Sunday, March 27, 2011

Where Is Heaven?

It has been 14 long months since I have posted here. Honestly, I don't know where the time goes. Not much has changed ... still rooted in Deism, following other's postings who share similar (and opposing) beliefs, and just living. But now and then I am compelled to write.

I have written before on basic facts about our Universe ... at least what is known at this time about it. I am utterly fascinated by the science and the sheer vastness. So, let me ask, "Where is heaven?" Such a childish question. So elementary, right? But this is not a rhetorical question; I want to know.

Generally, when heaven is spoken of, we merely need to lift our eyes "up" to know where heaven is. But is this "up" from the perspective of the northern or southern hemisphere? Or maybe it's a perpendicular delineation. Hard to believe that half of our globe is getting it wrong. They should be looking downward, through the Earth, in an effort to express their desire for direction toward heaven. But wait, no, that would show a yearning for hell, wouldn't it? It's certainly not difficult to imagine where the writers of these holy texts came up with the notion of hell, so we'll just let that go for now.

Is heaven in our solar system? Is it in our Milky Way galaxy? Is heaven at least in our own Universe? At any rate, hidden from the multitude of sensors and optics of scientists. How long will it take to get there? Hours? Maybe hundreds, or thousands of years? In the case of the outer reaches of the known Universe, billions of years? Or, as in select texts, in the blink of an eye? This one, in particular, presents a tiny little problem. Can our souls (or risen bodies) travel faster then the speed of light?

What do you mean our journey to heaven doesn't have a speed limit? Hold on. We agree that God created the Universe, right? In His infinite wisdom He created our Universe with space and time. It takes time to go through the space ... and it goes against these laws of Nature, which we agree God created for us, to go anywhere of note in the blink of an eye. In case you don't know, it takes over eight minutes for the light of the Sun just to reach Earth. So, we know empirically heaven is not around Earth, and certainly heaven is not within our solar system, and too, we might all agree heaven is not contained in our galaxy. I would venture that no believers would think heaven is contained at all, even within our Universe. Most would probably allude that heaven is outside of this physical world - outside of this Universe. Wow, well God certainly has presented us a huge paradox. He has created for us a Universe with almost incomprehensible distances, complete with natural laws that limit how fast we might travel the space within it.

Just to recap; the known observable Universe is about 540,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across. That's more than 540 sextillion miles, or about 45 billion light years out from Earth in opposing directions - 90 billion light years across in total. And scientists believe it goes much further ... that's just what we can see!

So, tell me again, "Where is heaven?"

One Deist Φ