EVIL & EVOLUTION

Chapter 6

Evil and World Process

Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born - but who, nevertheless, are being unmanifest, a lurking potential in the dark storehouse of the void. (Loren Eisley, The Unexpected Universe)

The problem of physical evil is most complex. It oscillates between the warp of random chance and the woof of the seemingly invariable laws of nature. It includes not only the conditions that are part of the essential constitution of the natural world, but also those accidents and calamities which, to the human eye, the world could do very well without. No doubt part of the problem is to distinguish between those happenings that inevitably take place as a result of the lack of total perfection in the great "chain of being" and the psychological reaction of suffering that these things occasion in humans and perhaps in animals as well. Setting this last consideration aside, for the present, let us focus on those things that the world might run more smoothly without.

Even here there is a wide range of opinion. Could, for example, the continents have been formed without the continuing aftermath of earthquakes? Could any agricultural activity flourish without the existence of other areas, like frozen wastelands and deserts, that seem utterly useless for agriculture? Could there be any food chain without the existence of animals of prey or even parasitic organisms? (Are not we ourselves "beasts of prey" and "parasites" in respect to the ecological scheme of things?)

In addition to this order of give-and-take in nature which seems to work out to the benefit of some if not all, there is the nearly constant occurrence of other problems afflicting plant and animal life as well as mankind which appear to serve no good purpose -- unless the "culling" of vast populations can be seen as somehow a stage preliminary to renewal. Even in such cases must we not question whether it is somehow better to die from some sudden disaster than simply have a population die off slowly through lack of food?

Finally, we also have to face the problem of genetic defects which affect all forms of life. While, as we shall see, the chance of mutations is integral to the process of evolution, is it necessary that there be physical, and in humans mental, defects which wreak so much havoc with the otherwise orderly development of life?

Obviously much depends on how we view the whole process and how we define physical evil in relation to it. Certainly we cannot help but look at it from the viewpoint of the human experience of pain and suffering, yet, even if we discount this anthropocentric point of view, it appears that there are true physical evils aside from whatever pain is caused. A three- legged calf, even if it should never become aware of its deformity, is defective nonetheless. To borrow from the classical philosophers and the scholastic theologians, at least some kinds of evil can be seen as a defect of being or of order in what is otherwise good. In much the same way, while death itself must be necessary, it is nevertheless an evil (perhaps, for humans, the greatest evil) for the individual creature whose existence we take to be a good in itself.

If all these evils are in some way natural, even necessary in the long run, how can they be said to be "evil?" Are they considered to be evil only because of a flaw in human perception? Or even if real, is physical evil merely something relative, containing no final, absolute significance in itself? (It is strange how such modern questions suggest the ancient Vedic reductions of evil and the world which contains it to the category of "maya" -- of mere change amounting to illusion.) With the greater portion of humanity, we refuse to see it that way. We tend to consider even relative evil as something actual in the world, something existing outside of our own perception and evaluation of it. Yet it is clear that there is a riddle here, one which for more than just our own satisfaction, must be solved. Both the riddle and the answer lies in the creative process itself.

Chance and Choice

Albert Einstein refused to believe that God plays dice with the universe. This world-renowned theoretical physicist, whom very few considered to be an avowedly religious person, was personally convinced that the universe invariably followed set laws of physical behavior. This apparent denial of the place of chance occurrence in the development of the universe is surprising, especially when his own formulation of the general and particular theories of relativity almost completely upset the hitherto-accepted Newtonian ideas of a clock-work-like universe.

In contrast, the priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose avowed purpose in life was to promote a general harmony between scientific and religious thought, believed that God plays creatively with chance. How are we to account for this rather surprising divergence of views concerning the role of chance in evolution?

Obviously the explanation can not be traced to differing theological stances. If it could, one might expect just the reverse situation, with the committed Christian downplaying the chance factor and the pure scientist doing just the opposite. More likely the difference can be traced to the mathematical basis of theoretical physics as opposed to the more experimental approach of the life-sciences. Even here, however, there is something of an irony, for it was another great modern physicist, Werner Heisenberg, who first introduced what amounts to a major reassessment of the place of chance in the basic structure of the universe.

