The Logic Of Time Travel (Part 2)

In the last post in this series I concluded with a promise, after presenting examples of logically impossible time traveling scenarios [1], that I would explore a logically legitimate one.  I used the example of James Cameron's film The Terminator to show how some imagined instances of time travel are objectively impossible.  So are there any time traveling scenarios where someone travels from the future to the past that are not logically impossible?  Yes, and I can think of at least one example of possible time travel from the future to the past from a video game.  The scenario in question is from the acclaimed game God of War II (yes, as my reviews of entries in the God of War series show [2], I love God of War!).  The events I will describe may be confusing to people other than players of the series, yet I hope to outline them in an understandable way.

At the beginning of the game, Kratos, who replaced Ares as the god of war, battles a giant statue animated by Athena.  After Kratos drains his divine powers into a massive sword called the Blade of Olympus, Zeus overpowers and kills him, at which point Kratos is pulled down into Hades.  So far nothing contradicts the necessary rules and principles of logic.

Zeus killing Kratos and Kratos descending into the underworld.

The Titan Gaia motivates Kratos to escape Hades, and he does quickly climb out of the realm.  The majority of the game from this point on sees Kratos trying to find the three powerful Sisters of Fate who control time, locating them, killing them, and acquiring the ability to manipulate time for himself.  And so he returns to the point where Zeus was in the process of killing him, catches him off guard, and fights him.  After battling Zeus (following the defeat of the Fates) in a fight that ends with the ruler of Olympus retreating, Gaia reminds Kratos that he can harness the power of time control.  Wielding this power, he retrieves the Titans from the moments before their defeat in the Titanomachy and brings them to Mount Olympus in the present time where Zeus had fled from him moments before.

Kratos, after ascending from Hades and defeating the Sisters of Fate,
goes back in time to the time when Zeus killed him.  Then he
travels to the time of the Titanomachy (the Great War between
the gods and Titans) and pulls the Titans into the present.

So, what makes this scenario possible as opposed to the one I criticized in the first entry in this series on time travel?

The Kratos that Zeus stabbed near the beginning of the game still died, allowing for a time loop to form where Kratos constantly dies, emerges from Hades, kills the Fates, and goes back in time to attack Zeus.  Unlike in The Terminator, the time traveling in God of War II does not involve logical incoherence because the past enables the future to occur, unlike how in the The Terminator it is the future which enables the past to occur, creating a impossible contradiction (see [1] for why this scenario is objectively impossible).  In The Terminator, a future event enables a past event to occur that in turn enables the future that allowed for it to happen to occur.  In God of War II, a past event enabled a future event to occur and the time travel back to the past did not nullify the future that followed.  Thus the chronological flow of time was preserved.

The eventual moving of the Titans from the past to the present would have indubitably altered some events in the God of War franchise, including a good portion of Chains of Olympus [3], which occurred before God of War II, but that does not seem to directly impact the legitimate nature of the time travel in the game.

Time travel remains an enigmatic, controversial subject, but identifying possible and impossible scenarios of time travel can sharpen the intellect and lead to a more complete understanding of time itself.  I am immersed in time constantly, and I wish to obtain a better comprehension of it, especially as it pertains to issues of metaphysics and theology.  In an age where some people outright deny self-evident realities like time [4], a right understanding of time certainly does not harm anyone's worldview!


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-logic-of-time-travel-part-1.html

[2].  I have reviewed multiple games in the series:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/game-review-god-of-war.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/game-review-god-of-war-iii-remastered.html
C.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/game-review-god-of-war-chains-of.html

[3].  If the Titans were not defeated in the Titanomachy and were transported to what was the future, they could not have been imprisoned in Tartarus and thus Atlas could not have conspired with Persephone to destroy the pillar holding the world, and thus Kratos would not have needed to fight them and Persephone would not have been killed.  This would appear to definitely affect some events in the following God of War storyline.  But in God of War III, Persephone is clearly described and seemingly shown to be dead, so either the game creators overlooked a logical flaw or they thought of some unmentioned way to resolve this dilemma.

[4].  Since something self-evident cannot be denied without invoking an impossible contradiction (for instance, a denial of the existence of truth, if correct, is still true), denying that any time exists denies the existence of the present moment--that there is such a thing as a moment of time right now, which is something that cannot be an illusion and that someone must speak or think in.  Because of this, a denial of time as a whole is self-refuting.