (That doesn’t mean we can accomplish it, but that it has at least been done by a divine act).
And FWIW, I think that the Transfiguration can be properly understood as a extratemporal pre-Resurrection appearance or glimpse of the glorified Jesus of the Resurrection, much as the Angel of the Lord figure in the Old Testament is often interpreted as an appearance of the pre-incarnate Son of God.
You may well be right, but my doubt is based on the fact Jesus remained fully God and fully Man for the entirety of His earthly life, so having both Moses and Elijah there with Him during the Transfiguration in real time was certainly not beyond His capability. In any event, thanks for a thoughtful observation and an interesting explanation of it.