IF X IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU THEN IT WILL HAPPEN AND IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU TRY TO STOP IT OR NOT

Fatalism is the notion that everything is laid out like clockwork and that clockwork will never fail.  Fatalism would suggest you may as well do nothing as do something for what is going to happen is going to happen anyway. The same thing be it a trifling thing or something gigantic will happen when it will happen whether I try to make it happen or not. That can be seen as learned helplessness. It is definitely extremely conducive to it.  It is definitely belief in magic. Something has to have the power and intelligence to design and regulate the future for you if you will do nothing. My free will is not real or if it is it does not matter for it has no significance.

If God is the one putting the scheme all together then this is magic for it is about treating everything as a prop in a play.  God does not need a play.  If he does this is even worse than magic!

Let us look at the issue of “backtracking counterfactual”. Here is an example. Imagine John went back in time to when his grandfather Jack was alive. Jack had not met John’s grandmother yet. If John castrates or kills Jack then we have a contradiction. Jack is unable to be a grandfather. Yet John must have had a grandfather, this Jack.

A contradiction is literally nothing. It is something cancelling itself so there is nothing. It is nothing that is easily mistaken for not being nothing for both sides of it look like two sensible stories – it is just that they are two stories that cannot match.  The fact remains that there are two opposites that cancel. 

Some say time travel is impossible for you cannot kill your own father before you were conceived by going back in time but this can be true and still allow for time travel.

The answer to our time travel puzzle is that the mechanics of the universe will stop John say killing Jack. If John is putting the knife in Jack will perhaps survive or the knife will bend. If you believe in God or magic, then these forces must be acting to stop you changing the future. Miracles and/or spells are intervening. If you can go back in time then you can force God to do miracles. This totally contradicts Jesus who told the devil himself that nobody can test God or tell God what to do. Jesus told Nicodemus that God’s action, the Holy Spirit blows where it will and nobody will tell it what to do. God is no longer God.

If you look at the universe it may seem to be organised and designed. If it acts to stop John killing Jack then what? Does it make sense to argue that the universe acts like it is intelligent to stop him?

Religion will say that we don't have to worry about some intelligent force taking over if we succeed in travelling back in time.  But that is not the point.  Even if time travel is impossible, it is not impossible as in you going to the time your grandfather was about to meet your grandmother. This is saying a force will take control to stop you killing your grandfather or stopping him meeting your grandmother.

In fact the force that will do this is only doing your life in such a way as how what you do now sets the future.

God or whatever fixing the future in immobile fashion in all its detail is a different subject from God knowing what will happen in detail.

What if some being perhaps God knows what I will do. This is supposed to mean that you have no free will. If he sees you will murder Jane tomorrow then you will have to murder her. But we are told looking is not causing. And it is because you freely will kill Jane today that he knew yesterday you would do it. God’s past perception was caused or given by my future action. It is not the other way around.

"If I will do x God will see that."  "If I will be able to do y and do y instead of x then he will see that."  God seeing it does not make it inevitable. He sees what we will freely do.  Notice how this says that our actions really do have consequences.  Some say that if fatalism is in some way true it does not mean you can do nothing and still get results.  You will not get the maths grade by learning only geography.

Imagine if God who knows the future predicted to you what you would do in two minutes and did that several times a day. This would be the same as fate. There may as well be no such thing as chance. Chance would be real but insignificant and irrelevant.  Fate is a terrible teaching and dangerous. God is inherently as bad.