Imagine two universes: Heaven and Everyone-Else. Heaven and Everyone-Else never touch or interact. A human in Heaven can’t see, touch, smell, taste or use any other measurement tool that could ever be created to observe Everyone-Else, and vice versa.

If such a scenario exists, and we are in Everyone-Else, is it useful for us to spend any time thinking about Heaven? Of course not, because we can’t affect Heaven and Heaven can’t affect us. In this case we can’t prove that Heaven doesn’t exist – but who cares, because it can’t even change one atom of this universe. This is a useless definition of Heaven, because we can’t even get there.

If we change the scenario and say you can go to Heaven, but you can’t come back, then this starts to look like a fairly common description of life after death as defined by Christians. When a Christian dies his or her sole soul leaves Everyone-Else and goes to Heaven and never comes back, (none of that reincarnation bologna). On the way to Heaven, the sole is stripped of sin which can’t ever enter Heaven.

By going to Heaven, we have taken something away from Everyone-Else — our soul. If this is the case, we should be able to measure this transfer of energy and prove that there is life after death. If there is nothing to measure, then there is no life after death.

It is impossible to create any version of life after death, any version of Heaven that does not at least in some way create a measurable effect. If it’s not measurable or observable, then it doesn’t exist and it is like the first scenario. If Heaven can’t interact with us in any way then it is pointless to think about or speculate on the existence of Heaven. If Heaven can interact with us then we can measure it and observe it – and therefore it is part of this universe. If life after death exists we can prove it.

We can take this logic and apply it to everything that we as Christians speculate exists – if it has the ability to affect the universe then we can prove it exists. If it doesn’t affect the universe, and can’t ever affect the universe, then we can’t prove that it doesn’t exist – but it also has absolutely no effect on the universe, so who cares?