(April 26, 2014 at 11:37 am)Deidre32 Wrote: Now that I'm an atheist, I can't help but wonder if the Bible in so many words, infers that heaven is space?That seems to be the original meaning of the term in the old testament, where there does not seem to be any talk of an afterlife, aside from those (like Enoch) who get taken to heaven. The heavens, to those early writers, was either the dome that stretched over the Earth, or incorporated it as part of an unseen structure "behind" the sky. Earth was described as god's "footstool" which could indicate a relative position (it was "beneath" the heavens).
The new testament (Revelation, mostly) fleshes out the idea of heaven as a location that can be described in human terms, with a throne and homes and land and rivers and such. I don't think I ever considered it to be that way literally, but as a JW (who with few exceptions look forward to a future on Earth, not in heaven) it didn't matter much to me. The notion was that being in god's presence was so overwhelmingly pleasant that it didn't really matter whether it was clouds with a golden gate or a city built from jewels or anything else.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould