Free Seeing Further by Bill Bryson

celestial space, there was no longer any reason to imagine a limit to the physical world. Why should physical space not go on for ever? By the end of the eighteenth century, that view had become scientific orthodoxy.
W HERE IS H EAVEN ?
    This new cosmology had profound theological consequences, for with physical space extended to infinity there was literally no room left for Heaven. One could say, as liberal theologians
do,
that the realm of the soul is simply beyond the material plane and leave it enigmatically at that, yet with physical space infinitised the whole question of what a ‘beyond’ might constitute became increasingly problematic. For better or worse, one of the consequences of the scientific revolution was to write out of Western cosmology any sense of spiritual space as a legitimate aspect of the Real.
    Newton himself was concerned about the matter and tried hard torescue the situation by associating space with God. Picking up on a tradition that originates in Judaism, he posited space as the medium through which the deity’s presence permeates the world. Space, he said, was God’s
sensorium,
the substrate through which He sees all, feels all, knows all. Space was indeed synonymous with divine Knowing. As President of the Royal Society Newton understood that the new science had to do much more than make empirical predictions – it had to be acceptable to reasonable society. Galileo and Descartes had both run afoul of such expectations about what a cosmology should deliver and Newton was determined not to make the same deistic mistake. As Britain’s leading representative for science, he comprehended that neither the people nor the patrons would support the endeavour if it was seen to be in conflict with wider spiritual needs. The Royal Society stood on the side of reason, but it also allied itself with the state, the King and God. All this wasn’t just a propaganda exercise, for psychologically speaking, Newton needed reasons to accept the new space himself – God made the void ‘reasonable’ to
him.
    Newton had good cause to worry, for soon after his death less religious minds stripped the theological embellishments from his system leaving humans alone in the void. Increasingly in the age of science we have confronted the dilemma that if we want to claim something is real, we have to posit its position in physical space. If one can’t point to coordinates on a map, then more and more one invites the accusation that whatever it is, is not real at all. Hence the liberal theological dilemma about Heaven. Where is it? Both Hell and Purgatory could easily be abandoned, but Heaven – the domain of human salvation – is critical to Christian integrity. The soul also became collateral damage as ‘Man’ was transformed into ‘an atomic machine’. Without its
own place
in the cosmic scheme, the spirit was disenfranchised. Humans became mere bodies, flecks of dust residing on a chunk of rock orbiting a small and insignificant star in the outer suburbs of a very mundane galaxy. We moderns are not only not at the centre of the universe, as spiritual beings we actually don’t exist in this world.
P OST -N EWTONIAN S PACE
    During the twentieth century physicists developed a post-Newtonian vision of space beginning with Einstein’s relativity theories and proceeding to so-called ‘hyperspace’ theories. How have these ideas impacted on the discussion above? Relativity compounds the problem in a truly fascinating way. General relativity, which is the cosmological version of Einstein’s ideas, replaced the three-dimensional Euclidean void of Newton’s cosmology with a four-dimensional Minkowskian void that now includes
time
as part of the spatial matrix. Physicists call it
space-time,
and treat time as effectively another dimension of space. From a theological perspective the consequences here are non-trivial because in a purely relativistic cosmos nothing really ‘happens’. Time unwinds itself in a