This is not a mathematical discussion. It’s far above that.
If you have read any significant amount of fiction dealing with time, particularly Science Fiction that seeks to use or explain a particular theoretical approach to understanding time, then you’ve had your mind twisted out of shape on this issue. That most of it takes for granted there can be no God and nothing beyond the universe (except perhaps a different flavor of the same stuff) is no surprise to us. We don’t have time to argue with them, only that we need to undo their pernicious influence.
The image is portrayed that some of the most infinitesimal actions can alter the entire following future. In a random universe where there is no God, this might be reasonable. Where there is a God, there remains a stabilizing force. Human choices do have effects, but they are not all that large. Indeed, the vast majority of consequences are poured back into our existence. Rather, God’s choices are the key to major events. The problem is not the idea of unintended consequences itself, but the magnitude of effects against God’s revealed intention to steer things to some degree.
It is utterly impossible to say how much difference your choices make. God holds the winning hand here. He steers events regardless of human intent. This is part of why I reject the notion that we can accomplish much through politics, even substantial political power. God has said in no uncertain terms that He steers a certain measure of such things. He certainly uses human choices because His power on earth has always carried a plausible deniability. Still, His Word breathes an overwhelming power to move through human decision to work His larger plan for this earth.
Because I regard our captivity under the strictures of time and space to be a large element in the Curse of the Fall, I could never give any credibility to theories of time travel. Leaping across vast stretches of space might be just theoretically possible, but I rather doubt we’ll ever find the means. However, jumping around in alternative time lines won’t happen because God will not let it make any difference.
A critical element in this is that God is wholly unaffected by the strictures of time. He created time. If God decided to rewrite the past, you would never know about it. Further, it’s generally false to see time as relentlessly linear. The linear nature of time is a matter of human perception and nothing more. That perception is part of the Fall; it is not inherent in our design. For God, all things are in His present moment, as it were, but we are unable in our fallen state to imagine an existence where time and space were not confining factors. Our Western intellectual bias makes us even more blind to the truth. It is beyond a Western understanding that ancient men were hardly so limited intellectually as we are today.
The ultimate truth is always both simpler and more complicated than just about anything we can imagine.
