Creation: God vs. Science: Part One

Probably among the most familiar of familiar phrases in the English language is one that starts out “In the beginning God created…” However, there are alternative non-theological variations on that phrase that fall more in the realm of natural philosophy (or as we call it today, science). What’s at stake is the credibility of God’s alleged word vs. the credibility of the word of science. Christians might believe the Bible, but they put their real faith in science when they turn on their TV set or board an aircraft. So too should they put their money on the scientific scenarios of the creations.

In the beginning God said a whole bunch of stuff central to His creation of life, the Universe and everything.*

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Genesis 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. [God creates photons and electromagnetic energy.]

Genesis 1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. [This makes little sense, but it’s a division of heavenly ‘waters’ from the earthly ‘waters’. There’s earthly ‘waters’, and then there’s everything else above the earthly ‘waters’ – the firmament.]

Genesis 1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. [The distinction between land and sea is noted as the earthly ‘waters’ undergo a partial phase change.]

Genesis 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. [Botany makes an appearance.]

Genesis 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. [The creation of the Sun, the Moon and the stars is noted.]

Genesis 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. [God creates fish (including whales) and birds.]

Genesis 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. [Add to that the invertebrates, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.]

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Genesis 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

These are statements, but not explanations, far less adequate explanations. It’s akin to sleight of hand, the snap of the fingers, the waving of a magic wand. Its parlour tricks that dazzle but you’re left none the wiser. You’re awed by magicians’ tricks because you can’t figure out how they do them; and they’re not telling!

We note by the way that microbes, bacteria, viruses, unicellular critters, etc. don’t get a mention in Genesis. There’s no “And God said, let there be microbes”. That’s one major omission. Of course humans didn’t have microscopes back then and I guess God forgot to tell His scribes about the reality of the greater part of Earth’s biomass so that’s why they didn’t get a mention. All of God’s creations would fall apart at the atomic seams if it wasn’t for the strong nuclear force, so why didn’t God take credit for that? Okay, so the human author(s) of Genesis presumably didn’t know much about atomic physics, but they did know about gravity (the force that really dominates the Universe, including much of reality back on Terra Firma, including much of their reality. So why no “And God said, let there be gravity”? 

Those significant omissions aside, and they are significant, religion, as in the Bible, gives you various creation statements as we’ve seen. If the Bible gives you creation explanations of any kind, they are downright weird, if not supernatural, and certainly not verifiable explanations. Science tries to give you logical explanations for creation events and to the best of its ability, verifiable explanations.

So, God created the “heaven and the earth”. Heaven apparently is as in all things not earth – the rest of the cosmos. Out of what did God create heaven and earth? Out of nothing? Out of some pre-existing primordial matter that presumably God didn’t create but had available to Him as a raw resource? Or, alternatively, if He did create this primordial stuff, then He then took some time out to figure out what to do with it. Decisions, decisions! I mean if God is immortal; and the heaven (cosmos) and earth aren’t, then a lot of water passed under the bridge between God, and God’s creation of heaven and earth. In any event, where are the details? If I told you I had created a jumbo jet in my heavenly garden shed, you’d ask questions. You’d require the nitty-gritty details, as in made out of what, and what size – life-size or toy model – and can it fly. Was it carved or assembled from pre-existing parts or were the parts all created from scratch, and if so where did I get the raw materials from? 

Now even I have to admit, when it comes down to the creation of “heaven” (the Universe or cosmos presumably), scientists (cosmologists) come out with some pretty far-out-star-scout statements too. And some pretty far-out-star-scout details, but at least there are details. The nitty-gritty is that 13.7 billions years ago (science – vs. 4004 BCE God), there was a Big Bang which somehow created the Universe (matter, energy, time and space) from nothing, and to top off the silliness, that all happened in a space way, way, way smaller than a pinhead. Pull the other one fellows! However, at least they do have some observational evidence – runs on the board – to support at least the 13.7 billion year ago event (though little else), evidence which the 4004 BCE Biblical version lacks. For example, there’s the measured redshifts of the galaxies which suggest the cosmos is expanding. Reinforcing that there’s the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) – the temperature of the cosmos – which keeps getting cooler as the cosmos expands. CMBR measurement meets CMBR theory. Also an area when observation matches prediction is the cosmic ratio of hydrogen to helium. So, the Big Bang has runs (as in details and evidence) on the board. Genesis 1:1 doesn’t.

The “earth” part on the other hand has science on a far, far firmer ground. Astronomers have certainly witnessed the overall process by which extra-solar planetary systems are currently forming, and extrapolation then gives the process that created our Sun and planets, including the Earth, isn’t difficult. In brief, it goes something like this. Interstellar dust clouds rotate and contract due to gravity. Contraction down into a much relatively smaller volume makes for extreme heat and pressure. That heat and pressure eventually triggers nuclear fusion – a star is born. The surrounding debris under gravity contracts to much smaller bodies where the heat and pressure isn’t quite enough to trigger fusion. Those smaller bodies become the orbiting planets – like Earth. As I said, observations are made, explanations are given and details are, well, detailed. So when it comes to accounting for the creation of the Earth, it’s science on top by a mile, or two or ten.

As to the creation, or separation, of land and sea, well you certainly don’t need supernatural processes to account for that. Take a lump of mud or sand; add water; stir until everything is a uniform mixture or slurry. Let stand. What happens? The mud/sand sinks or settles to the bottom (gravity again) and you have separation of church and state – sorry, land and water. Science trumps God again. The Bible should have mentioned gravity and density, but it failed to do so. The Bible should have also mentioned the atmosphere when noting the separation of the land from the waters. Somehow God forgot to mention His role in separating out the atmosphere from the lithosphere and from the hydrosphere. That’s another major oversight IMHO. 

To be continued…

*Kindly note that all Biblical references have been taken from the Book of Genesis that appear in the King James Version of the Bible.

Your Soul, Your Free Will and Your Afterlife: Part Two

The soul, free will, and the afterlife consisting of Heaven or Hell are among the central tenets of the Christian religion. All have philosophical baggage attached. In two cases, the soul and the afterlife, that baggage is a rather excessive amount.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

The Concept of an Afterlife: Heaven, Hell or Other:  It should come as no surprise that we have some sort of internally hard-wired need to believe in an afterlife, especially one which is pleasant (like Heaven - that of course doesn’t make it of necessity a given). The only experience we’ve ever had has been as a living being. Since we haven’t yet experienced death, it’s in the realm of the totally unknown, and unknowable (until we cross that boundary). At best we are nervous about the unknown, even scared, perhaps terrified – even more so when the unknown is also unknowable. No one has yet be proved beyond reasonable doubt to have come back from the grave and tell us about death, which, is the biggest, most important unknowable of the lot. So, it’s no wonder that believing in an afterlife (or Heaven) helps us overcome our unease.  Despite that, we still fight like the dickens to postpone death, no matter how convinced we are that Heaven awaits! Anyway, let’s look at some specific questions that suggest that the concept of Heaven is, as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock would say, ‘Illogical’.

Firstly, I have to assume that Heaven is an actual physical place with a defined location. That is, if it’s to accommodate humans (and animals?), and presumably the humans are physical (in order to see, hear, touch, etc.), then you need a physical location – the exact place and size are immaterial. So, we have a third dimensional Heaven, that experiences the passage of time (not everyone arrives at Heaven’s Gate at the exact same moment), and allows an existence of physical objects that can be touched, seen, heard, tasted and smelled. Translated, Heaven has a physical location within our Universe and has the properties central to mass, energy, space and time. That said, the ultimate fate of Heaven, and therefore ultimately your ultimate fate, rests with whatever the ultimate fate of the Universe will be. Either prospect is bleak. If our Universe, of which Heaven is but one suburb, ceases its expansion and begins to contract, then it ultimately comes together in a Big Crunch, the mother of all Black Holes and presumably goes ‘poof’. On the other hand, if it continues to expand for all eternity, then ultimately the suburb of Heaven will be totally isolated from the rest of the diluted Universe; dark, freezing cold, and absolutely boring! The idea of spending eternity – absolute infinity - in one place, no matter how heavenly, must ultimately prove to be depressing. In fact, such an existence one could argue would be pure Hell! Lastly, there’s this scenario that as space ever expands, more and more ‘dark energy’ is created (because ‘dark energy’ is a property of space itself), and ‘dark energy’ is a repulsing push-apart force. It is postulated that there will be ultimately enough ‘dark energy’ in the Universe to firstly rip apart clusters of galaxies, then individual galaxies, then their stars, right down to the level of molecules and atoms. This Big Rip (obviously) scenario ultimately has the fate of the cosmos having a Universe composed of nothing but the absolute un-rip-able elementary particles. Presumably, Heaven and all it contains will be ripped to shreds as well.

