Religion: The New Heaven

Where is heaven?

“It’s up there,” says the fundamentalist, “and it’s accurately described in the Book of Revelation. Heaven has twelve gate’s and a 144-cubit wall.”

“No!” explodes Nikita Khrushchev. “We sent the astronaut Titov up there and he looked all over and didn’t see it anywhere.”

“Heaven exists.” says the monsignor, placing his fingertips together. “That is all we know for sure. Some “theologians hold that heaven is everywhere, as God is. Most, however, deem it more appropriate that it should be a special place with definite limits—a glorious abode in which the blessed have their home. The church has decided nothing about its locality.”

Three-Story Universe. Few physicists would hazard a location for heaven, but one who does is exceptionally well qualified. He is William Grosvenor Pollard, 50, executive director of the Institute of Nuclear Studies at Oak Ridge, Tenn. He is also the Rev. William Grosvenor Pollard, associate rector of Oak Ridge’s St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. He uses his expertise in both fields in a stimulating, just published book: Physicist and Christian (Seabury Press; $4.25).

Science, beginning with Copernicus, has knocked flat the old, literal, three-story concept of the universe—heaven in the top floor, hell in the cellar, the earth in-between. Physicist-Priest Pollard feels that a whole new imagery must be invented to depict for modern man the relationship between the natural and the supernatural.

“The key to this approach,” he writes, “lies in conceiving the whole space-time continuum of our human intuition as being immersed in a space of higher dimensions.” The reality of a higher dimension than the three of space and one of time may seem somewhat elusive to ordinary human beings, but modern scientific minds can see it as mathematically just as sound.

A higher dimension is the result of a lower one moved perpendicular to itself. Writes Pollard: “Heaven, instead of being above us in ordinary space, is perpendicular to ordinary space, and the eternal is perpendicular to the temporal dimension. The transcendent and the supernatural, instead of being pushed farther and farther away from us with each new advance in astronomy, are again everywhere in immediate contact with us, just as the dimension perpendicular to a plane surface is everywhere in contact with it, though transcendent to it.”

Dimensional Status Seeking. If space as man experiences it is only a limited field in a space of higher dimension, the supernatural is just a question of one’s dimensional status. For a two-dimensional body, a three-dimensional one would be supernatural, and the same logic applies to steps into the fourth, fifth and any other dimensions. In this context, says Pollard, “even the supernatural domains of heaven and hell, which have been so universally acknowledged in human experience, have as much claim on reality as does the restricted spaciotemporal domain which constitutes nature. The only difference is that the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is then rather differently drawn, and in a manner much more agreeable to modern views of the natural universe.”

Combining Episcopalian piety and scientific sophistication, Pollard thus virtually sweeps readers into his fifth-dimension heaven. But it is a heaven that Van Eyck (see cut) would have had a hell of a time painting.