Death

There was an article in the New York Times the other day about the "death cafes" that are springing up everywhere.  No, this isn't a retake on the Jim Jones Koolaid thing.  What these gatherings are, people get together at Starbucks (or at a real coffee shop or tea room) to simply talk about Death, not actually do it.  http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/death-be-not-decaffeinated-over-cup-groups-face-taboo/ 

According to the article, these groups trace their origins to a web designer in London named Jon Underwood who organized the first "Death Cafe" in 2011.  Mr. Underwood, in turn, was inspired by the work of a Swiss psychologist, Bernard Crettaz,  who organized what he called called "cafes mortels," designed to encourage people to engage in "more open discussions about death." 

That's great.  I'm concerned with death as a philosophical problem, too-- in addition to its presenting a pretty heady math problem related to investment horizons and estate planning.  But I would suspect that there's a lot of wheel-spinning going on at those get-togethers, because you can't get away from the fact that the reason we're interested in Death in the first place is that it's the end of Life.  I have to think that in order to understand what Death is, you'd have to start out with a consensus on what Life is, and there's remarkably little agreement on that.

After all, just one last rattling breath, a gunshot, a heart spasm, or a splat on the pavement is all that stands between the Here and Now, whatever that is, and the Hereafter, if in fact there is such a thing.  So, in my humble opinion, it stands to reason that you'd get a good leg up on the problem of Death by taking stock of all that you know or can learn about "pre-Death," i.e., "Life."

Well, I think that we've all heard about Darwin by now, and the Law of the Jungle, a.k.a. the "Survival of the Fittest."  So, at one level, at least, Life is all about trying to stay alive.  Which, of course, begs the question, "Why?"  Why struggle to stay alive?

You'll find no shortage of people who will say that they "love" Life.  Most of those people don't live in war zones, though, nor do they suffer from lingering, painful diseases, nor have their kids recently been kidnapped, raped and murdered.  Then again, just living a life of privilege isn't enough to make one "love" Life; otherwise, movie stars and millionaires wouldn't become drug addicts or alcoholics or attempt suicide at a rate greater than troops returning from a year in Afghanistan.  Frankly, there's a lot of Life that is pretty crappy, all told, and even if things are going well for you it's possible to become upset about the destruction of the environment or children on chemotherapy or terrorism or illiteracy or cruelty to animals or the sudden death of James Gandolfini or intolerance or hunger or hate.

Of course, there are positive aspects to Life, too, like Springtime and flowers and Mozart and fireworks and Yosemite and horses and Rodin sculptures and cherry pie.  But like all of Life, all of these things are ephemeral (yes, even including Mozart and Rodin, although each of them will probably last longer than Yosemite, at the rate that the environment is deteriorating.)  And some of the "good" things, like fireworks and cherry pie, can also kill you.  And although in the Bible it says something like "the poor will always be with us," (or am I thinking of Dickens?) unfortunately nobody can say that about honeybees or blue whales or even elephants anymore, so how long do you think horses have got?

So, maybe there are reasons to "hate" Life, too, if you can't bring yourself to "love" it.  But either way, it's legitimate to ask if there's a point to it, and I think you have to have at least a working hypothesis on that point in order to formulate a theory concerning  the nature and meaning of Death.  (We can save the empirical experiments for later, if that's O.K. with you.)

If you approach the problem from the other direction, it's just as tough.  Is Death a "transition" or a "graduation" or a "fulfillment" of some kind, as people quoted in the NYT article conceptualized it, or is it just "the end?"  If it's just "the end," is it possible for Life to have meaning?  If it's a "transition," what's it a "transition" to?  And if it's a "graduation," what are the criteria for promotion to the next grade level?

As pointed out in the aforementioned NYT article, a lot of people (in Western nations, at least) shy away from talking about Death, and many people acknowledge that they fear it.  Why fear death?  It appears to be as natural as birth, after all, and as far as we know it is inevitable and, except in Oregon, is pretty unpredictable.  Maybe our fear of Death is nothing more than our instinctive fear of the unknown.  Maybe.

If you turn off like a light bulb when you die-- i.e., simply cease to exist-- all your troubles are over.  But, as Hamlet realized, you never can tell.  "To sleep... perchance to dream.  Aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come..."  What if everything doesn't zero out?  What if your life really does flash before your eyes and then you have to remember all the smallest details forever?  After all, the human mind doesn't seem to be programmed to imagine its own mortality.  And since we don't really know what consciousness is, why assume that it resides exclusively in the brain, and that it is dependent for its existence on the continued viability of that organ?  What about those stories of organ transplant recipients who begin to experience memories associated with the deceased individual who donated the organs?  What about dreams, what about ghosts?  And, dare I say it, what about the possibility of retribution for all the crappy decisions and bad acts and evil thoughts?  Have we done enough good deeds to balance things out?  Are we accountable to Anyone but ourselves for all of that?

Some people (well, maybe a lot of them) think that all these questions are answered by their particular brand of religion.  Ricky Gervais, whom I admit is an acquired taste, explored the formulation of religious dogma in a film called "The Invention of Lying," in which the protagonist, living in a fictional world in which everyone always tells the truth, attempts to comfort his dying mother by making up a story about a "Man in the Sky" who controls everything and has a beautiful afterlife waiting for Mom.  Mom is comforted, but this story is overheard, and the thing quickly spirals out of control.  Next thing you know, the son is a world-famous prophet.  What is impressive to me is how hungry all those naive, honest people were for some answers, and how uncritical they were in examining the "prophet" once he started giving out the answers they sought.  "How do you know?" is a question that never came up... pretty much like real life. (And in real life, of course, if the question did come up, the response would be gibberish:  "Because the Bible says so," or "According to the magic golden plates that I lost," or "The Angel Gabriel buttonholed  me in a cave.")

If there is no purpose to Life, then it seems to follow naturally that there is no purpose to Death, either.  If there is a purpose to Life, then is there necessarily a purpose to Death?  (Other than just making room for more Life, that is.) Or is it something that just happens?  In the case of infants and kittens who die young, does either their life or their death have a purpose?  What is the purpose of the life of an evil, destructive person?  Or the death of a gentle nobody?  If Life is all there is, what's wrong with being a hedonist?  Or a sadist, for that matter, or a child molester?  What's worthy about being a saint?

If there is an Afterlife, a strange concept for which the empirical evidence is at best inconclusive, is it something that is the same for everybody, or is it tailored to the individual?  Are we constructing our own Heavens and Hells right now?  Or is there a big, shining City out there somewhere, with incessant harp music and hymns, one size white robe fits all?  Why would switching from Led Zeppelin or Steely Dan to that stuff necessarily be a reward as opposed to a punishment?  Remember that "Twilight Zone" where the crook winds up dead, and thinks he's in Heaven because he gets whatever he wants and things always go his way... until he realizes that the complete lack of adversity (can't even lose at pool) is driving him nuts, and it is revealed (by a leering, whited-suited Sebastian Cabot) that he's actually in the Other Place?

In the end, it all comes down to a belief system, whether you start from some holy book or a science text.  Either you believe that Life and Death matter, and have rules of some kind, or you don't.  And either way, I'll bet you stop and wonder sometimes.

Good God!

Hey, let’s talk about God.  I don’t mean using His Name in vain, or anything like that.  And I don’t mean let’s shout at each other like we were in church.  I’m talking about having a serious discussion, with God being the topic.

In the middle of the last century, the hot topic was Is God Dead?  But to me, that was jumping the gun, because I’m not sure anybody ever really got around to establishing that He existed in the first place.  Stephen Hawking, who is a self-professed atheist, states that the laws of physics can explain the existence of the Universe without the need for postulating the existence of a Creator.  I guess we’re going to have to take Hawking’s word for that, because physics at his level is Greek to me, and if it’s Greek to me, it’s Greek to you, believe me, unless of course you happen to be Greek.  But even assuming that Hawking is correct (as we must, for our purposes, anyway) all he’s saying is that there doesn’t have to be a God, and he doesn’t think there is one.  But not even Stephen Hawking can definitively say that there isn’t a God.

These days, we hear a lot about something called “Intelligent Design,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “if this is here, Somebody must have made it.”  Well, I’ll take Stephen Hawking’s word for the fact that "it ain’t necessarily so,” at least with respect to the individual marvels that the “creation scientists” typically point to as “proof” of the existence of God.  But again, I suppose that Somebody might have “made” the world.  But even if that were so, we’d have no better chance of being able to prove it than the ants digging in that ant farm in your kid’s room would have of proving that you exist.

So, maybe there’s a God.  Maybe there’s a being or a spirit or an entity that created all that we’re aware of as the Universe.  That’s where you’ve got to start.  So how do you prove whether or not there is such a One?  Lots of philosophers and theologians have tried, and for various reasons, none has succeeded.

Plato and Aristotle, among others, advanced what is called a “Cosmological Argument” for the existence of God.   Many others, including most notably St. Thomas Aquinas, have elaborated upon it.  The Cosmological Argument goes like this:  Everything has a beginning, and occurs as the result of some cause.  If you go back far enough, there has to be a beginning of everything, and the Cause of that beginning is what you’d have to call the First Cause… or the Uncaused Cause… or God.  This is why you’ve got to think of God as eternal—if nothing caused Him, then by definition he was always (and will always be) present.  For those of you who attend Christian churches, that might ring a bell:  “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, etc.”  Of course, Stephen Hawking seems to be challenging that, but if you think about it a little, you come to realize that there’s a major flaw in his reasoning, in that it requires an assumption that the laws of physics always existed as we now know them, and if that’s so, where’s the First Cause for them?

Stephen Hawking and most other physicists, by the way, trace the beginning of our Universe to something called the Big Bang, and conveniently deal with the problem of what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang by concluding that a) there’s no way of knowing; and b) it doesn’t matter to our understanding of the existing Universe in any event.  Of course, the Universe is and always has been defined by physicists by reference to what we know about it, and our conception of the Universe has changed quite a lot since it was conceived, a few thousand years ago,  as something flat carried upon the back of a giant turtle and surrounded by a series of crystal spheres, so I’ll bet that if you got a couple of drinks into Stephen Hawking he might admit the possibility that there are a few more questions to be answered around the fringes of his current theories.

Of course, both Plato and Aristotle believed in an eternal cosmos, that existed without beginning and without end, and that sounds a little more like the prayer mentioned above.  “Pantheists” believe that the Universe itself is God—i.e., that God is everywhere.  That works out pretty nicely, because if the Universe itself is everywhere and is eternal it would pretty much be occupying the same space as the omnipresent and eternal God that we’re looking for here.  Plotinus, back in the Third Century, felt that the Supreme Being would necessarily cause the Universe to exist, merely by the fact of His own existence, “creatio ex deo,” as expressed in Latin.

There’s something called the Ontological Argument, among the proponents of which was one Rene Descartes (the “I think, therefore I am” man.)  Those who favor the ontological approach to the problem of the existence of God usually define God as an entity “than which there can be no greater.”  Well, that’s clearly inviting discord, because who’s the greatest is pretty much a question of opinion, at least at the elite level.  Remember, even though Muhammad Ali just flat out told everybody the he was The Greatest, people fought him anyway, and eventually even whipped his ass… sort of.  And why would we assume that our Creator would necessarily be The Greatest?  In Robert Heinlein’s novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” for example, the Creator of our Universe is revealed to be a fledgling artist whose work (i.e., our Universe, including us) is judged—presumably by entities greater than the Creator—to be so seriously flawed that it has to be painted over. Maybe we—and our entire Universe—are just a mistake. How would we know? Of course, there are some people (like the Biblical Moses, for example) who report that God talks to them personally.  Oral Roberts once told his flock that a 900-foot Jesus tapped on the window of his upper-story office and told him to build a cancer treatment center.  Another time, Roberts announced that God would be “calling [him] home” unless he raised eight million bucks by the middle of March.  There are visitations from angels reported, too, and what about the Bible itself, touted as the Word of God? Like the old song says, “How do I know?  The Bible tells me so.”  Sounds a little circular, if you ask me.

And even if there is a Creator, who says that He would necessarily be all-knowing, all-powerful or all-good?  And how could He possibly be all three of those things, given the travesty of human history?  If, for example, God was all-knowing, He would have known about the Holocaust before, during and after the event.  If He was all-powerful, He could have prevented it.  And if He was all-good, He would have prevented it.  Does the occurrence of the Holocaust therefore prove that there is no God?  Or only that there is no God that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good?  (This, by the way, is called “The Problem of Evil,” and was first stated, so far as we know, by Epicurus.)

What if God were only two out of three?  If He were only all-powerful and all-good, for example, but not all-knowing, he might have just missed the Holocaust.  The Universe is vast.  Or maybe the “Deists” are right, and God just lost interest after creating the Universe, and pretty much lets it run itself—sort of like if you had an uncle who won the lottery, but figured that you were pretty much on your own if you fell behind on your mortgage.  A far scarier prospect, to me anyway, is the possibility that God might exist, and be all-powerful and all-knowing, but just not all-good.  After all, we’re supposedly made in His image, and it really doesn’t look like there was a serious attempt to make us all-good.  Or maybe the Holocaust was a special case, sort of like the invasion of Iraq, in which the shot-caller’s judgment was warped by pique at the victims’ previous bad acts against a relative… or something like that.

When we pray, to Whom, exactly, are we talking?  Is it to the Person in Charge, or simply to a lackey sitting in a celestial call-center?  Or an intern?  Or an apprentice?

Now, when I lie awake in the middle of the night and fret about all this stuff, I really tick off the lady of the house, who proudly boasts of her freedom from religious indoctrination and wants to know why in God’s name (well, she doesn’t say it like that, of course) I want to waste my time pondering the imponderable.  Heck, that’s like asking why I want to waste my time on James Bond or Star Trek… in other words, a good question.  But I guess there’s a part of me that wants to know, in the event I’m ever tempted to pray for anything, whether it would be more like I’m petitioning the White House or Santa Claus. Well, God and Santa are both magic, and either way, you might get an answer, but it might not be the one you’d like.  Still, from being a kid I remember that even if Santa didn’t bring me exactly what I wanted every time, he never gave me a real kick in the teeth like a World War, an auto accident, or a cancer diagnosis, either.  God, on the other hand, is always “waxing wroth” and smiting people… or so it says in His Own Book, anyway, and apparently, unlike Santa, or even the dentist, He never gives out toys.