The Fear of Death

A disconnect in the life of a human is the contrast between existence and death.  How can I cease to exist?  Why this is disturbing to us could be explained evolutionarily.  All vertebrates, at least, have a tremendous fear of death.  It is, of course, an adaptively-favorable trait.   Vertebrates moved forward evolutionarily by becoming better problem solvers.  The best problem solvers were the best hunters or the best at avoiding being eaten.  Humans are the ultimate problem solvers and have such an excess of this capacity that they can figure out that they will die and now have to deal with this conundrum.  How do I avoid this destiny?  It is built into my genetics to want to avoid extinction, so the inevitability of death is a terror just in thinking about it.  So that seems to solve the problem nicely as to why this disconnect, this disturbance, exists in us.

But it also opens up another door.  If this is what separates humans from animals, and if God exists, it is rather obvious why this trait exists.  Humans can make decisions and be held responsible for them because they can think ahead.  Humans can consider the size of the world (and in our century, the universe) and consider their place in it.  Humans can consider the big questions because they can see their own mortality.  I’m not one to claim that God micromanipulates evolution.  If so, He is responsible for an awful lot of awful things.  But it is a fairly obvious next step to see that God could have set the track of the evolution of vertebrates towards the development of problem solving with the ultimate goal of developing the ultimate problem solver, Man (Adam in Hebrew).   This ability to ask the big questions is the breath of God. 

So that’s the problem with trying to prove the existence or nonexistence of God.  In the end, you just explain a mechanism.  The why of that mechanism can usually be interpreted either way, to follow God or to walk away.  Perhaps it was set up that way.  When there are two solutions, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is found in the garden.