The Impossible Nothing
It must be understood that one of the primary fundamentals of the Odinist belief in life after death is that nothingness is an impossibility.
There is no 'First Cause,' there was no 'beginning,' though there are beginnings. Cycles begin, progress, end, then begin again. This is a natural law of the universe.
Our lore describes "The Earliest Age" of the natural cycle, where the ice and the fire and other elements are already present, so there was not this great vacuum where some god or some explosion created something from nothing. To us this does not reflect reality.
Energy (Fire) and Matter (Ice) are intrinsic to the cosmos and thus must have always been and always will be. If this is the case, then all things in the universe must be eternal (yet transmutable) as well, for there is no way we can ever reach a state of nothingness.
We have mentioned previously the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This very law is the cornerstone for understanding Eternal Universe theory. If something cannot be created or destroyed and yet it is, then it must have always been and always will be. There are no exceptions, there are no exemptions. If it cannot be created then this means that neither a god nor an event brought it into being: it simply has always been. It may change, it may transform from one state to another, but it is eternal.It is stated by some that there will come a point where the universe will end, then all will go back to a state of nothingness. Others believe in First Cause, but then think all of 'creation' will last forever.
If something cannot end, then it cannot begin, for entropy must always be kept in mind. Now, the universal order can end, but even that is merely a transmutation from one state (order) into another (chaos). Even when there are explosions like Supernovae that create galaxies, we can clearly see that this is simply one thing becoming something else, and no 'creation' from nothingness has taken place. All are subject to the law of life/death/rebirth, and thus there can be no end, just as there can be no beginning.This incessant desire for singularity: for one cause for the existence of all things, can only stem from Western dependence on monotheist creeds, which has corrupted our very notions of objective scientific research.
Some scientists seem to be on a search for a natural equivalent to the Biblical Genesis account, and ise the Big Bang as a sort of religious dogma. But life and the universe are far too complex for such oversimplifications, and in every instance we find that it is multiplicity that makes the most sense and works the best. We label it 'forest' and then think that because we have designated it thus, the trees cease to be individual entities. Does the forest have a singular birth? Or is it made up of thousands upon thousands of life-forms, each with a seed from which they were born? If it burns down does this mean it stops existing? Or is it reborn out of the destruction? Our tiny planet consists of trillions and trillions of life forms, many of which we have little to no understanding of. Yet, because astronomers look through a telescope and see some colors (cp. Red Shift Theory) they think they know how the universe 'began.' Such audacity is beyond measure.
If we can debunk the idea that the universe is not going to end, then we can debunk the idea that life is over when we die. The one must follow the other, for all life must follow the same laws.
Monotheists state that we were divinely created, yet we are immortal, just as they say our world has a beginning yet no end. We say this is a contradiction, for existence must extend eternally backwards as forwards. They see the apocalypse as nothing more than a transformation, as we do with Ragnarok, but before their Genesis there was nothing, which is a paradox. Any timeline that can begin must also end, period. Some scientists say that the universe is going to collapse in on itself and reach a state of non- existence, as in a black hole.
The expansion of the universe is simply entropy at work, and one day Chaos will return and the universal order will come apart, as we reach the state of total transformation through Ragnarok, but never will there be nothingness, just as there never was 'nothingness.'