In fact, Heisenberg's Indeterminacy Principle not only holds that it is impossible to determine exactly simultaneously both the nature and position of the smallest particles of energy or matter but in addition, that their behavior, in itself, is to a large extent unpredictable. The result is that rather than seeing the laws of nature as inflexible rules to which all things must conform (whatever be the correct formulation of these rules) , Indeterminacy sees these laws merely as statistical predictions of how most, but not all, particles will react to given conditions. It is only when the individual particles are lumped together that behavior seems to take on a predictable uniformity. Even more important is the fact that when they are combined into more complex atomic and molecular structures their elemental "freedom" becomes hemmed in by more invariable patterns of performance.

Certainly there is a paradox in this, particularly when we compare this modern view of chance to classical notions of cause. The medieval scholastic idea of "chance" was simply a word used to describe the lack of sure information about the immediate cause of any effect. Since God, however, was seen as the ultimate cause of everything, ultimately there was no such thing as chance! The Indeterminacy Principle, on the other hand, seeing everything as ultimately based on chance, is claimed, at least by some, to all but eliminate the whole notion of cause. By such standards, despite the nearly complete dismantling of the old Newtonian ideas of a universe ruled by a clockwork-like mechanism of cause and effect, Einstein's universe of Relativity still seems to be ruled by a God who has disposed of everything according to a fixed plan! Surely there must be room for another possibility -- a God who can allow things to be caused by chance.

Admittedly then the notion of "chance" is a very slippery one, having different overtones for different people. Yet on the whole, as the biologist Jacques Monod says, we tend to think of chance in terms of a certain "randomness" or the "quality of an event that results from the intersection of two totally independent chains of events" (Monod, 1971, p.121). Such, for example, would be an occurrence like that of person A who just happens to be walking by a building when person B, who just happens to be working on the roof at that very moment, accidentally drops his hammer. Assuming that B has no murderous intentions against A, we conclude that if A just happens to be struck in the head and killed, this is an accident, an entirely chance occurrence, even if the old adage about not walking near or especially under ladders or the common precaution of wearing a hard-hat around construction sites indicate the probability of such accidents under certain conditions. The element of chance is surely present here, but just as surely the element of cause as well.

Of course, if we were to assume that B was waiting for A and actually aimed the hammer at him, we then could assume that B was causing a homicide. Yet even here, chance, in the form of various other circumstances, could intervene to frustrate the murderer's design. Thus, while every event logically would seem to have a cause (or a whole series of causes), some of these causes are not only difficult to discern, but likewise defy any sure predictability, especially when it comes to forecasting any simultaneous interaction of causes to produce an invariable result. While definitions and examples could be multiplied endlessly, or even words like chance, indeterminacy, accidentalness, or randomness more or less interchanged, it should be evident that such factors are part of the chain of causality. The idea that chance somehow eliminates any otherwise intelligible element of cause would seem to be an outworn part of a strategy to argue against the existence of God as the First Cause. As such, this tactic seems to reproduce the same error that is involved in many people's problem with evil - the assumption that any First Cause must necessarily be directing the occurrence of any secondary causes. For both kinds of mentalities, God would seem to be a kind of homicidal workman who could not only aim his hammer blows unerringly, but who would also control the movements of all pedestrians: Such a picture of God or the world is unreal.

On the contrary, this element of basic indeterminacy or chance, taken precisely as a cause, is of capital importance. Once we survey its effect on the evolution of things, we will see that not only has indeterminacy determined the course of events, but that even at this very fundamental level, without chance there would be no evolution at all, at least in the accepted scientific sense of the term.

To better understand this fact, we must become more specific. Evolution in the sense of biological transformism can be understood as the development of one biological type from another. This phenomenon can be understood narrowly in terms of offspring not resembling their parents in every respect, thus allowing for gradual variations within a species leading to the formation of distinct races or types. Or understood more broadly (as the present-day general theory of evolution would have it) this biological transformism would include the emergence of wholly distinct new species which, although they share common ancestors, can no longer successfully interbreed. In either interpretation, evolution depends initially on the occurrence of genetic mutations. After a century of argument, it has been generally agreed that, while the effects of such mutations tend to follow more or less set laws (beginning with those formulated by Mendel), the actual occurrence of such mutations in terms of the alterations in the DNA coding of the chromosomes is extremely unpredictable. We not only do not know the exact cause of the mutations, although solar radiation and "mistranslations" of the genes are commonly thought to be major factors. However, the predictability of a single mutation happening in a certain specified way is about as random a matter as forecasting the impact point of a hammer falling from a housetop. All that can be known are statistical averages.

