(September 15, 2019 at 5:07 pm)Darwinian Wrote: If there is a heaven and you make it there, what might you expect to be doing in a billion years and what relevance would your 80ish years of life on Earth have?
One thing I know for sure -- we are, as presently constituted, creatures of time. Natural selection has not fitted us for eternal life. Hedonic tone alone would not allow humans to function in that context for any length of, for lack of a better word, time.
The analogy I usually deploy is that no matter how good a movie is -- how masterful the script, the direction, the acting, the music -- you don't want it to last for 12 hours, much less forever. At some point you would just want to pee and go to bed. So it would be with eternal life. At some point -- 200, 500, 5,000 years -- you would be indifferent to any more experiences because there would be nothing novel or interesting about it. You would not see the prospect of being introduced to someone you haven't met before as anything more than a trivial variation on a million other people you have met. You would not see the prospect of a new relationship as anything but a tiresome repetition of the same social dance you've engaged in countless other times.
I know that some people very much disagree with this, and imagine that we could never exhaust the appeal of new experiences. And I confess I'm not sure how long most people would take to get to the jaded place I describe above. But I see it as inevitable, given how human minds work.
So for us to live "forever", we would have to be magically changed into something that we are not. Which begs the question of in what way an idealized existence in heaven would be desirable or comforting to anticipate. We would not know ourselves, or our loved ones. We would be experiencing something other than the human condition. If heaven is supposed to be human existence without all the suffering, that in no way addresses how it would avoid the problem of boredom indefinitely. If heaven is radically different, then that in no way addresses our present human yearnings and wishes, it just takes those away in a sort of bait-and-switch that involves making you something you presently are not.
I submit that even the conventional Christian heaven is, in a way, "radically different". Somehow, people don't want to, and apparently can't, sin, so we are all compliant robots with no independent volition at all. This is terribly ironic, given the lame free will arguments used to try to construct theodicies. In THIS life, it's a pearl-clutching problem that we would be robots. In heaven, not so much.
In heaven, it's clear from the alleged statements of Jesus that "they are neither married, nor given in marriage" and right there is another really big difference, enough to give many Christians pause. What, I won't be married to my beloved spouse anymore? This is usually explained by the nature of relationships in heaven providing something better than marriage (or really, by implication, than sex) although this is never explained. There's another way in which the familiar human condition is vastly altered, to the extent that many people aren't sure they even want that for themselves.
Ultimately eternal life of the Christian sort is so incoherent a concept that when really examined, it falls apart as any sort of incentive or reward for righteous living.
