Ask An Atheist: Why do we die?

Because we are biological organisms.  Nothing lasts forever.  Things fall apart.

It’s nothing malicious or intentional on nature’s part.  There was no option, gee, living systems can either live forever, or not, which shall be chosen.  That wasn’t in the option list.  Living cells replicate, mutate, wear out, and do so constantly.

More complex multicellular organisms have a different mix.  The whole organism can persist even as individual cells come and go (apart from some long-lived brain cells, apparently, all the rest of us get replaced cell by cell over a seven year cycle).  Which means if you are 30 years old, almost none of the cells that compose are as old as 30 years.  Are you not still you?  Has almost all of you died?

No, we think of ourselves as being the “same” person as we were then, kind of.  Clearly something interesting happens from the collection of ever-dying cells that isn’t true of individual cells.

On the purely biological side, from an evolutionary perspective, the only thing that selection really pays attention to is has the organism reproduced?  Once that reproduction is accomplished, selection doesn’t have any necessary impact on what happens to the reproducer after that (and some insects actually devour their now superfluous mates after the deed is done).

Things operate at a very different level for sentient beings with cultures that have inheritable features apart from the purely biological.  And it’s not just us.  Various of our close cousins, the chimpanzees, for example, communicate stone or other tool use to members of their culture by learned behavior.  A chimpanzee can know how to use a tool not because there was any biological gene for it, directly passed on from a now-dead ancestor, but because their culture is now complex enough that knowledge can be “inherited” from their now dead stone bangers outside a selection framework.

Add language and written messages to the mix and you get an even more interesting process.  We humans can achieve an “immortality” quite independent of death, cellular or multicellular.  Beethoven had no offspring, and therefor is dead biologically and genetically.  And yet he is probably more alive to people today than almost all of his contemporaries living in 19th century Earth.  That’s because he wrote down his music, and people alive today can interact with his now long dead mind in a way independent of the expiration dates on his cells.

It’s possible for this to happen without being alive at all.  For millions of people on Earth, Sherlock Holmes is as “real” a person as Tony Blair.  True, he “exists” because another mind that actually did have a body at one time, Arthur Conan Doyle, invented him, but in a very real sense Holmes has taken on a reality that transcends even the parts that were directly written by Doyle.

That’s how our minds work.  Rather amazing isn’t it?

The extent to which the gods people believe exist, and attribute intentional behavior to, are real only in the same way that Sherlock Holmes is real, is a matter for people to work out on their own.

This is very likely not the answer you were looking for, on “why do we die.”  You wanted a teleological reason for it all.  An exploration for why a creator spirit has people being born only to be dead eventually, especially when so many of the stories made up about gods have worked up the idea that there is some afterlife, where the “you” that had a body might get a fresh edition and keep on going sort of as you were before.

Never mind how awkward that might be for spouses having to figure out whether it’s the first or second or third spouse they’re supposed to be reunited with for eternity, or is there some timesharing?

Perhaps there is something inevitably screwy about the idea that death is only what you go through before the divine Star Trek transporter reconstructs you on the other side of the Pearly Gates.

I don’t think that happens.  But it doesn’t bother me that it doesn’t happen, any more than it bothers me that there are asteroids in the sky that could vaporize me or all civilization in one inconvenient splat.  (Watch the skies!)

But I do know that so long as sentient beings cherish the creations of the once alive beings that took the trouble to write down their work so others long after could read the words, or hear the music, or see the plays, those analogous entities transcend death in an observable and wonderful way.