On God Part V.II- Heaven, Hell and the Mind-numbing Prospect of Eternity

This is On God Part V.II, confusingly enough. Initially, Part V was just one mega-post, but considering nobody gives a shit about this blog, it felt too long. That being said, it’s now broken up into two only semi-long posts. This one is mostly about eternity. I think eternity is real fun in a bizarre and horrifying type of way. Forever will happen whether we’re around for it or not.

So, for On God Part V.II, I want to explore eternity. Remember from Part V.I, for this post, the Bible is 100% true. Typically people argue the individual points in the Bible- “Jesus walked on water!” “No, he didn’t!” But today I just want to accept the puzzle pieces laid out by mainstream Christianity and put them together from there. Then we can think about eternity for a few minutes.

Let’s get to it.

I get really jazzed when I think about the concept of eternity. The thing is, eternity is a thing that is going to happen whether God exists or not. It’s crazy to think the last 13.8 billion years [or 7,000 years as it were] happened one second at a time and I totally had no idea it was going on. The next several billion years into the future will also happen, regardless of whether the world continues to exist or not.

I spend too much time imagining various thought experiments to help me make sense of the vastness of time and space. It’s similar to when a child tries to think about what infinity plus ten looks like. This article is a lot of me asking what infinity plus ten looks like, then adding one hundred.

In Part V.I, we discussed who gets into heaven and who gets sent to hell.

Forget who ends up where for a minute, let’s think about what eternity means.

A pretty standard Christian belief is this idea that God is eternal. He’s been around, literally, forever. How long is that? More than a million years? Yes. More than a billion? Yes.

Good. Let’s get wild and try to envision what eternity feels like.

[Once again, you’ll be playing the part of God.]

Very nice.

Imagine you’re God. You’ve been around forever and you’re getting bored of just hanging out. You want to come up with some way to pass the time.

You got tired of the years passing with no celebratory festivities, so in order to break up the monotony of living forever, you decided to place one droplet of water into a big empty pool once every trillion years. Another trillion years pass and you put a second droplet, etc.

There are approximately 591.471 drops in a single fluid ounce.

I would have left off the last .001 and just called it 591.47 drops, but that .001 represents a billion years. So 591,471,000,000,000 years after you begin your celebratory festivities, your pool now has one ounce of water in it.

Everyone following along so far?

[If we believe God is eternal, we believe he could literally carry out this experiment.]

But you’re God, you’ve been around a lot longer than merely 591.471 trillion years. You’ve been being God for the entire expanse of eternity. You’ve been alive long enough to not only fill up several two-ounce shot glasses worth of water in your pool- one drop at a time- but to fill your entire pool to the brim.

Can we all agree that an eternal God has been around long enough to really do this?

But we’re not done. Eventually, you ran out of room in your pool, so you started filling up all the seas and oceans of the world- one drop every trillion years.

Now, to put THAT number into perspective, the more than 20 seas and four oceans weigh an estimated 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons, which comes out to 2.9E21 pounds (The ‘E’ just means you add that many zeros, in this case, 2,900,000,000,000,000,000,000) or 4.64E22 ounces, which of course you have to multiply THAT number by 591,471,000,000,000 years- because that’s how long it takes to get one ounce worth of drops.

In order to fill up all the oceans and seas of the world- one drop every trillion years- it would take approximately 2.74442544E37 years. If you can picture how long that would take, you can begin to understand how vast eternity really is.

Admittedly, that number is hard to fathom. The fact that you’re only doing one drop per trillion years might lose a few people. There’s just too many zeros.

Side Note: To give you an idea of how much water 2.9E21 pounds actually is, think about this: Instead of one drop every trillion years, if you filled up your pool with 92 pounds of water every second, it would take you one trillion years to fill up all the oceans and seas of the world.

But of course, you’re not filling at a rate of 92 pounds per second, you’re filling at a rate of one drop every trillion years- and you’ve still filled it all up.

What’s my point?

As with many of my articles, you might be wondering what the point is. The point is, as an eternal God, you’ve been around long enough to have done this thought experiment in real-time. 

Oh, and you’ve done it thousands of times throughout the course of your existence…and you aren’t even halfway done existing.

I think when we think about eternity and how it relates to heaven and hell we think of several thousand years, or maybe a million years if we’re really wild. But that’s not what eternity is. Eternity is 11.78979879E541 years, plus a bunch more. Eternity is trillions upon trillions of years and you’re still less than one percent of the way there.

Those huge numbers we just thought about are only half of the equation. That’s only a tiny fraction of what God has lived through ALREADY. Now we’re here in 2019 waiting on Jesus to come back so we can live in heaven with God for the REST of eternity.

