Blogger informs me that, as I haven’t logged in since 2007, they’re going to delete an old blog of mine soon. I thought I should save this post, that I wrote on August 2, 2005, as a post here. While a few of my positions have changed in the past 18 years (I think I’m more consistent, but it’s hard to tell), the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Culture of death
My favorite Onion story of all time has the headline, "World death rate holding steady at 100 percent."
The crack reporters at The Onion uncovered this disturbing fact: every living creature ends up dying. As the writer of Ecclesiastes points out, "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity."
Bummer.
Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been running an entertaining and valuable series for the past year or so on the myriad failings of the Left Behind series of rapture porn novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. One of the most interesting and serious of Clark's critiques of Left Behind is that the series endorses a theology that denies the reality of death. In the LaHaye-Jenkins opus, the lucky saved who happen to be alive at the end times never have to die--they get raptured up to heaven, instead. As Clark observes, being "raptured" looks suspiciously like dying to us mortals left behind on Earth. But to LaHaye and Jenkins (and, for some reason, to their invented characters), being raptured means never having to die. So the raptured are the lucky ones, not just because they don't have to endure the various torments promised to those still-Earthbound folks at the End of Days (wars! famine! pestilence!) but because they are the exceptions to the Onion's rule (death!).
A friend of my mother's fell victim to this sort of toxic theology, before she succumbed to leukemia last week. When my mother's friend died, it was not for lack of effort on the part of her doctors, or for lack of faith on the part of her family and friends. She had undergone an intensive series of chemotherapy treatments for the past two years. She had an international network of believers praying for her good health, for her complete recovery. Her family believed that God can work miracles, and that if only their faith was strong enough, she would be saved--not just from Hell, but from death too.
I never knew this friend of my mother's well; I have no idea how her family is reconciling their belief in God with the fact of her death. But since they had pinned so much of their faith to a specific miracle--a miracle that was certain not to be granted--I don't know how their faith could fail to suffer. I pray for a different miracle: that they can find peace in spite of the poisonous idea they've swallowed that death is a curse, a punishment a loving God somehow still inflicts on all His children.
I'm a biologist. As such, I've gotten involved in the undying debate about the teaching of evolution in public school science classrooms. I'm a biologist, so obviously I support teaching evolution, the central theory in all biology, as an important part of science. I oppose teaching creationism, or its odd, God-free bastard child of Intelligent Design in science classes. But I have friends who are creationists of various stripes. And of course I've discussed the origins of life with plenty of creationists through my involvement with the evolution debate.
There are many reasons why people oppose evolution. There is the facile insistence on the literal inerrancy of the Bible. There is the belief, embraced by William Jennings Bryan and James Dobson alike, that accepting evolution will make young students reject morality by convincing them they are no better than animals. (A good reason to avoid exposing those gullible children to Ecclesiastes 3:19-22, too, if you ask me.) But the most serious philosophic complaint I hear, again and again, against evolution is that it involves an intolerable amount of death.
The thing with evolution is, there's an awful lot of dying in it. For survival of the fittest to work, there have to be a lot of less-fit critters that don't make it. By the way, "survival" doesn't mean "immortality." It means having children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, an unbroken chain into the uncertain future. The death rate for individual creatures remains steady at 100 percent, and has, for the past 4 billion years or so. The future for any individual species doesn't seem much brighter, at least not over the next million or billion years. As Charles Darwin, Ecclesiastes, and The Bloodhound Gang have all noticed, "we all do the Wang Chung with the Grim Reaper." And have, if you accept evolution, as long as there's been living things to die.
This is unacceptable, to many of the creationists with whom I've discussed this topic. They point to Genesis 3 and argue that before man sinned, there was no death. As additional evidence of our death-free, pre-Fall condition, they point to God's repeated insistence that the original creation "was good"; also, His admonition to humans and animals to be vegetarians is further proof that nothing died until Eve extended her vegan diet to include the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Although I doubt plants would see it the same way.)
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis' senior demon, Screwtape, informs his young pupil Wormwood that one shouldn't make the mistake of believing, as humans do, that death is an evil. Wormwood, a junior demon, has been given the task of leading a young man astray. As a naive young demon, Wormwood is therefore delighted when his charge risks his life in a war. If humans fear death so much, it must be bad--which is to say, good (from the perspective of a demon). Not so, the older and wiser Screwtape says. Sin is bad; but death is just death. It's not good or bad. It just is. And it happens to everyone, as the Onion reports.
Marriage is an act of adulthood, bioethicist Leon Kass writes, because deep down marriage is a recognition of one's own, individual mortality. Kass is troubled by our culture's exaltation of youth over adulthood, and sees our radically changing attitudes toward marriage as one symptom of our cultural obsession with youth. One of the privileges of youth is the belief that death is so distant that one is effectively never going to die.
Kass is on the opposite side of the much-discussed American culture war as I. His side routinely calls my side, with our embrace of birth control, embryonic stem cell research, and gay rights, the "culture of death."
Ironically, what makes American mass culture a "culture of death," Kass and others like him write, is our refusal to recognize our our mortality. We behave like children, as if we all have an infinite amount of time as our birthright. We see little need to contribute to communities which will last long after we are gone, or to have children who will outlive us, because we refuse to believe that anything, or anyone, will outlive our immortal selves.
Kass observes: "The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: Sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation."
The inescapable tie between sex and death is at the heart of the origin of species. It is little wonder that a culture like ours, whistling furiously past the graveyard, would make the Left Behind series best-sellers. It is little wonder that solid majorities of Americans reject biological evolution in virtually every poll. As much as it might pain Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins to realize this, rapturemania and our falling fertility rate are flip sides of the same coin. A culture living in denial of death will of course support embryonic stem cell research while rejecting evolutionary biology.
I talk a good game. In real life, I research a disease that an earlier American culture, one more accepting of death, called "the old person's friend" because of its ability to kill the elderly relatively quickly and painlessly. In real life, I push for practically every novel medical intervention that will add a few more miserable minutes onto someone's life. I am pro-choice. I am pro-stem cell research. I study evolution but have chosen, thus far, to remain childless. No one ever accused me of consistency.
Like Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, like my creationist friends, I'm whistling past the graveyard. I'm just trying to carry a tune by the Bloodhound Gang, trying to be a grownup instead of a scared little girl.