Retroactive Continuity

This is an idea that seems quite elegant and satisfying as a way of viewing the universe and understanding life.

I came across it originally when reading the retcon article in WikiPedia and was particularly struck by this:

The first published use of the phrase "retroactive continuity" is found in theologian E. Frank Tupper's 1973 book The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg:"Pannenberg's conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past."


The idea that this rather conservative (in some ways - he was anti-LGBT) theologian could conceive of such a radical idea I found unsettling - although I guess the same could be said for the Nazi philosopher Heidegger.

Anyway, this sort of view sort of ties in with the concept of time that appears in The Lathe of Heaven by  Ursula K. Le Guin - the idea in the story being a guy whose dreams can change reality - he dreams of something and it happens - the whole universe changes, everything is now what he dreamed, the whole past has been changed to fit in with some new reality.

It also made me think of the quite Timothy Keller uses about the resurrection "everything bad is going to become untrue" - how can something become untrue? Again, Keller doesn't seem to actually suggest the past could change, but that seems to be the logical end of something becoming "untrue" - for it to no longer be true. Could it be that a past event will at some point no longer have happened? Could the future change the past in such a way that a past event no longer has happened?

Another angle on how we understand time is in the film Arrival in which learning an alien language changes the nature of how we experience time - suddenly time is all in the present - there is no past or future, the person who learns the alien language knows everything "now".

This suggests that the true nature of reality is that "now" contains both past and future, that in some way it is all one, and we just experience it sequentially, but suppose it is just a single entity, then could there be some way in which that single entity might change to rebalance itself?

We know that we experience material cause and effect - one billard ball hits another and moves it - and so matter appears to move from the past into the future, the acts of one object affecting another.

Yet with the conservation of energy we are told energy can't be created or destroyed, just transferred. But what of the energy that comes from the mind?

When the mind is motivated or inspired or excited then we get more energy - we can be energised by all sorts of experiences in our minds, but how can that extra energy that the mind then creates, that is transferred into the material world - how can that obey the law of the conservation of energy?

Perhaps it does so by mental events causing the flow of time to work backwards, so that the sum total of energy in the universe is adjusted every time we produce positive energy - when we increase the energy in the universe the past has to change to adjust to it.

And so positive thinking, acting in a positive and inspiring way might actually cause time to flow from the future into the past, changing the past to somehow align it with the new future.

Thus perhaps with enough mental energy and positive thinking perhaps all the bad events of the past will become untrue, and the universe will be redeemed.