My Trip in Time Read online

Jacob showed me a video that his Dad took of him as a toddler, levitating for the first time. It was surreal to watch the toddler wobbly floating into his Mommy’s arms.

  I could have stayed there all day asking questions, and I wanted to, but the Professor informed us that I only had a little over 50 minutes to still be in the future. So it was time to get to the reason I had asked them to visit me – evidence from the future to prove God doesn’t exist.

  “For simplicity’s sake,” Aaron began. “Do you mind if Jacob and me just call you Grandfather?”

  “Grandfather?”

  “Yes, you are my 70th grandfather on my Dad’s side and you’re the 70th grandfather on Jacob’s mom’s side. It will take a lot of time to say great 70 times.”

  “Why don’t you just call me James,” I said.

  Aaron and Jacob glanced at each other then back at me. “We would prefer to call you Grandfather. I know it may sound a little dumbar, but we think it’s important to keep it squarely in our minds that you are our forefather. We’re of your direct line, we are…well, we’re family.”

  Well, I wasn’t exactly sure what dumbar meant (though I was pretty sure it was future slang for stupid), but I nodded my head that it was Ok for them to call me Grandfather. It was weird to have two guys, that were only a few years younger than me calling me Grandpa, but since it was technically true, what the heck.

  “So, Grandfather,” Aaron continued. “You wrote this letter to your children and it has been passed down ever since. It has become, as I’m sure you intended, a family tradition. There are now over 300 copies of this letter, but this one, is the original, preserved now for all generations to see.”

  Wow, I thought. What else is there to say?

  “In this letter you asked us to provide you with evidence proving or disproving that God exists,” Aaron continued. “Unfortunately, we can provide you with neither. But I can tell you, that just like in your time the majority of the people living today believe that God exists, or at least some divine entity.”

  “What?” I exclaimed, perhaps a little louder than I would have liked (OK, it was quite a bit louder than I would have liked).

  Aaron and Jacob were taken back at my rather loud response, and looked at each other in confusion. Professor Phineas III however merely chuckled.

  I felt pretty guilty about my exuberant response. “I am sorry,” I said, trying to mollify my tone a little bit. “But how is it that science has not yet proven that God is a myth? I mean you guys can travel in time. You can go back and prove that the world wasn’t created in seven days.” Aaron and Jacob looked even more confused now, and the Professor chuckled a little louder. “Or,” I continued, trying to sound at least a little more objective. “You should have been able to prove that all that really happened, and thus God exists.”

  “The world created in seven days?” Jacob asked. “You mean like in Genesis?” I nodded my head, and Jacob shared a confused look with Aaron before responding, “But the creation story in Genesis is allegory, it is not an actual factual account of creation.”

  “Clearly the two of you didn’t read all the materials I sent over,” the Professor said to Aaron and Jacob. “James is from a period of human history that we call the Theological Dark Ages. The majority of people in this period, at least those familiar with Christianity, Islam and Judaism, believe that the first books of the Bible were meant to be interpreted literally.”

  “Theological Dark Ages?” I replied, confused. “What do you mean Dark Ages?” I wasn’t very happy with the Professor referring to my time period as the dark anything.

  “The Theological Dark Ages,” the Professor answered. “Refers to a period in mankind’s history in which theological understanding takes a step back, so to speak. It starts with the Protestant Reformation in 1517, though it really escalates in the 19th century and is at its peak in the 20th century – and continues through the Great Reunification of 2029.”

  “Takes a step back?” I asked, still confused on what the Professor was talking about.

  “Yes, your statement on the Creation Story is the most famous example,” the Professor replied. “Prior to the start of the Theological Dark Ages, it was commonly accepted by theologians that the creation story was allegory, a parable. Saint Augustine of Hippo, a fourth century Catholic bishop, famously wrote about this after years of study. Per Saint Augustine, God did create the universe and man, but the description in Genesis was not an actual account of how it was done, but merely meant to provide the Hebrews with a conceptual foundation of God and the human condition.”

  “Wait a minute,” I replied. “I went to church every Sunday growing up, and I can tell you that everyone in my church believes Genesis is supposed to be an actual step by step account.”

  “Well of course they do my boy,” the Professor laughed. “You are living in the Theological Dark Ages.” Seeing my confused and frustrated look, he continued. “James, surely you can see that it would have been impossible for God to explain to the ancient Hebrews – who not only thought the world was flat, but that the stars were just holes in a doom that covered the earth – how He created the universe. Their understanding of science and physics was just too limited. And knowing who created the world was the important thing, not the how. Does that make sense?”

  Well I guess, in a way, it did make sense, but I still wasn’t convinced.

  “James, have you ever studied the Bible?” the Professor asked. “Not just read it, but actually study it?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I had a Bible that was given to me when I was 13, but I had never actually read it. Of course, I didn’t want to admit that to the Professor and my multi-millennial off-spring – especially not after all these cracks about the Theological Dark Ages.

  “Good,” the Professor replied. “Then you know that interpreting the Bible is difficult. Especially the Torah, the first five books of the Christian Bible. To truly understand the Bible you need to understand the historical context…the culture, customs and practices of the original audience. For that is who that section of the Bible is written for. Make sense?”

  “Sure,” I replied. I never really thought about it like that before, but it did make sense.

  “Good, well one of the foundational principles of the Protestant Reformation was that all truth comes from the Bible. So the Protestant movement encouraged everyone to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. A byproduct of this was the literaturization of Western Europe – for in order to be able to read the Bible, you first need to be able to read – which is a good thing. However it also resulted in a theological decline, for while you had more people reading the Bible, they were not adequately trained in the study of it. In addition, you had a rapid expansion of the number of churches, and the clergy for those churches in many cases came from the congregation itself – this was especially true in America. So you had a combination of a decrease in educational standards of the clergy, and more people interpreting the Bible for themselves, which naturally resulted in a lot of things being misinterpreted. In addition, when you add the scientific revolution to the equation, you have a perceived conflict of ideas that force both sides to extremes.”

  “I assume, when you say the scientific revolution, you are referring to how science has now disproved most of the Bible? Why do you think I sent the letter in the first place? I was hoping the job would be completely done by this time.” Ok, I didn’t mean to confess that. When I wrote the letter, I deliberately wrote it so that it would sound like I had an open mind. My future descendants, Aaron and Jacob were giving me completely baffled looks. The Professor on the other hand, merely nodded his head like I had just proved his point.

  “You, James, are the perfect example of one of the extremes I was referring to,” the Professor continued. “When you attended church, was the creation story discussed much. Or was it mostly the New Testament?”

  “Well, it was the New Testament?” I grudg
ingly agreed.

  “And how much of the New Testament has been disproven by the science of the 21st century?”

  “Some of it has,” I replied.

  “Really, which parts?” the Professor asked.

  The Professor had me there. I really racked my brain, but while I didn’t believe any of it really happened, science hadn’t really disproved it. It just sounded too incredible to be true.

  “You see,” the Professor said triumphantly. “You have gone to the extreme of believing that everything in the Bible is false, just because you were taught that the first few pages in the Bible were literally true. Which, as it turns out, were never meant to be interpreted literally. There are extremists on the other side as well, who cling even harder to the notion that the creation story is literally true, out of fear that if it is not, then the entire Bible must be false.”

  Ok, I must admit that did make sense, but I still couldn’t accept that the creation story had simply been misinterpreted as literally true. I mean, I know there are a number of people out there with no real education, acting like they’re experts on the Bible – there were several in my church. But what about the Pope and the Bishops of the really big churches, surely they went through a lot of theological training. So everyone couldn’t be as ignorant as the