So this going to be as scientific as a paper on evolutionary psychology, but anyway, I was thinking a few days ago about names and their uniqueness. In Revelations 2 Jesus tells when we enter His kingdom we will receive a new name:

And I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who receives it.

I started wondering if our new heavenly name would be unique. According to these calculations by a Professor from Hawaii, approximately 96,100,000,000 people have ever lived. It doesn’t appear to matter much whether you are a theistic evolutionist, an old earth creationist or a young earth creationist, because the human population before 6000BC is a small fraction of today’s population. Now for a very crude assumption. In Matthew 24 Jesus talks about the end times and says:

That is the way it will be when the Son of Man comes. Two men will be working together in the field; one will be taken, the other left. Two women will be grinding flour at the mill; one will be taken, the other left.

So let’s assume 50% of the people who ever lived are going to be in heaven, which means the population of heaven will be approximately 48,050,000,000. Now we can propose different ways of uniquely identifying each member of that population. Each person could be given…

• A number from 1 to 48,050,000,000
• 2 words from the Oxford English Dictionary (which contains 301,100 entries)
• A string of 9 hexadecimal digits
• A string of 8 letters from the Latin alphabet
• 3 of the 5000 commonly used Chinese characters
• 3 names from this database of mostly Western names
• 3 syllables from the 15831 found in English (according to link)

Let’s hope God comes up with a better system than any of those.

Ironically, today I got a nice email from another person called Rowan Seymour who lives in Canada now but was born in Carrickfergus which isn’t so far from here. I’ve only once before heard of another Rowan Seymour and that person was a woman in the US.