Thus Monod estimates that the rate of even easily detected mutations (the ones that can be seen in microscopic examination of genetic material) averages on the rate of 10-4 to 10-5 , which translates into an incidence of 100 to 1000 billion mutations (as multiplied by X# of genes per individual) occurring in an overall population of three billion humans within a single generation. At this rate, as Monod exclaimed "...the amazing and indeed paradoxical thing, hard to explain, is not evolution but rather the stability of the 'forms' that make up the biosphere." (Monod, 1971, p. 121.) Part of the reason for the stability, however, is that rarely if ever will a single mutant gene cause a significant change in a general biological type. More often only a certain combination of mutations will effect a significant change, a process that has been compared to a couple of masons rummaging through a pile of rubble to find a suitable number of reusable bricks: most of the material they come across will prove to be entirely unsuitable -- a conclusion also recently confirmed in the research involved in mapping the human genome.

Thus, even here the odds are not very favorable for any mutation turning out to be a beneficial change. As George Gaylord Simpson repeatedly pointed out, the great majority of genetic changes result in organisms that are less able to survive than their well adapted predecessors. It is only the changing environment, acting as a "sieve", that favor any variant gene or gene combination out of the raw material that mutation provides. Statistically, mutant forms of life are much more likely to be biological failures or at least severely handicapped, if they survive at all. Still, considering all the factors favoring survival in the stable forms of life as against the "loaded" dice of random mutation, the incidence of harmful genetic defects is imposing. Over 1500 single gene hereditary defects are possible in the world's population, with conditions like cystic fibrosis afflicting caucasians at a rate of one out of every three thousand (with one out of thirty as carriers) and Down's Syndrome ("mongolism") afflicting one out of two thousand live births (and one out of fifty children born to women over 40). One out of every four hundred males are born with an extra X chromosome; a condition often resulting in mental retardation. Eighty percent of achondroplastic dwarfism apparently results from fresh genetic mutation with no previous family history of the condition. Such figures are hardly reassuring for those who would credit God with disposing all things for human benefit!

While genetic mutation remains the greatest chance element in evolution, it is not the only such factor. According to Simpson, fluctuations in genetic frequencies (or what is called "sampling errors" in a given gene pool) as well as the inflow of genes from other populations within the same species are two other highly variable and equally unpredictable factors. These chance elements, coming from "outside" in terms of the influence of selective or differential interbreeding of individuals and races only further increase the chance of genetic mutations in the offspring of parent stock that is already susceptible to the possibility of mutation from within.

If all these factors form the element of chance in evolution, there also remains what might be called the element of "choice". For most purposes, this element might be better termed "necessity" or "determination" to stress its quality of certainty or inevitability. Even here we are only dealing with relativities, with what amounts only to a certain predictability in the face of unlimited randomness. Evolutionary biology has generally thought of natural selection as the limiting or determining factor, the anti-chance element that balances or even to some extent cancels out the nearly complete randomness of mutation and other chance factors. In old-fashioned Darwinian terms, this natural selection was thought to operate on the basis of a "survival of the fittest." The climate, the competition for available food, or even just the comparative strength of the mutants was thought to determine which organisms would live and reproduce, and which would lose out in this brutal competition and die. Thus the wild prodigality of chance mutation would be relentlessly "screened" and trimmed by an almost automatic process that would inevitably harden biological efflorescence into a highly predictable series of types or species.

It is not that such ideas were wrong, but the whole process of natural selection has turned out to be considerably more flexible than was once thought. For one thing, it is not so much a question of the survival of the fittest as conceived in an individualistic way (the strongest ape, the fleetest horse, etc.) as it is a question of which type of organism proves most successful in terms of "differential reproduction." It is not that characteristics such as strength, speed, or cunning in selected individuals are negligible factors (if you breed race horses or hunting dogs you had better believe it!), but that the decisive factor in the battle for survival is now thought to be the ability of a whole population successfully to reproduce itself as a distinct species in comparative reproductive isolation. Species that can maintain reproductive superiority without diluting their genetic pool by interbreeding with other types will very often end up winning out over a line of supposedly superior physical types which don't reproduce as readily or as successfully. Thus researchers and theorists in the field of "sociobiology" (sometimes referred to as "the New Darwinism") are close to claiming that it is the genes alone that are the controlling and motivating force of evolution. Neither the individual organism nor even the whole group or species are seen to exist for their own sake; they are merely host populations used by the DNA sequences which according to the sociobiological spokesman George Pieczenik, "exist to protect themselves and their own information" (TIME, Aug. 31, 1977, p.55). The individual organism, or even the whole species, really doesn't count!