Once that happens, we’ll all either go to heaven or hell where we can begin our own one-drop-of-water-every-trillion-years experiment.

Side Note: A fun paradox is the idea that if you started from now and worked backward you’d never get to the beginning of God’s existence, so-working forward- how did we get to now?

How long have we been around if one droplet happens every trillion years?

To put even one droplet of water into perspective, scientists believe the universe is 13.8 billion years old.  Let’s say it takes God one trillion years to make each drop of water. That means, during the entire time the universe has existed, only 1.38% of one drop has been made. The earth is around 4.543 billion years old, which would equate to enough time to make only .04543% of one drop of water.

But remember, the Bible is true, so the earth isn’t 4.543 billion years old, it’s 7,000 years old.

Quick note: How did we get to 7,000 years? The Bible lays out the generations from Adam to Jesus, then there’s been another 2,000 years since Jesus, so many Christians believe the world is around 7,000 years old, give or take.

In that scenario, .0007% of one droplet of water has formed during the entire time humans have existed.

Fun Fact: The human life expectancy in the United States is around 80 years. That means an 80-year-old person is about 1.14% as old as the Biblical earth.

As a human, you get 80 years, if you’re extremely lucky, and that determines whether you’ll be in everlasting joy or eternal suffering for the next 2.74442544E37 years, plus the rest of time.

I’ve constructed a few scientific timelines to help illustrate what all this looks like from the Biblical perspective.

Here’s the Biblical timeline of the earth.

This represents the entire history of the world. Creation happened at the far left of the picture and the green line is everything that happened in the Old Testament. The green time lasted approximately 5,000 years.

Jesus lived during the red time, and the New Testament was more or less written shortly after.

The blue is approximately 2,000 years since Jesus left, and the cyan is the mysterious amount of time that will happen before Jesus gets around to coming back again. So, that’s the history of the world.

Let’s look at how that compares to the history of God.

The entire history of the world fits at the very end tip. For eons, God existed without us. Then a bunch of stuff happens right at the end.

Here’s what it looks like zoomed in.

[Side Note: God’s zoomed-in timeline is NOT intentionally drawn to look like a penis.]

What’s noteworthy about this is how tiny our part of God’s overall existence is in terms of time. That is, up until this point. Now that we’re here- and ALSO eternal- our future timeline will look like this.

Recap of What God’s Been Doing with His Time

So, you’re God and you’ve been around forever. After approximately 58E351 trillion years, you decide to make people. It takes one week of pretty hard work to get things going. After approximately twenty minutes of people existing, the second human ever ruins your plan for humanity to indefinitely live a nice, easy existence.

After a few hundred years, humans have become so annoying that you flood the world and kill all of them, except for a small family and two of every animal. A few thousand years after that, you decide it’s just utter chaos and you need to send your Son down to die for our sins. 

Another two thousand years have passed since that happened.

If God’s entire existence BEFORE he created earth was the length of a person’s life, then the amount of time that has passed since he created us is not even one one-millionth of a second.

I have several questions.

How long until God wraps up production entirely?

God made people after not having people for trillions of years. For various reasons he decided only some of them would make it into heaven, so he sent his Son to die for our sins. How much longer until Jesus comes back again and the whole human experiment is finished?

Even if humanity continued on for another billion years- and we just happen to be the lucky ones who were born almost exactly after Jesus on the vast humanity timeline- the whole experiment would still be over in the blink of an eye on God’s timeline.

How many times has God run this human experiment thing?

This is one of my favorite things about eternity to ponder. Has God made other worlds? Do we all share the same heaven and hell, or are we separated based on which earth we lived on? Did he use the same parameters for determining who goes where?

He already knows everything, so he shouldn’t have to experiment much to find the most logical way to sort things out. Maybe he ALREADY KNOWS this is a terrible way to sort things out, but he doesn’t care because we are one of a trillion copy Earths, and this is just one of many experiments he’s running.

You’d think the odds that we’re the first humans he’s made in his image has to be pretty small. Did he really sit there for trillions of years, then spend 7,000 years watching Earth, and now plans to just hang out with THAT group of people for the next several trillion years? That seems unlikely.

If he really is eternal, common sense would suggest he’s gone through millions of previous Earths. If he somehow hasn’t, what set of circumstances came together for him to finally get around to making us?

At the very least he did send Jesus to our world. So we’re pretty special. But it does bring up another question.

How many times has God sent Jesus to die for the salvation of various other worlds?

We want our God to be all-powerful, all-knowing and, most importantly for this post, eternal. We also want for God to have created the world not all that long ago, Jesus to have come down to die for our sins, and we want that to make perfect sense and be not at all problematic.

