Why don’t you just burn in Heaven!

There’s been a lot of discussion about Hell this week, especially from this apologist, David, so it might be timely to re-post this reassuring little number from 2013: Heaven is hotter than Hell.

It’s just one of those oddities that causes your brain to do little summersaults. Heaven is hotter than Hell. It sounds comical, certainly counterintuitive, but the math just doesn’t lie. Heaven, according to Isaiah 30:26, is where “the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days.” Taken as read, Heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the earth does from the sun, and in addition 49 times more, meaning fifty times in all. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation [(H/E)4 = 50 where E is the absolute temperature of the earth 300°K (273+27)] gives the temperature of H (Heaven) as 525°C. Hell, according to Revelations 21:8 is where the “fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.” Now here’s the fun part. A lake of molten brimstone (sulfur) means that its temperature must be at or below its boiling point, 444.6°C. Above that point and it’d be a vapor, not a lake. Heaven (525°C) is therefore hotter than Hell (<444.6°C).

It’s the cognitive equivalent of injecting warm chocolate directly into the hypothalamus, and since being published in Applied Optics (August, 1972) has become a favourite of godless (baby-eating) heathen’s eager, as always, to annoy bombastic biblical literalists. What isn’t as well known is that seven years later a convoluted rebuttal was published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results by a rather head-strong Dr. Tim Healey; a man determined to do whatever it took to re-establish the standard arrangement of these post-obituary destinations. His argument, and I’ll lighten the load here, stemmed from errors he saw in the calculation of Hells pressure; errors he stressed which would increase the boiling point of sulfur. Now, most don’t know it but Hell has a GPS location: 31°46′49″N 35°14′24″E / 31.78028°N 35.24000°E, otherwise known as the Jehoshaphat valley; a 7,000,000m² Iron Age sacrificial pit-come-refuse-dump where sulfurous smelling fires were maintained around the clock to consume it. “Have we any data as to the pressure likely to be found in Hell?” asked Healey in 1979. “The answer is Yes. A 19^th century mathematician [Neiht] has already provided the groundwork for us and we may feel confident that by the year 2000 the total number of the damned will be at least 29,422,641,251,519,917,000 souls.” There is a method to this glorious madness which can be perused here, but for our purposes let’s just say Healey went to great lengths to look at the Ideal Gas Equation and how it applied to the finite volume of the Jehoshaphat valley (Gehinnon), the gaseous component of the human body, the dynamics of electromagnetic repulsion, the proposed arrangement of souls in Hell (no more than two layers otherwise those in the middle layers would escape Hells full rigours), and ultimately how it all shifted the phase diagram of sulphur. And here’s his final calculations:

So that, the volume available in Gehenna is 60 x 10⁶ x 2m² and the original volume of the damned is 0.06 x 29.422641 x 10¹⁸m³, then, at constant temperature (which we assume, taking equilibrium) P₁V₁ = P₂V₂ or P₂ = P₁V₁/V₂ substituting (1) P₂ [29 x 6 x 10¹⁶] / [2 x 6 x 10⁷] = 14.5 x 10⁹ atmospheres.

Now let us see what pressure is needed to liquefy sulphur vapour at 525°C. We have, using the Clausius-Cleypeyron equation in its integrated form, Log P = 7.43268 – 3268.2/T where P = Pressure in mm Hg and T = the elevated boiling point in °K, so that Log P = 7.43287 – 93268.2/798) = 3.3373813, whence, (2) P = 2174.607 mm Hg = 2.86 atmospheres.  (1)  is so much greater than (2) that Revelations 21:8 indicates a temperature very considerably higher than 525°C. Thus, Hell is hotter than Heaven.

Now thankfully for me and every other mathematically challenged individual on the planet this labyrinthine mess amounts to absolutely nothing as both calculations are, I’m happy to say, categorically wrong. Heaven and Hell have the same calefaction: 37°C… the temperature of the human brain where both mythological destinations are birthed, lived, and will ultimately cease to exist when the thermometer inside said gullible brain falls to room temperature.