The End of Everything

Though Disney World is known for having the most elaborate and compelling queue lines for its rides, such that you are transported to a whole new world (or maybe a ‘Small World’, after all) before you ever even get on the ride, the most expensive, and indeed, the most intricate queue line for a ride ever made was for the ‘Dueling Dragons’ roller coaster rides at Universal Studios, just a few miles down the road from Disney World.  The sign over the entrance queue gave prospective riders the ominous warning, “Beyond this point of no return, your only choice is freeze or burn”, signaling you could choose to ride the blue ‘Ice dragon’ coaster or the red ‘Fire dragon’ coaster, the two of which interlocked and had narrow misses throughout the tracks.  I use this as an example, however, because though passengers on these coasters knew this was a facetious and playful claim to set the stage for a thrilling experience, there are those dressed in physicists’ white lab coats making similar, yet all-too-real claims concerning the prospect of the universe.  The fate of the universe, according to most secular scientists follows the course of some rather dreary nominal titles, including ‘The Big Crunch’, ‘The Big Rip’, and the ‘The Big Freeze’.  These, of course, only hold true if one holds to the initial sequence of the ‘The Big Bang’, none of which have been observed and yet all of which are propounded as empirical science.  Rather than go out with a bang, the universe is purported to go out in a silent whimper, like someone slowly and agonizingly dying from hypothermia, when all usable energy has reached a final state of entropy and becomes nonviable – how comforting!  Even if our future offspring and subsequent generations become technologically advanced enough to hitch a ride on an asteroid to increase orbital period and avoid the red giant phase of the sun swallowing the terrestrial planets, the disastrously epic fate is unavoidable and will be definitive.  While that bleak fate is projected to be on the order of 100 trillion years away, that is a finite period of time and will arrive – again, given the naturalistic framework for the universe.  This is not just bleak, it’s hopeless.  Who gives a ‘rip’ (pun intended) what I or you or anyone else does if this is the ultimate fate of everything.  But if things will be restored to their former, undying glory (Rev. 21:1), I would like to know how to be a part of that!