I have been told many things about heaven: that I will live forever, I will feel no pain and have a perfect body. The Quran promises 72 virgins and mountainous of gold exist for believers in paradise. Both concepts portray a very structured and rigid universe but is such a universe even possible?
Then I thought about time and the second law of thermodynamics. Time must exist for us to think, feel, do or experience anything. Therefore, time must exist in heaven or else heaven itself would be meaningless. But then comes the second law of thermodynamics.
Why?
The the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe is always increasing.
So what ?
Suppose you fired a bullet into a plate of steel armor and the bullet is flattened. Why doesn't the bullet reform and come right back at us, remember the wall just absorbed all the bullet's energy? The only law of physics that prevents the bullet from coming back at us is the the second law of thermodynamics.
So what ?
This means that the the second law of thermodynamics requires that time can only go in one direction. So the the second law of thermodynamics must exist in heaven also in order to be meaningful at all. I wouldn't want to live in a world where time went back and forth without meaning. I might meet one of my 72 virgins only to be thrown back to infancy. What kind of paradise would this be.
But the the second law of thermodynamics requires that disorder always be increasing. Every description of heaven, or paradise, that I've heard is a very structured, ordered place. Muslims all receive the same amount of gold upon entering paradise. Again, this is not possible because it would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Time would have to stand still for heaven to exist.
I believe that heaven, or paradise, is a central myth that pervades the dominate western religions. But if you examine this myth closely then you have to conclude that heaven, or paradise, can only exist in the human imagination.
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