Anyway, before the end of the Universe as we know it, okay, so you arrive in Heaven. What do you do? Apart from the wings and the haloes and harps bit that is, I would assume that Heaven would be a pretty boring with eternity stretching out in front of you. If they don’t have your favourite beer on tap in Heaven, are you really in Paradise? What do you do in that great cosmic eternal waiting (for Armageddon presumably) room after you’ve read all the National Geographic’s or Woman’s Weekly or Reader’s Digests from cover-to-cover for dozens of times? Do you have hobbies in Heaven? Do you have some kind of nine-to-five job? Are there cultural events and libraries and dining out available? Do you form new relationships, or are you stuck with the old ones? What about shopping – supermarkets presumably are necessary to feed a body that still has a physical essence. Presumably you also need water and air. If so, where do they come from?

Let’s start with one obvious question, what do you look like in Heaven? Presumably you must have some sort of appearance so that others can recognize you (I can’t imagine you go around wearing a nametag). Do you look the same as that you that died? That could be tricky if you died all mangled up in a car/plane/train wreck, or had your atoms scattered to the four winds at ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. What if you died as a six month old foetus? What if you died with some body parts of someone else or had plastic surgery – is your appearance that of before or after? We could assume that everybody in Heaven is given their appearance that reflects what they did, or would have, looked like at age (pick a number, say) 21. But how would Mum recognize her six month old foetus, or a child recognize their father when the child wasn’t born say until daddy was already 55 years old?

Let’s say you died with essential artificial body parts. What’s the status of your health in Heaven? Presumably you are restored to perfect health, so if you have an artificial heart I gather you get your old organic heart back, even if it ‘died’ decades before you and had long since decayed away. If you were mute, or deaf, or blind all your life, can you now speak, hear or see? If you were old and senile, presumably you’ll have your memory fully restored and razor sharp in Heaven.

How do you communicate? Is there one universal language in Heaven which you instantly master the moment you get there, no matter what your previous languages or language skills or in fact if you died before ever learning a language?

How do you get on with people in Heaven who you didn’t get along with when living, like maybe your neighbour, or boss, or ex-spouse, or that bully who pushed you around in school? Is everybody lovey-dovey with everyone else?

Do you have any natural sexual desires in Heaven? What about sex? I take it as given that you’re not allowed to, or can’t, reproduce (despite the edict to ‘be fruitful and multiply’). But is a Heaven without heavenly pleasures really Heaven?

So, a physical Heaven appears to be a somewhat difficult can-of-worms to deal with.

On the other hand, maybe Heaven doesn’t have any actual physical reality (there’s no matter, no energy, no time, and no space) and it just houses nebulous non-physical souls that exist in total isolation. That’s a rather depressing concept.

Either way, Heaven is illogical. Oh, the same sorts of arguments apply equally to Hell.

Forgetting Heaven for a moment, could there be an afterlife but no God? Yes, of course, but (there’s always got to be a ‘but’).  The ‘but’ in this case is that it’s possible, providing that you can provide a natural, as opposed to a supernatural ways and means of transcending life to life-after-death, and that I doubt you can do. Since I reject a supernatural explanation, and since you can’t come up with a plausible natural one, then I conclude that there is as likely as not, no supernatural God (or gods) that can provide this afterlife service. A natural afterlife would be akin to being a citizen of a country that has no government; an afterlife without any infrastructure. But (there’s that ‘but’ again), maybe there is a natural, well naturally artificial anyway, explanation for an afterlife after all.

I refer to the idea noted above that we might exist in a computer software simulated cosmos. If our life is simulated, so too may we, after being deleted from the alive-and-well, full-of-life software, reappear in another software program called Heaven or Hell (or maybe Spirit World). Now I know nearly all of you gentle readers will reject the idea that you are just a simulated being in a computer generated universe. However, I conclude that you take the idea seriously, since it just may well prove to be your one and only ticket to an afterlife!

Origins and Ultimate Questions: Part One

Who are we; where did we come from; what is my purpose in life; why is there something rather than nothing, etc. has probably been pondered by most of us at one time or another. One universal blanket answer is God (or in earlier times, the gods). A rival answer is that the abstract concept of Mother Nature can equally explain all, even if sometimes in the negative – the Universe and you have no ultimate purpose. It, you and I just are.

Cosmological Origins & Considerations: Did God create the Universe?

To be honest, cosmologists have no need of a God Hypothesis to explain the origin of our Universe, be it the standard model of the Big Bang event or a variation thereof (and there are cosmologists who don’t buy into the standard model) and you won’t find any mention of the God Hypothesis as a plausible possibility in their textbooks and given in university lecture halls.

Still, ‘In the beginning’ - that’s a good place to start, although I actually prefer the phrase ‘once upon a time’ for reasons that will become apparent. The standard cosmological model outlining the origin or our Universe via the Big Bang event is, well let me just say I don’t accept a word of it and I won’t go into massive detail about it. It’s very easy to get hold of any number of popular accounts that detail the standard Big Bang scenario. However, in extreme briefness, the standard Big Bang event postulates the origin of all matter where no matter existed before; the creation of all energy, where no energy existed previously; the creation of time itself where previously there was no time; and lastly the creation of space where before-the-fact there was no space. To add insult to our intelligence, the Big Bang was also a quantum event, so you are forced to believe that the entire contents of our Universe were once crammed into a space the size of an atom or less. Sure it was! In fact there’s so much philosophical baggage for the standard Big Bang scenario to have to lug around that even the standard Biblical account is slightly, ever so slightly, more believable, but only just – barely just.

In proposing an alternative scenario, I can’t really throw the Big Bang baby out along with the philosophical bathwater, because there’s too much real observational evidence in support of some sort of Big Bang event. My alternative just postulates that the Big Bang event happened in pre-existing space and time, and that the matter and energy of our Universe is just a recycling of the contents of a previous universe that, in the reverse of our expanding Universe, contracted until it all came together in a Big Crunch so warping the fabric of space and time that it ended up spewing the contents out in what we see as our Universe. Oh, the transition from a previous Big Crunch universe to our Big Bang Universe was a macro event, not a micro (quantum) one.

Anyway, either our Universe had a beginning (the Big Bang), and will have (based on current cosmological observations) an ultimate, albeit long drawn out termination (a Heat Death or Big Rip), or the Universe is infinitely cyclic (Big Crunch – Big Bang – expansion – contraction – Big Crunch – Big Bang – etc.).

In the former case, what’s the point of God creating and ruling over a Universe that’s ultimately going to spend an eternity in a very cold and dead state, or for there to be a Heaven (or Hell) that exists within such an ultimately dreary Universe? The realm of God, of Heaven and Hell, has ultimately got to be part of our Universe and subject to the same sort of fate as the Universe overall will share.

In the latter case, with infinitely cyclic universes, there is no need for a creator God at all. Or, maybe God, over an eternity, has created lots of various universes, one after the other, for His amusement, and perhaps like a kid tired of a new toy, abandoned it (or destroyed it via a Big Crunch) after a time. Our Universe could be but the latest in this series of amusements, sort of like a child playing with a doll house and dolls for a while. Perhaps God is akin to a child and we are toys to be played with and manipulated. God can sure throw tantrums like a spoiled brat! [Recall the original ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘Squire of Gothos’ for an illustration of what I’m on about – the episode illustrates a very similar idea.] Regardless, perhaps this is yet another interesting variation of the cyclic or oscillating universe scenario where there are lots of universes in turn, but supernaturally, not naturally created. However, I’d ultimately have to argue that if Mother Nature can create one universe, Mother Nature can create more than one universe. And while God can create as many universes as He likes, what’s the logical point of doing so? Isn’t our Universe a big enough playground for Him? 

The Origin of Life on Earth (or Elsewhere): Did God Create Life?

