Memorial Day Weekend was for me especially aptly named, for the reason that I spent it at home for a memorial for my recently deceased Great-Grandfather. I pray that his soul may rest in peace. The service itself was held at the Christian community church in Cocquille, a small and non-denominational Protestant Church, and the Eulogy was given by a non-denominational preacher who was a friend to my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents. His eulogy itself was touching, and I am grateful for that; I am even more grateful for whatever comfort it afforded my grandparents--no small amount, I'm sure.

However, it was also my first live brush with (non-Denominational) Protestant theology in quite some time, and touching as it was, it touched on more than one of my Catholic nerves. As has become commonplace with the non-Denominational crowd, he did bring up the false dichotomy between "religion" and "relationship", though not as forcefully as some I've seen. I want to write a bit about the other point which he brought up in passing: the often repeated idea that in Heaven we will have new bodies.

"Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite. And Thee would man praise; man, but a particle of Thy creation; man, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin…Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee."

Thus begins Saint Augustines’ Confessions, and these lines are among the most well-known ever written. I came returned to them after reflecting a bit on Mrs Jennifer Fulwiler’s discussion of Catholic misconceptions about atheists. Specifically, she notes that few if any atheists feel that they are “missing something” in their lives, and that few recognize the “God-shaped hole” in their hearts. Most atheists I’ve known, including those who are among my friends, would concur with this analysis, given that they reject the existence of said holes in their hearts. For her part, Mrs Fulwiler states that she only recognized that she was missing something after she had found it.

Disclaimer: This is a bit speculative on my own part. As a disclaimer, I am a physicist, but I study lasers and plasma physics, not astronomy and astrophysics. Thus, I have some knowledge about General Relativity, the Big Bang, black holes, etc, but this is not the subject matter of my particular expertise. Nevertheless, I got to musing about this stuff, and thought it was kind of interesting.

In the Beginning...

A question has been posed concerning the universe's existence and the specific requirement that it has a beginning. It is sometimes asked, "what happens before the Big Bang?" Alternatively, it may be made as a statement:
There is no point in time when the "stuff" that comprises the universe did not exist. Why must it have a cause? Or, why must a finite being be caused by something else in order to exist?

The background of the statement is the assumption that time is inextricably interwoven with space, so that both space and time came into existence with the beginning of the universe. Thus, time itself cannot be older than the universe: no universe, no time. The Big Bang is the first event, before which nothing occurred; indeed, "before" is a meaningless concept (since it implies a progress of time) until after the Big Bang.

As a simple example of how this can make sense, image that the universe has a sort of "time line" along which it travels. There are, indeed, several "arrows" which give the "direction" of time: as time increases, the universe expands; as time increases, entropy increases; etc. The assumption being that time t=0 is the Big Bang, as as t approaches a value of 0, the universe by necessity approaches the instant of the Big Bang and its initial extent (which is not necessarily zero), and entropy by necessity approaches its minimum value (perhaps somewhat larger than zero).