The point that I am trying to emphasize here is that if this current trend in biological theory is correct, then we must see that even the supposedly anti-chance or determining factor of natural selection as it is now understood itself seems to be largely a matter of chance. If teleology or the attribution of some kind of purpose in the process of evolution has always been a touchy subject, one which has tended to credit Nature with some kind of creative foresight not unlike that which theologians have attributed to God, the tenets of sociobiology would seem to be forcing us toward the unlikely conclusion that it is particles of protein that alone "plan" the course of evolution. Whether or not the sociobiologists are correct, the result of this reexamination of the so-called "determination" or "necessity" that governs natural selection or differential reproduction is unsettling. On the level of the biological process alone, understood in isolation from whatever other forces may be at work in the universe, the "choice" or determination is apparently a matter of random chance. No one, not even the sociobiologists, credit DNA with having a conscious mind of its own. "Determination" of a sort there may be, even a kind of "choice" in a brutish world of basic indeterminacy, but pushed this far, such words tend to loose all meaning.

Further evidence of this basic randomness in the midst of what supposedly limits the results of chance mutation is even more striking when one comes to paleontology (the study of ancient forms of life). Simpson tells us that "Throughout the whole history of life most species have become extinct, without issue. The statistically usual outcome of evolution is not, then, the progressive appearance of higher forms but simply obliteration." (Simpson, 1961, p.21.) The reasons for this are several. For one, most mutations, as we have seen, are non-adaptive, that is, they lead to extinction rather than improvement. More decisive yet, those mutations which do prove adaptive and of some advantage in the struggle for survival usually do so only on a strictly limited and limiting basis. Most adaptations are highly opportunistic, fitted to a particular climate or a lucky abundance of a certain food supply. If the climate should change, or if the food supply be wiped out by some other sudden catastrophe, the happy accident will soon turn out to be a curse.

The case of the famous Irish Elk is a striking example. For reasons unknown, in the times following the last ice age, this large species of deer evolved enormous antlers -- males sporting racks well over six to eight feet in spread, presumably to fend off rival males. Suddenly the species died out. Did the growth of forests make their moving about nearly impossible? Did the nutritional drain of growing a new set of these gigantic appendages each year (or even their sheer weight) prove to be too much of a strain? We can only speculate on such a profligacy in nature. Fortunately for us it was the brain that expanded in the ancestors of the human species. In the long run it is not the opportunistic specializations that favor success, but the specialization of not becoming too specialized. There seems to be a lesson here that extends beyond biological evolution.

In this discussion of chance and choice in the role of evolution, it should be quite evident by now that this randomness is, for the most part, what is behind not only the progress of evolution, but equally behind its failures. Statistically the failures far outnumber the successes when we judge them as individual ventures or experiments of nature. That we should call these failures "evils" is, of course, a human judgment which must be balanced by the realization that evolution as a whole has been a success. And that success we judge, like the Creator in the Book of Genesis, to be "good", indeed, "very good."

Such judgments aside, the overwhelming evidence is that life has evolved only at the expense of most of the forms of life other than those which presently exist. It could well go on that way, with most of the present forms of life doomed to some day disappear. Not that the overall process has been automatic. It has involved many random events, any one of which could have set the whole course of evolution in a completely different direction -- or even have nipped the whole thing in the bud!

Theodosius Dobzhansky, the famous and highly respected geneticist insisted (despite the contrary opinions of many other scientists, but most of them physicists and astronomers venturing outside their respective fields) that while there are undoubtedly many other planets in the universe which might support life of some sort, there is very little probability that such life would duplicate the same course of evolution as that which occurred on this planet. As Simpson pointed out, it is not just the randomness of genetic mutation that supports such a conclusion, but even more the randomness of all the factors involved in natural selection that would affect the results. It is not just ourselves as individuals, as Loren Eisley has said, who are "statistical impossibilities." The whole human species, or even life as we know it on this earth, comes very close to having been such an impossibility.

