There are but two possible or realistic fates for our expanding Universe. Either it will expand forever and ever, or else the expansion will eventually halt and reverse into a contraction. If you had to choose between the two, based not on the science of cosmology, but on the Bible, you’d have to opt for the former. Fortunately for the Bible, cosmologists place their bets on that option as well.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
ETERNAL LIFE
*Heaven as the happy ultimate in retirement villages and facilities has drawbacks when it comes to life eternal or everlasting life. The big drawback as I see it is that you are going to end up bored, not to death obviously (you’re already dead), but out of your feeble little mind. You might occupy yourself with the novelty of it all for the first million years or so, but what of the following billion years after that and the trillions of years that follows on from that – and you’re not even a stone’s throw within being ‘everlasting’ or ‘eternal’ yet.
ETERNAL YOUTH
*There’s another and usually overlooked issue with respect to having eternal life – eternal youth. A common situation in mythology arises when someone asks for and is granted immortality but forgot to request that the ageing process be suspended – oops!
RESURRECTION
*Now to get from this life to the afterlife that you hope to spend eternally in a physical place requires two events, your death and your resurrection. Death is the natural order of things. That’s the easy part.
*Resurrection as I understand it means the return to your former self after your demise (your death). Resurrection however defies the second law of thermodynamics – it’s like unscrambling and un-cooking a cooked scrambled egg – unless there some intelligence with super-science behind the resurrection; something beyond our reckoning.
*As per the above linking of immortality with eternal youth, I’ll assume that once resurrected, the ageing process isn’t also resurrected.
*Jesus (J.C.), if there ever was a Jesus, was a 3-D physical being. J.C. is the prime example of someone allegedly resurrected back into a 3-D being (unless he was ‘resurrected’ as a hologram of course, though a hologram is still a something that involves physical principles and energy. Still, a hologram is an interesting way of providing a ‘resurrection’).
*Now issues arise as to what your biological age will be when you are resurrected. The unwritten assumption would be to be resurrected back to the age you were at the time of death as was the case with J.C. That’s nifty if you’re 50, but what if you snuff it at 100? Do you want to spend eternity as a 100 year old? The opposite problem – what if you die as an infant, say a day or two after your birth. Would you want to spend your infinite afterlife as a new born baby? It would be even worse if you die before even being born!
*Maybe the optimum solution would be if everyone were resurrected to what they were, or what they would be at say, age 30. And of course all deformities would be corrected in the resurrection process. That would be super-science indeed, but how does one know what, say a two-day old infant will look like at 30-years of age, and how does one resurrect experiences and learning and memories that a 30-year old should have but a two-day old infant doesn’t.
*Then again maybe one size fits all. That is, there is only one body model and you, and everyone else, gets resurrected into that single form or body type, though that still isn’t much help for issues arising with our two-day old baby.
*Well maybe we should just forget resurrection of the entire body. It’s a can of worms. Even more so a Mission
SOUL
*Well, instead of resurrection of the body, there’s usually just talk of your soul winging its way to Heaven, or alternatively your soul suffering eternal torment as in “damn your soul to Hell”. Now the soul; your essence; what makes you, you; what makes (or made) you tick, leave the body upon your death. Now either your soul has mass, and one study – never independently verified said it was 21 grams, or your soul is without mass. If it does have mass, we’re back in the realm of chemistry and physics again and now one can imagine a physical Heaven inhabited by floating souls instead of bodies. I assume here that a physical soul (21 grams worth or otherwise) has sensory apparatus; otherwise you’ll be eternally floating deaf, dumb and blind. It would be like spending forever in a sensory isolation tank – you’d go bonkers really quick-smart.
*Now if the soul has no substance, no mass, it weighs zilch, then it’s hard to understand how it could represent the essence of anything. A weightless, no mass soul couldn’t interact with anything. There could be no physical forces holding it together and so it would dissipate, if the concept of nothing dissipating has any meaning.
GHOSTS
*Somewhere between a resurrected body and the soul must be something akin to wraiths or spirits or phantoms or ghosts – call them what you will. This is at least clear-cut – if you can see a ghost, hear a ghost, if the ghost interacts with other matter and energy, then the ghost is a physical object. Though the concept of a spirit or a ghost (holy or otherwise) is noted in the Bible (phantoms and wraiths miss out), somehow the image of Heaven as a celestial version of a haunted house just doesn’t resonate.
*Equally unexplained is how one goes from a dead body to an animated ghost – what part of you stays dead and what part of you returns to an animated condition? In much the same way that applies to reported out-of-the-body (OOB) experiences. OOB happenings have to really be all in the mind since you cannot have by any physics we know a physical body split into two physical entities, each with functional sensory apparatus that interacts with energy (mass in another form), like light and sound. How do you divide one live physical body into two live physical bodies, even temporarily? Even if the OOB part of the original physical body were light as a feather, gravity would pull the OOB back down to earth. It couldn’t just float around like a hot air balloon.
ENTROPY & OTHER COSMIC DANGERS
*As the Universe expands it gets colder and colder – the Universe’s finite amount of energy gets spread around in an ever increasing volume. Further, heat spreads from areas of warmth to areas of coolness thus ultimately making everything a uniform temperature – a concept known as entropy whereas a high state of order (hot areas and cold areas) turns into a lower state of order (temperature uniformity).
*How does Heaven shelter itself from entropy – the second law of thermodynamics? When all the stars in the Universe have all exhausted their fuel supplies and the temperature of the cosmos just hovers above, just a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, how does Heaven cope from the Big Freeze and shield itself from this and for how long can Heaven keep itself isolated?
*Heaven must have some sort of ‘force field’ to protect it as the Universe sinks ever lower in temperature. (Hell need not worry quite as much as it obviously has a lot of energy storage, supply and reserves in stock!)
*Heaven, being a part of the cosmos (it’s around somewhere), needs to shield itself not only from entropy but other cosmic catastrophes. Heaven may have a force field to shield it from gamma-ray bursts and other deadly radiations (wouldn’t you just love to hear God say “Increase power to the shields, Scotty”) but no amount of shielding will stop it going down a Black Hole gurgler, so you’d better hope Heaven has a good helmsman and sensors!
ALTERNATIVE ONE
*One solution is that Heaven and the afterlife aren’t physical at all, but somehow ghostly in the extreme or nebulous or without actual form or substance. The problem there, just like with that soul with no mass, is that no physical presence means no matter, therefore no chemistry and physics is possible. In short, if there’s no matter, there’s no energy. It’s hard to conceive of existence of any kind that doesn’t involve the transfer of energy. For one thing, all your five senses would be inoperative. What kind of afterlife would it be if you couldn’t see, if there were no sound, if you couldn’t touch and feel anything. All this requires physics and chemistry and the transfer of energy.
ALTERNATIVE TWO
*There is no Heaven (or Hell for that matter); no afterlife, no resurrected bodies, no ghosts and no soul. Cosmologists will have to continue to rely on traditional methods to figure out the ultimate fate of the Universe.
CONCLUSION
*Any Biblical promises of eternal life are simply pie-in-the-sky and cannot be a believable scenario by any critical or rational person. Thus, the fate-of-the-Universe question is still up for grabs, or in limbo land, though, irrespective of Biblical claims, just based on current scientific (not Biblical) evidence, any sane person would in fact put their money on infinity and not on the Big Crunch.
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