A silly question in a way, but also a serious one. In fact, it’s a question forced upon us by the importance of cosmological physics as popularized by the so-called Big Bang model of cosmological physics. Live in the Big Bang world, die in the Big Bang world. Even be resurrected in a world part of the same Creation as the world of the Big Bang.
God shaped this universe out of some very strange stuff that was not matter nor energy nor fields but became each of those by way of what physicists call the breaking of symmetries. I’ve written a number of entries on this and related topics and I’ll not go into details here but I’ll say that Roger Penrose, the British mathematician and physicist, has shown that that strange stuff had a huge number of possible initial states and God (yes, he used the G-word in this context though I don’t know what his beliefs are) chose a very, very unlikely initial state. In a way, this is beside the point since any particular universe, even one beginning in a more ‘likely’ state, would be nearly impossible at that point of shaping and it was literally impossible from the creaturely viewpoint for anything to have existed in the first place. Substance is not self-creating nor self-sustaining.
Let’s just move on to a fact explained by Professor Penrose in his wonderful but demanding book, The Road to Reality, but also discussed in his earlier books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind — also a bit demanding. Despite the name Laws of Thermodynamics, the ‘law’ that says entropy increases is not a law. Entropy tends to increase, rather relentlessly, in the universe as a whole, though life-forms exist by reversing that process locally. The reason for this tendency is that particular configuration of the universe at the time of the so-called Big Bang. Entropy was extremely low at that point God chose from the absolutely infinite sea of chaos I call the Primordial Universe.
It might seem surprising that this universe was at its lowest point of entropy, or its highest state of order, back in those early seconds when no things or thing-like matter had yet condensed out of that ball of fire which was far, far hotter than the sun. Yet, that’s the case. Entropy was very low. Disorder was very low. Order was very high. Very little energy was in the form of low-frequency and long-wavelength radiation that we know as heat or degraded, high-entropy energy.
Entropy had to increase and order decrease. This is the movement towards heat death that is sometimes discussed on documentaries on television. As it turns out, life on earth organizes itself as the physical environments take in the relatively ordered, relatively low-entropy, radiation of the sun which quickly degrades to heat. On the whole, entropy increases, but an amoeba or a gorilla or a sequoia tree is an island of order in the midst of this process of degradation of order. Life as we know it exists only because it can produce ‘heat pollution’ by degrading low-entropy energy. I might get back to this subject eventually. For now, I’ll again refer the interested reader to Professor Penrose’s The Road to Reality where he discusses this seeming contradiction in the nature of life on earth.
I’ll speak about the problems this presents to Christian thinkers who consider Heaven to be a real place and a part of Creation. Christians who wave away concrete discussions of Heaven might wish to consider the possibility they’ve conjured Heaven away, turning it into a region of make-believe that’s not really part of Creation.
If we stick to the terms used by Professor Penrose and other modern physicists, it would seem we have to imagine Heaven as being a new world in which entropy is such that it doesn’t increase or decrease. It remains constant. Can such a world be a world of life? Would it be a frozen or crystalline world? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to endanger my faith to ask such questions. In fact, asking such questions leaves me more settled than avoiding questions or waving them away with vague suggestions that “such questions are beyond us.” I admit the value of a simple faith for many believers but I think that history tells us that there are many, including the authors of the Torah and St. Paul, who are willing to deal with the difficult questions. My own experiences tell me that those with simple faiths aren’t doing so good a job of raising their own children to be Christians, not in this world of National Geographic specials about human evolution or NOVA specials about the universe filled with stars and seemingly empty of angels.
Suppose we try to look for more general possibilities, assuming that God will shape Heaven in a completely different way from how He shaped this world. Suppose the concept of entropy isn’t necessary to describe a world in which human beings could exist, once formed by the processes of this universe. I don’t know what sort of a world would have no entropy. I don’t know if any world suited for humans, even perfected humans, could operate without entropic changes. It certainly seems that changes in entropy are part of the struggle between order and disorder in this universe in which we are being born and formed. But maybe our imaginations are yet too weak and ill-formed to open up to greater possibilities. After all, St. Paul tells us:
[T]he creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. [Romans 8:20-21]
We have to learn how to deal with open possibilities and to develop the courage to speculate even about Heaven as did St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Milton, and others of strong faith. Those speculations were largely wrong, but those men of faith didn’t make the error of putting infinite chasms between Heaven and this world. We modern Christians tend to believe that knowledge of Heaven is impossible to men, that Heaven lies in a realm so different as to be pretty much non-existent. We should have faith that Heaven exists, as the Lord Jesus Christ told us, and we should realize that any Heaven suitable for human beings is a part of Creation and has to be subject to serious human speculation.
In ages of greater faith, Christian theologians and poets didn’t hesitate to speculate on the nature of Heaven while recognizing that the truth of the matter lies beyond any certainty on the part of mortal men.