Everlasting Life and the Beginning of Theology

Everlasting life is not principally a theological question, but a medical one. It isn’t hard to imagine a day when corporations, who employ technicians – who in turn lean on the work of scientists – will find a way of extending life by fifty or a hundred years. The generation that gains this extra boost to the human lifespan need only cross their fingers and hope that, in the extra time allotted, these institutions will work out how to add on an extra hundred years or two. 

It’s really pretty easy for us to imagine a point when technological progress outpaces the degeneration of bodies and minds. Combine that with the possibility of one day leaving planet Earth behind, or leaving all earth behind and existing as pure energy, and we start to see that death could one day effectively die.

Perhaps these descendants we are presently imagining, who would no doubt be very different from what we understand as human, will finally meet their end in a universe that expands out to the point of absolute entropy, or crunches back into an infinitesimal point. But, as far as our human understanding of time is concerned, this end would be inconceivable.

This is, of course, all still science fiction, but, as we gain greater insight into the universe and become better at applying our knowledge in the creation of new technologies, the things that were once science fiction often become science fact. Today, there are many in the scientific community who speak and write about a time when we shall be able to escape our earthly bodies and be reclothed in a heavenly form that does not suffer the ravages of time. It may well be that in the future the scientific community is actually able to cash some of the cheques that the clergy have been writing for millennia.

For many this marks the end of theology. 

But for others it marks the beginning.

In the book I’m currently writing I’m going to explore this beginning.