On the Mortality of the Earth

On the Mortality of the Earth

It is I guess a fairly recent scientific deduction. Most of the people who have ever lived have never thought of it this way. It turns out however that the earth is mortal. The earth is mortal because the sun is mortal. Sometime in the far distant future the sun will exhaust its supply of nuclear fuel. As it does it will grow hotter and expand. As it expands it will destroy the earth, or at least it will render the earth incapable of supporting life. It may even be true that the universe itself is mortal. There does not appear to be enough mass in the universe to reverse its ongoing expansion. If there isn’t the universe will one day in the very, very distant future lose all of its energy and become a static place lacking all dynamism and life. Science tells us these supposed facts quite dispassionately. For the scientist these are simply facts. They are predictions of the future, but scientists today are confident that they are accurate.

To scientists these are just facts, but to those of use with a more spiritual understanding of reality they seem at first glance to be quite disturbing. How can it be that this earth and its sun, positioned in an unremarkable corner of an unfathomably large universe, where we believe God created humans to live, cease to exist, cease to support life? I mean, didn’t God create us humans to live forever? Not individually of course, but as a species? If the scientists are correct the only possible answer to that question is no. God it seems didn’t create humans to exist as a species forever. One day long before the end of the universe and indeed probably long before the death of the sun we humans (along with all other life forms on earth) will cease to exist. Unless we dismiss the findings of science out of hand, which I am not willing to do, that conclusion is simply unavoidable.

This scientific truth used to bother me a lot. I used to think that if God’s creation was temporal not eternal that nothing has any meaning. I mean, it’s all going to end someday. Not the way biblical literalists fantasize about it ending based on utterly untenable readings of the book of Revelation. No, not that way; but it will still end. That scientific truth used to strike me as hopelessly depressive. How can anything mean anything if it’s all going to end anyway? I used to avoid thinking about it. Thinking about it was just too hard, too spiritually enervating. It was a whole lot easier to live in denial of these truths of science.

But I’ve been using the past tense here on purpose. I don’t think of the matter that way anymore. Here’s why. I finally figured out that it has to be this way. Why does it have to be this way? Because creation is not God. Pantheistic theology to the contrary notwithstanding, God and creation are not the same thing. Because creation is not God, it cannot be immortal. It cannot be immortal because only God is immortal, and creation is not God. Therefore it simply could not be that the earth, the sun, or the universe itself would last forever. They must be mortal because they are not God. These seemingly disturbing scientific truths turn out to confirm rather than deny one of the foundational convictions of any spiritual conception of creation.

That understanding has greatly relieved my angst about the earth, the sun, and the universe being temporal not eternal. How? Consider this. The desire to be eternal is a desire to be God. It is a yearning to be more than God created us to be. It is a corruption of another aspect of what it is to be human, namely our innate striving for connection with that which is greater than we are, for connection with God. We humans are always tempted to become more than we are. We want to know everything. We want to control everything. We resist being who we really are. We are loathe to accept the limitations of our created nature. We need to get over it. We need to come to terms with the reality that God is God and we are not. Neither is the earth. Neither is the sun. Neither is the universe. That’s just how it is.

And it is not cause for angst or doubt about the reality of God. God’s universe is exactly not just what it is but what it must be. We can assume I think that God could have created other gods. Perhaps we can never know why God didn’t do that. We do know that God didn’t. We must trust that God knew and knows what God was and is doing. If we can truly trust God, then we can live free from anxiety about the mortality of the universe, of the sun, and the earth. We can even live free from anxiety about our own individual mortality. If we can do that, then perhaps science telling us of the mortality of creations far greater than we are will be one of science’s greatest gifts to humanity. May it be so.