GSR: Where Is Heaven?

How is the belief in
heaven possible in light
of modern cosmology?

from an interview on Genesis Science Network

Introduction

Skeptics sometimes insist that the Bible is outmoded because its view of the universe was wrong. Heaven is not some ethereal existence beyond the stars, where everything is made of some perfect, luminous substance known as quintessence. Didn’t Galileo prove over 400 years ago that heavenly bodies like the moon are just as material as what we have down here?

We’ve known for centuries now that the universe is filled with objects that are composed of the same elements as those in the Periodic Table we study in science classrooms, and follow the same scientific laws. Where is there room for some “heaven” where saints go marching in, given the cosmology we know now? If heaven is “up” somewhere, which way is “up” in a universe of bodies in motion?

Hard Questions

It was this question, and four others, that prompted me a few years ago to look for answers to such doubts about Biblical credibility that could make sense in light of modern science. I gave presentations under the heading, “Hard Questions Facing 21st Century Christianity” with the subtitle “Answered with Help from Science.” Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if the very science trusted by skeptics actually supported the Bible?

We’ve seen four out of five from that series here at CEH before (one, two, three, four). This last one, I thought, could revolutionize our thoughts about the afterlife. An abbreviated presentation of my answer was given in a conversation with David Rives on Genesis Science Network on 23 Feb 2026. You can watch the segment here:

Due to time limitations, I could not fit in a final thought that can be of great comfort to believers facing death and to those who have lost a loved one: death brings us immediately into the presence of God. We do not have to board a spaceship and travel a long distance to reach heaven.

Of course, that comfort for believers is the opposite for the lost who have not repented of their sins and trusted in God’s provision in Christ. The certainty of the coming judgment should bring fear of the wrath of God, the perfect Judge of the universe, who will not allow sin to go unpunished. “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?” (Hebrews 2:3). Find the way of escape here.

We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is ‘another world’, and that is where we come from. And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we ‘belonged here’ we should feel at home here. All that we say about ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’, about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is quite inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic? If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked? —C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns