The Theory of Nothing

Is there an afterlife?

Is there an afterlife?

This is a sequel to the post about souls. It assumes that one believes in the existence of a soul. However, that’s not necessarily the case because we could end up in a body in the afterlife. That’s called resurrection and it’s a foundation of Christian faith.

However, if we do end up in a body, it won’t be like the body we have now. For one thing, the body we have now will die and decay or in some cases be destroyed completely. I’ll leave the idea of resurrection to another post, but for now, we’ll go with the idea that we’ll be in a body after our resurrection.

This idea that we’ll have a body in the afterlife is an old one. It’s a frequent subject in the New Testament. Jesus speaks of life after resurrection and He actually appeared in a resurrected body to his apostles and others. His body must have looked normal to those that saw Him. Let’s go with the idea that our bodies will appear to be normal. The question then is where is this afterlife going to be?

Most historic religions, namely Judaism, Islam and Christianity, believe in an afterlife. In the case of Christianity one ends up in Heaven or Hell, depending upon one’s behavior in this life. We won’t go into the existence of either of these places. That’s for another post. We’ll assume that this is the case. The question is: is either of these places on the planet Earth?

I don’t see how the Earth could be the location of the afterlife. The Earth is a planet that will only be around for four billion or so years, assuming that it isn’t hit by another planet or sucked into a black hole. Eternity has to be in some place where there is no time or entropy. As I explained before, entropy is the thermodynamic variable that measures the disorder of a physical system, and the entropy of the universe is always increasing. Thus, entropy could not be active in the afterlife, which means that neither Heaven nor Hell could be anywhere we can see now. That is unless one ascribes to the end of time scenario. The second coming so often mentioned in the Bible reveals that this world or universe will no longer exist and a new world or universe will. And, it could have a planet Earth that will never go away.

However, that presupposes that Heaven and Hell exist somewhere now. This is confusing. The only way to explain our way out of this dilemma is to propose that Heaven and Hell exist in higher planes of existence and that the afterlife will eventually exist on a planet Earth in a new unchangeable universe.

Wow! That gives me a headache, but it’s fun thinking about it.

Thanks for reading.