The upshot is that those biologists and biochemists who study the origin of life, whether an origin indigenous to our planet, or one arriving from the depths of outer space via a panspermia scenario, have not required resorting to supernatural explanations for the creation of life. You won’t find the phrase ‘and then a miracle occurred’ in the textbooks between discussions that link pre-biology with biology.

Life, even microbial life, is still very, very complex (try making a microbe from scratch if you doubt it). The fact that life arose from scratch on Earth within a very, very short span of geological time after the planet formed is a bit suspect IMHO. But what if Earth were seeded by microbial life forms already in existence from space (or deliberately seeded by extraterrestrials as the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick has proposed)? Now I realize that just puts off the origin of life question to another time(s) and place(s). However, given the vastness of the cosmos is far greater than that of our finite globe, and given that the cosmos existed for vastly longer periods of time before our sun, solar system and home planet came into existence, such additional time and space easily turns the improbable into a near certainty. And once established somewhere, life could spread throughout that time and space, until it reached us.

Earth arose billions of years after our Universe and our galaxy had evolved, ample time for life to have arisen elsewhere, and seed the early Earth. This is the concept of panspermia. We know that comets, meteors, and the cosmic dust within outer space are chock-o-block full of complex organic molecules. We know that simple terrestrial life can survive the outer space environment if suitably shielded – and it doesn’t take much to do the shielding. We know that surface bits from planets and their moons can be ejected into space, carry a cargo of microbes, and land on another planet, even eons later with the microbes still viable. Of course 99.999% of all such microbial life will be doomed to forever wander in space or crash onto a cold, surface of a planet with no atmosphere or water, or plunge into a star, etc. But, sheer numbers, like terrestrial plant seeds, will insure that now and again some microbes will land on a hospitable abode and be fruitful and multiple and evolve. The interesting bit is that if then, then now. And thus panspermia will be happening today. Certainly some meteorites which have impacted Earth have inside them ‘organized elements’ suggestive of microbial structures – the Murchison Meteorite from Australia is one such stone. The problem is terrestrial contamination as there are often lengthy time periods between their fall and their discovery. As an aside, if Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe are correct (and I believe they are), microbes (bacteria and viruses) impacting Earth today are largely responsible for some select and various disease epidemics or pandemics, past, present, and no doubt future.

Further readings:

Crick, Francis; Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature; Simon and Schuster, New York; 1981: 

Davies, Paul; The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life;

Allen Lane, Ringwood, Victoria

; 1998:

Hoyle, Fred & Wickramasinghe, Chandra; Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe; J.M. Dent  & Sons Ltd, London; 1978:

Hoyle, Fred & Wickramasinghe, Chandra; Diseases from Space; J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London; 1979

Ponnamperuma, Cyril (Editor); Comets and the Origin of Life; D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland; 1981:

Seargent, David A. J.; Genesis Stone? The Murchison Meteorite and the Beginnings of Life; Karagi Publications, The Entrance, NSW: 1991:

To be continued…

Cosmology’s Biblical Resolution: Part Two

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: Impossible to resurrect a body that was cremated and had its ashes scattered to the four winds and already recycled unto other life forms.

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. 

Cosmology’s Biblical Resolution: Part One

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.

Revelation 1:8 - I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

Beginnings and endings are not just the exclusive providence of the Almighty. Cosmologists too are interested in all things Alpha and Omega. Can the latter glean any guidance from the former? Well yes, but one has to enter some pretty strange territory, and ultimately one will have to conclude that any similarity between religion and cosmology comes down to a matter of just unconnected coincidence.

ALPHA

*The Biblical “In the beginning” matches the cosmologist’s Big Bang event, the origin and kick-starting of our Universe, even if there is a gap of some 13.7 billion years between the two versions.

OMEGA

*In all things Biblical there really is no Omega or ‘The End”. Yes, there is a forecast ‘end of days’ or ‘second coming’ or Armageddon or apocalypse, all as depicted in the Book of Revelation, as well as talked about in many other earlier books of the Bible. But, when all of that transpires, life, the Universe and everything goes on. Even after the ‘end of days’, etc., the Universe still goes on – there’s no point in wasting a totally good cosmos just because of some local terrestrial apocalypse. It’s not an “On the Beach” end-of-the-Universe plot. Stars aren’t really going to fall from the sky – that itself would take nearly forever since the stars are far away and a star can’t ‘fall’ at a velocity that exceeds the speed of light.

