For countless people of faith, the primary promise of
their religion is that, in some form or other and following a brief life here
on earth, they are to be rewarded with eternal life in heaven or some variation
thereof. No other promise has so
powerfully captivated the thoughts of modern Homo Sapiens and endured with such
resilience across long millennia. To many people, that heaven exists is a
fundamental certainty as clear as is the one that every Monday follows a Sunday
or that Antarctica is a real place. Furthermore, to persuade them that this
might not be the case, is about as challenging as trying to convince them that
one of those following statements is likewise a fiction too.
I am not one of these people. I consider Heaven to be
both a philosophical and practical impossibility. I find it inconceivable that
such a place, be it physical or non physical, could exist. It is the dead end
of rational, sensible thought to consider it both possible and probable that
each human's individual consciousness or "soul" (and what point is a
soul without awareness of self) is going to maintain an awareness of itself for
all time. This applies whether God is factored into that existence or not.
Forget even the science for a moment, and just think about it; it's simply a
conceptual nonsense.
Consider, how in times of great grief, when we have lost
a loved one and are at our emotionally weakest, we are plied with phrases and
terms that, although seemingly embedded in our culture, serve to perpetuate
this grand illusion. With comforting words we are encouraged to imagine the
recently deceased having being gathered to the arms of the Lord or that they
have been called for by the Saviour and now wait for us to soon join them in
the everlasting. In truth words such as
these are almost definitely no more than whimsy; a collection of meaningless,
if lyrically composed words strung together and sugar coated into shallow
prose; a palliative to dull reality. Conceptually, by seeking to link each
individual's consciousness and therefore self awareness to an endless endurance
beyond death, we are perpetuating the greatest of all humanity's delusions,
namely, that we are immortal. What is clear, is that we do not understand the
concepts tripping so loosely off our tongues.
If we consider the science of big numbers, then we can
begin to appreciate just why the popular concepts of eternity in heaven and
immortality are such philosophical non starters. Take the number 10 to the
power of 80. That's a "1" with
80 zeros after it. This is the estimated number of fundamental particles in the
known universe, including sub atomic ones like Quarks and Leptons. The name for
this number is “One Hundred Quinquavigintillion”
This is a vast number, but it has a name and can be
written out although not comprehended. It is at least finite. Yet, it is many
many times greater than the number of sand grains on every beach and in every
desert on our planet and any and every other planet in the universe. Yet, not
even this almost "numberless" number can begin to get even remotely
near to describing the length of time that the chosen and the so called saved
are to spend in heaven with their saviours. Our universe will, over the course
of trillions of future years, have expanded out into ultimate emptiness, every
star, even those yet to be born, will long since have burnt out and even the
most vast of galactic scale black holes withered away into dark silence. Yet,
even this near measureless span of time is no more than a rapid eye blink in
what we fondly term as eternity. Despite this, many still believe that the spark of our individual self awareness,
our consciousness, is going to endure along with and beyond all of this. We are
deluding ourselves.
Eternity is an 8 letter word, yet it seeks to engage our
minds within the terms of a concept that
is incomprehensible. Perhaps because it is a word around which we can get our
tongues and commit to writing; that in the normal course of our lives we work
into our daily routines (after all , who has not felt that waiting for a
delayed train on a dark rainy platform can feel like an eternity), that we have
become comfortable with it and familiar too. We all know what familiarity
breeds so perhaps it would have been better had eternity been spelt as a jumble
of incoherent letters so that we could not use it in our conversations and
every time we saw that incoherent jumble, we would know it as symbolic of the
undefinable and that not measurable with any number. Almost certainly, we are
not going to spend eternity there.
Yet, we speak of and imagine heaven as a more or less
physical place where God lives, for subconsciously it has become some kind of
perfect, upgraded intellectual habitat from which is somehow banished, for all
time, all that is displeasing or unpleasant about our daily human lives. It is
the ultimate fairly tale believed real. Yet it is hard to hold a genuine
conviction that heaven exists as a place. It can only be expressed in terms
that allow it to be excluded from any material or physical world. It must take
refuge in the esoterica of the unworldly along with our personalised concepts
of gods and saviours. For it was at the point that the concept of God morphed
from being the term adopted by those seeking to contemplate the origins and
circumstances of that vast panorama of our world, our being, our origins and
all that was so inexplicable within it and about it, into its current usage and
understanding, that it entered a philosophical dead end.
As with terms like eternity and infinity, God was a mere
word to refer to that beyond understanding. That concept has now been squeezed
into a predominantly male body, imbued with human emotions, senses and body
parts, given superhero like powers and expected to have a personal relationship
with everyone, or at least those who want one with him. Subject to constant
reinterpretation and ever more ridiculously detailed analysis, we know amongst
other things, that he dislikes death metal music, cartoons of himself and
working on Sundays, or Friday's, depending upon your view. This, the supposedly
ageless creator/sprit of the universe. For God is now a word to refer to a
competing collection of deities. In one sense he remains a Middle Eastern relic
from the age of the Crusaders and Saladin, whilst elsewhere he is become a
hyper energetic avatar from the phantasmagoria of US-led Evangelicalism
bothered about every aspect of the day to day world. For dispassionate
observers, he can appear as some out-of-step and an increasing spectral entity
from the old world, whose papal cheerleader struggles to translate into real
world relevance in the face of gay rights, disapproval of the use of condoms
and tolerance of child abuse by the custodians of his creed. For God is trapped
within the straight jacket of inflexible religious ideologies in a madly changing,
diversifying world where he also has to be all things to all believers. So we
see the so called supreme deity passing from original myth and undefinable
presence, via sinister medieval autocrat into something closer to modern day
comic book superhero.
We are now in the philosophical cul de sac down which the
various stands of modern religion have raced each other over the past few
centuries. Because too many religious leaders have been insistent that their
holy books' parables and stories are rooted in iron fact they have done their
faiths an extraordinary and incalculable disservice. As a result generations
have been raised, often compelled, and taught to treat as infallible and
certain, events both past and predicted that were never meant to be more than
parable or myth. It's not quite like insisting that the story of Narnia is
historical fact, but it's not that far short.
In reaction to this we have seen the rise of what's
termed militant atheism, writing it's angry books about why, say, the bible
isn't true or narratively coherent. It was never meant to be and undertaking a
savage dissection of its contents to show as much serves as much point as
undertaking the same exercise with the "Just So" stories. Those
convinced their holy books are irrefutable statements of universal fact will
seldom be swayed by these logical yet
belittling assaults against their citadels of absolute certainty. Few will
suddenly forsake a life long held conviction that they are due to be rewarded
with life eternal for having been a loyal member of their faith when faced with
a torrent of scientific abuse that seeks to tear down and expose as nonsensical
deeply held convictions hard wired into their thinking.
So, where to next? Not much is likely to change for as
long as people continue to believe as fact the myths of their faiths. Modern
religion needs to find a way out of its cul de sac and back to a wiser, far
less fanatically literal interpretation of events and of the great unfurling,
awe-inspiring reality before us. Perhaps science can help it, but for that it will need to speak with a
calmer and less hectoring voice. Ridicule inspires change in neither heart nor
mind. Religion as a wider more benign form of philosophy for living may have a
role to play in modern and future life. But for that, it needs to stop deluding
its adherents with impossible guarantees about rewards in a life hereafter. For
it is this alone which is surely the single biggest driver of much of the
deviant and alarming behaviour amongst the faithful. This is manifest both at
an individual level and collectively right up to the level of independent
states and governments that are directly, or even indirectly, run as
theocracies, for it is these doom-transfixed ideologies that threaten us all,
faithful and unfaithful alike.
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