And the thing is, it’s not all that problematic if you just read the Bible and don’t think that deeply about what’s really involved in the idea that God is eternal.

No matter how you slice it, most of the time that God has existed, our world and the universe haven’t. What did God do during the other 99.9999% of his existence?

If he went ahead and created other worlds, how many of those did Jesus eventually have to come down and save? If the answer is anything more than ‘this is the only world Jesus died for’ then, on a long enough timeline (and we’re working with forever here), Jesus would have had to die for various beings’ sins millions upon millions of times.

Even if God only got around to making a new world once every eleven zillion years, he’d still have ended up making billions of other worlds over the course of the last 13.8E49 trillion years. Did he not want to save the people of those worlds as well? Did he think of a better way to save those worlds than to have Jesus die every time? If Jesus didn’t have to die to save every single world, why did he have to die in this world?

Back to you being God

Does this seem like the best way to go about things?  To me- a very mediocre human- the sorting out of the inhabitants of heaven and hell feels unfair, and the punishment for getting it wrong seems excessive. If bad people HAVE to be punished, how about a slightly more lenient sentence? What about a solid lifetime in hell? Sure. Maybe even a few thousand years if you want to be REAL strict. Why not?

As long as there’s a number- and the sentence will eventually end- I can begrudgingly get behind the idea of hell- in a very limited and not at all Dante’s Inferno type of way. Casting down a judgment of ETERNAL damnation? That sounds excessive, and kind of makes you a dick for even putting people in that situation. But again, for this post, we’re assuming the Bible is right. Like it or not, this is the way things are.

The concept of God and eternity is so complex that it’s hard to even quantify. I’ve heard a lot of Christians say, “Well, I’m glad I’m not God,” when I bring up some of these questions. To me, that’s not a well thought out answer.

I know these thought experiments of trying to quantify time are absurd, but that’s the thing. If God has been around F-O-R-E-V-E-R then he’s been around for an absurd amount of time.

I’m totally fine accepting everything in the Bible is true and arguing from there. The whole thing still seems problematic and it’s those problems that really fascinate me. It’s like the Bible is a bunch of puzzle pieces and people just kind of assume once it’s all put together it will make sense. When I put the puzzle pieces together in my own mind, the picture looks more like a Picasso painting on LSD and less like a coherent explanation of the world.

I hope there is a God if, for no other reason, he can explain some of the paradoxes of time and how the vastness of eternity relates to this one tiny slice where people existed.

This brings me to my overall point of Part V.

Because of how vast eternity really is, I find it unrealistic that God would send anyone to an eternal hell for getting things wrong during their tiny lifetime.

Those who believe in the Bible say Jesus paid the price for our sins. “His grace is sufficient for all who believe,” is a common statement of faith. But I think that sells Jesus short. I’m not convinced that this whole heaven and hell thing didn’t get completely mangled by writers who had their own motivations and confirmation biases.

I don’t think the Bible is a historically accurate book, much less the only way to get into heaven. If Jesus really was everything the Bible says he was, then His grace is sufficient. Period. No need to add on for those who believe.

The more we learn about how the brain works and how easily we’re manipulated, the less I believe in free will. We think we have free will, but we don’t actually have a lot of choice in how we act. Most of how we react to stimuli is dictated by our surroundings, genetics, and whether or not we ate enough protein that day.

When I bring up paradoxical questions, it’s not with the intention of proving that God must be a real idiot. Instead, I’m trying to show that our understanding of God doesn’t line up with what the Bible actually says and we all have to do some real mental gymnastics to sort everything out in our mind.

My own mental gymnastics

Assuming God even exists, I think the Bible got him wrong. I fully understand that’s my own confirmation bias speaking. Try as I might, I just can’t get behind a God that would send anyone to hell.

So, I choose to believe- as much as I believe belief is even a choice- that if God exists he’s the kind of fella who wouldn’t subject anything he created to an eternity without puppies.  Since we know in our hearts all dogs go to heaven, there will be no puppies in hell. We all agree it would be incredibly unkind to send anyone or anything to an eternity without puppies. A equals B equals C, everyone gets to go to heaven.

After all, we’re just monkeys with anxiety.

What do you guys think? Have you thought about some of these questions? Do they bother you at all? Are you kind of upset you read this financial blog? Weeee!

Thanks for reading. Please share this if it made you think and kind of hurt your head. 

Next: On God Part VI-Does Prayer have the Power

Here are a few articles with cartoons instead of words to balance out your system.

FinCon Blues

On God Part IV- God Sends Jesus to Die for Our Sins

On Swearing (Warning Explicit Content)