 Even most protagonists consider it an unwarranted consequence that the notion of backward causation, if consistent, involves the idea that the future is able to change the past. Their answer has therefore usually been that if we have the power to bring something about in the past, what came about really already existed when the past was present. We have to make a distinction between changing the past so it becomes different from what it was and influencing the past so it becomes what it was. A coherent notion of backward causation only requires that the future is able to have an influence on what happens in the past. Nonetheless, we can say, quite parallel to forward causation, that the past would have been different if the backward-directed cause had not made the past as it turned out to be.