The Pope’s visit to London was the only news in town over the weekend. Not much to do with science there, you might think. Well, the papal excursion reminded me of a little thought experiment I did for Inkling Magazine a few years ago, and the comments on Eva’s latest piece persuaded me to repost this groundbreaking piece of theoretical work here.

The Christian Heaven, and other flavors of theistic afterlife, are often described as places outside of space and time, existing at the end of a long dark tunnel. Not unlike a black hole, then. And a little gedanken experiment suggests that this might be no coincidence.

First, we must imagine somebody so pious that there is no question of his soul rising to heaven upon death. Step forward the Pope, who being God’s infallible representative on Earth, is unlikely to cause much of a queue at the Pearly Gates while St. Peter checks his credentials.

Assumption 1: The Pope’s soul must go to Heaven.

Next, we place the Pope in the vicinity of a black hole. When he’s looking the other way, we playfully nudge him beyond the event horizon. Thus ensnared, the pontiff will be squeezed by gravitational forces as he begins his inexorable spiral towards the singularity. His death is assured.

Assumption 2: Nothing can escape from a black hole, not even the papal soul.

Taking Assumptions 1 and 2 together, the only self-consistent outcome is that Heaven must be within the event horizon of the black hole, and most persuasively at the singularity itself. Unless he pulls some kind of clever trick with Hawking radiation, whereby black holes can leak matter/energy, there’s no way his holiness’s spirit can escape. So for his soul to reach heaven, heaven itself must be inside the black hole.

Fairly watertight logic, I hope you’ll agree. Of course, this raises all kinds of interesting questions. The nearest black hole is more than a thousand light-years away, so do departed souls take more than a millennium to reach the Great Hereafter, or do they somehow break the light-speed barrier? Perhaps we each carry a micro-black hole around in our heads, which would itself raise questions about the cause and nature of consciousness. Could this be a whole new branch of research, to be known as biocosmological theology?