The Pearly Gates of the Central Sun Science and the Location of Heaven in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract

The history of the relations that have obtained between science and religion—chiefly Western, Catholic and Protestant, Christianity—has attracted considerable attention. Oftentimes, in various ‘popular’ literatures, conceived as a relationship of intractable ‘conflict’ or antipathy, recent historical research has shown that the relationship between science and religion has been far from simple or straightforwardly amenable to pithy, off-the-peg, generalisations. The history of the perceived significance of science to the question of heaven’s putative location supports this conclusion. For some 19^th- and 20^th-century individuals, the advancement of science precluded the possibility of a ‘geographical’ heaven. For others, however, specific scientific ideas–the German astronomer Johann Heinrich Mädler’s theory of a ‘central sun’, for example–provided clues as to its nature and location. That scientific ideas could influence and inform ideas about the afterlife also suggests that the physical and the spiritual have not always been construed, in both theory and practice, as easily separable ontological opposites.

Keywords: Science and Religion, Location of Heaven, John F.W. Herschel, Johann Heinrich Mädler, Alcyone (star)