*In all things cosmological, there are two versions of Omega. Firstly, we know that our Universe is an expanding Universe. Its volume increases like an ever blown up balloon. Now that suggests two possible fates. Firstly, the expansion slows down (because of gravity), stops, and reverses course and starts to contract (gravity again), faster and faster, ever faster until everything comes together at the same point in space and time and you hit the Big Crunch. The Universe only has a finite amount of time before it enacts that “On the Beach” end-of-the-world or in this case end-of-the-Universe, plot.

*If there is a Big Crunch then its curtains for Heaven and Hell and all associated eternal lives, all snuffed out in its prime, crushed down into a singularity from which not even God can escape.

*Option two is that there isn’t enough gravity to stop the expansion and the Universe will keep on, keeping on – expanding that is. The Universe will have lots of time on its hands – an infinite amount of time. The latter scenario matches the Biblical scenario as defined by the phrase “everlasting life”. No end in sight – ever.

*And that’s the context or connection here. An everlasting Universe has to exist in order for there to be everlasting life.

AFTERLIFE

*Two questions now arise. Does Heaven physically exist and is there an eternal afterlife in that Heavenly abode? Well the Bible does say repeatedly one will have “everlasting life” (11 mentions), or “life everlasting” (4) or “eternal life” (26) or “life eternal” (4) or “live for ever” (14) in Heaven, so let’s tick the “yes” box for the afterlife.

*The immediate follow-up question though is what does the word ‘immortal’ or ‘immortality’ (also noted and logged in the Bible) or ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ or ‘for ever’ signify to you? The Bible doesn’t use the word ‘infinite’ or ‘infinity’ in the context of the afterlife though ‘infinite’ does appear, so the concept was known back then, and no doubt that’s the meaning you’d give to ‘eternal’, etc. If your ‘life eternal’ only amounted to 1000 years, you’d feel cheated. No, you expect ‘life eternal’ to equate to infinity. That in turn will create all manner of issues as we shall see. Meantime, you have eternal life, which immediately settles the fate of the Universe question since the Universe has to attain an infinite age as well. Now you need a Heavenly place in which to spend it.

HEAVEN - LET’S GET PHYSICAL

*Is there a physical Heaven to house that presumably physical afterlife?

*It seems clear that since various physical beings such as angels, as described in the Bible, descend from and ascend to Heaven, including mortals like Enoch and Elijah, that Heaven must be a physical 3-D place with geographical, or rather celestial, coordinates.

*Heaven is often referred to as the “Kingdom of Heaven”, and a kingdom implies physical geography.

*Now the Bible refers to a throne in Heaven which God sits upon. Firstly, a throne is a physical object. Sitting is a physical action. If you are not a physical being you can’t get tired and so there is no need to sit. God sits on His throne, which is in keeping with the stated fact that God needed to rest on the seventh day of creation – God isn’t all powerful, He gets pooped like the rest of us! Jesus (J.C.) is also known to sit while in Heaven.

*If you sit, you have to sit on something (like a throne). If you sit on something and you don’t fall through that something (that throne for argument’s sake), then clearly the electromagnetic laws of physics are in operation – the same laws that prevent you from sliding through your chair at home when you sit down. The laws of physics can only operate in a physical realm.

*The Koran makes it crystal clear that Heaven is a physical abode, a land of milk and honey and lovely maidens all in a row for the menfolk to ogle.

*If the afterlife is a physical afterlife, then there must be a physical place in which to spend that afterlife. If the options are Heaven or Hell, then both are geographical locations existing in existing space and time.

PROBLEMS & ISSUES ARISING:

LIFE & THE AFTERLIFE

*From the moment of your conception, to the moment of your death (a more drawn out process since not every cell you’re composed of will perish at the exact same moment), you owe your entire life to the laws, relationships and principles of physics and chemistry.

*That equally applies to that brain-thingy of yours and all the processes that go on inside it – thinking, memory, personality, emotions, likes & dislikes, decisions, morals, spirituality, etc. None of these facets which makes you, you can be so without those root fundamentals of physics and chemistry.

*You may, or may not, have free will, but regardless, making a choice involves thought processes and drawing on memories and knowledge and those are within the providence of physics and chemistry, since without physics and chemistry there’s no life, no body, no brain, no thoughts and therefore no decisions.

*To give your afterlife any meaning and continuity with your life the same will have to apply. Your afterlife is equally dependent on physics and chemistry operating as we know it.

*Now perhaps your afterlife in Heaven is based around some totally other kind of physics and chemistry – who’s to say ours is the only kind possible. But, if that’s the case you are born afresh and can have no possible connection with this life you’re currently leading grounded in our physics and chemistry. In one sense that sounds an awful lot like reincarnation, where you are born again but have no connection to what you were previously.

*Okay, you’ve had a life; you now have an afterlife, what about a permanent, everlasting afterlife where physics and chemistry still rule, OK? 

To be continued…

The Afterlife

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death is my topic under consideration, or at least your survival after death. The concept or subject of death (and closely related subjects) has (much like taxes) spawned billions of words (and conversations), millions of documents, multi-thousands of texts – and for all of that, we’re still none the wiser when it comes to death, or at least post-death! [Taxes we understand!]

Of all the Big Questions, one of the biggest of all is of course, is there any sort of life after death? Is there perhaps a heaven or a hell?  Or perhaps a life after death is as having an existence solely as some sort of spirit or ghost. The afterlife is akin to exobiology (otherwise known as astrobiology) in one sense – both are ‘sciences’ in search of their subjects!

Actually, quite apart from the fact that all major religions preach the existence of an afterlife, there are quite a few ‘religions’ where the death of an individual is actually celebrated (in song and dance, etc.) because they firmly believe that that person has now gone from ‘rags to riches’, the ‘riches’ part being the afterlife where all is peaches and cream and you get three square meals a day (including seconds!).

Now either there is some sort of on-going perception of the Universe after you are deemed medically dead (an afterlife), or there is not.

If there is not, then death is akin to the existence you had prior to your conception! You have no recall or perception of the Universe prior to your conception – it was peaceful; a stress-free, tax-free, memory-free, perception-free existence – if you could call it an ‘existence’. Translated, without an afterlife, post-death is akin to pre-life. It is a blissful state of nothingness.

Of course if there is no afterlife, if you only get one short bite of the cherry, or grab at the merry-go-round rings, because for 99.999999999+% of the Universe’s existence (assuming the Universe has as well a finite lifespan), you were a non-event. [Of course for most people, the great unwashed, even while alive you’re pretty much a non-event in the grand cosmic scheme of things!]

Even if you have an afterlife, and assuming there’s no such animal as reincarnation, 13.7 billion years of history have passed you by. You were a universal non-event from the Big Bang (and before, if there was a before the Big Bang event) through the date of your conception. That’s still a long time to be of no consequence to the cosmos!

Questions, questions, lots and lots of questions arise. Is it logical to have a finite beginning but an infinitely long (afterlife) ending? And what happens to you if there is an afterlife but the Universe hits a Big Crunch? If there’s a Big Crunch – the reverse of the Big Bang, then even your afterlife presumably is kaput!

If, on the other hand the Universe expands forever and forever (infinitely), and ‘dies’ an eventual Heat Death, albeit still existing as cold (as near to absolute zero as you can get) dark (no energy, no light) elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and larger bodies such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, etc., then your infinite afterlife is going to be a rather dull one – eternity spent contemplating for all practical purposes an ever expanding Universe tending towards a state of pure vacuum!

Then too is the theory that the relatively newly discovered ‘dark energy’ content of the cosmos increases in strength over time, ultimately not only accelerating the expansion rate of the Universe, but ultimately tearing apart clusters of galaxies, galaxies, stars and solar systems, molecules, atoms, right down to the most fundamental of particles – it’s termed ‘The Big Rip’. Presumably, the realm of the afterlife is still a part of the Universe, so if there is a Big Rip, well the afterlife you gets ripped apart as well!

Perhaps it’s better to go out with a Big Crunch bang than with an eternal cold dark whimper or being ripped apart! Or, perhaps there is another dimension or plane or parallel/alternative universe/existence where you will spend an eternal afterlife (complete with harp and wings and halo) where there is no Big Crunch or Heat Death or Big Rip – but I wouldn’t bet on it!

I should stress that it’s the fate of the Universe that’s important here vis-à-vis ‘living’ an afterlife. The demise of Planet Earth is of no consequence. If an afterlife is somehow on a different plane or in a different dimension, then what happens to Earth – existing in yet another plane or dimension - is of no matter.  I assume however that the Universe, containing all that there is, contains your afterlife plane or dimension and therefore its fate is your fate. So when the entire cosmos goes kaput (in either direction – Heat Death or Big Crunch), then it’s curtains for you too! 

Another point, if people really believed in an afterlife – in a life after death paradise – then they wouldn’t go to such lengths, expend so much time, effort and expenses to avoid or delay their own death, would they?. If you’re aged, suffering the disabilities of same, in pain, say due to cancer, why not give in immediately and go to paradise? No, people tend to fight the prospect of death with all the resources they can muster, even though it’s ultimately a hopeless battle. They might state they believe in an afterlife, but they fight tooth and nail to avoid it! 

Should one be afraid of death? Only if one firmly believes that there is a nasty afterlife (Hell?) to which they are likely bound for. But, there’s no evidence anywhere, at anytime, that such a ‘Hell’ exists; has existed or even can exist. The proof of that afterlife pudding lies with those claiming that there is such a thing. 

Somewhat akin to the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell afterlives, is the concept of the ‘spirit world’ or moving on to a ‘higher plane of existence’ after your physical death. I’m actually not really sure what a ‘higher plane of existence’ actually means in any sort of physical sense. Presumably it has to be physical since there are those who claim that when you die, some part of you, when it departs the physical body and heads for the ‘spirit world’ or a ‘higher plane of existence’, actually has weight or mass, and thus your afterlife essence is a physical thing and thus must reside in a physical medium. Methinks that such phrases as ‘spirit world’ or ‘higher plane of existence’ sound a lot like parapsychology, paranormal or psychic mumbo jumbo.

However, let’s assume the ‘spirit world’ or ‘higher plane of existence’ is a physical place, for sake of argument. The only thing that makes any sense is to employ these six or seven hidden dimensions that string theorists postulate (string theory only works in ten or eleven dimensions, four of which we are intimately familiar with – front/back; left/right; up/down; and time). But, the consensus is, that these dimensions, if they exist at all, are ultramicroscopic, curled up in a volume less than typical atomic sizes. So, maybe you spend your post-death eternity in a space that occupies less volume than that of an electron! This kind of recalls the worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds philosophy (it’s hardly science, albeit a frequent topic for sci-fi authors), akin to the series of Russian dolls all nested inside one another and each getting progressively smaller and smaller as you go along. Regardless, such an afterlife doesn’t sound very appealing, but what do I know!

Actually there’s a reason rooted in physics that suggests that you can’t have an eternal afterlife – unless you’ve had an eternal pre-life. If you just have an afterlife, then something has been created from nothing since 100% of your mortal remains, remains stuck in our physical world, and yet presumably your afterlife existence must somehow be connected with some matter/energy that had bugger-all to do with your physical life. Of course if you had a pre-life, then that matter/energy went into short-term storage, awaiting your return to Never-Never Land, the spirit world, whatever you wish to call it, after some short metamorphous into a flesh-and-blood existence. The fly in the ointment is, I don’t recall any eternal pre-life, do you?

If by chance some part of the matter/energy that made up your flesh-and-blood-ness travels with you to, and become you, in the afterlife, then, when that amount or bit of matter/energy is multiplied by all humans who have ever lived, live now, and will live, and presumably ditto all animals too, that’s going to add up to quite a net loss of matter/energy to Planet Earth. I’m unaware of any net loss of matter/energy from our abode that would suggest transference from same, to Never-Never Land (or whatever, wherever).

There’s one other option. If our Universe is a simulated Universe; if you are just part of a virtual reality, say a character in an extremely realistic video game, then it’s possible that that simulation contains an afterlife software program, perhaps called ‘heaven’, perhaps ‘hell’, perhaps ‘spirit world’. Being nothing but a simulated being, software computer code, might be the price you pay to get a software computer coded afterlife!