Being ourselves the children of chance, it is not surprising that there also lurks, both within the void of the universe and within each one of us, a "dark storehouse" from which unknown potentialities may manifest themselves. There are not only all the genetic mutations which may occur in ourselves. There are also the rapidly evolving viruses and bacterial parasites that hover, seemingly ready at a moment's notice, to change themselves into new forms that defy with impunity the weapons of modern medicine. We carry even within ourselves a perverse potential for our own cells to go berserk and to multiply in wildly cancerous forms, whether triggered by viruses or other outside agents, or simply by the caprice of genetic factors within us. If chance, whether from within or without our own organisms, can wreak such havoc, it may be just as much a question of chance that we can survive. Jacques Monod believed there is good evidence that even the antibodies that form the frontline defense of our own immunity system are themselves only able to arm themselves against invading cell growth by means of a fortuitous or random matching process. In this case chance recombinations and mutations would be the only means by which the right combinations are found -- not unlike a wrestler attempting different holds on an opponent or a gambler betting on different numbers. We always hope the statistics would remain on our side, but unfortunately even a winning streak must eventually end. The odds are stacked in favor of the house. Not only have the vast majority of species sooner or later died, but each individual, be it a member of a successful species or not, must die. Chance leaves no choice in the end.

Evolution and Death

If it can be said that evolution is built upon the contending variables of genetic mutation and natural selection, it can be just as truly said that it is also built upon the invariant of death. A strange paradox, perhaps one that would not exist in a "better" world, but one that necessarily exists in our own.

Life feeds upon death. New life as we know it requires the death of what has already lived. The successful evolution of new types of life depends, to a large extent, upon the disappearance of former types. Conditions that favored the age of the dinosaurs would not have favored the appearance of the primates from which we have taken our remote ancestry. Whenever some earlier and more primitive types still survive, it is almost inevitable that newer, higher forms of life pray upon them. This is what largely constitutes the pattern of food-chain even today. Microscopic bacteria prepare the soil for plants, animals in turn consume plant life, other animals consume them, and humans consume them all. Of course many exceptions exist, some of them anticipating the end of each higher organism, when the bacteria turn on plant, animal, and human alike and consume them. In either case, the major point remains: no form of life survives except at the expense of other life, always feeding upon the nutrients of life that belong, have belonged, or could have belonged to another living creature.

There remains another fact that is just as basic. In an even more intensive fashion, sexual reproduction, although responsible for new life, is the harbinger of death. The only living creatures that are, in a certain natural sense, "immortal" are those which reproduce asexually, that is to say, those which prolong their existence not by an exchange of genes with others of their kind, but which simply divide or split in half. Even this mode of reproduction involves a kind of "death" for, while the primitive protoplasm may live on (at least until such a time as it is consumed by something else), still, it ceases to exist as an individual. It is not amoeba A plus amoeba B, but amoeba A becoming amoebas B and C.

Although simple protoplasmic life loses only its numerical identity in the act of reproduction, this is not the case in life that reproduces sexually. While the genes involved in sexual reproduction can be said to "live on", albeit in new combinations, the individuals of which they are a part are themselves doomed. Thus, on the biological level, sexual reproduction alone guarantees true individuality; an individuality that is more than just a numerical difference from its source. Yet just as sexual reproduction results in the statistical impossibility that is our own organism's uniqueness, so too does sexual reproduction make it impossible that our offspring ever be exactly like us. Biologically speaking, only cloning could produce that result in higher animals, yet even then the parent (as well as the offspring) remains subject to death. True individuality, implies mortality. The price of being totally unique is death.

What, then, can be so wrong with death? Is it not just part of the overall scheme of things? How can something so necessary and natural really be considered as an "evil" in the real sense of the word -- a disorder of sorts or even something which should not be? Is it not just our sense of individual self-awareness that protests -- quite unreasonably at that? Perhaps, but I think it goes deeper than that.

We protest death in the name of our own uniqueness but so, in some sense, does the animal world, at least the higher animals. While it may be improper to speak of an animal fearing death (because man alone, as Dobzhansky said, can contemplate the fact of his own impending death), still animals share a common drive toward life and generally manifest a certain instinctual avoidance of death-dealing situations. Allowing for certain "altruistic" behavior, such as defending their own kind, especially their own offspring, to the point of death, animals nevertheless will generally struggle to keep themselves alive, at least to the point that there can be said to be any hope of survival left. Without such an instinct neither the individuals nor the species would have long survived. No doubt our own fear of death also has its roots in this subconscious drive to live.

There is, however, something more. Individuality and the spontaneity it implies also seems to be a value or "good" of evolutionary significance. If we speak of "higher" forms of life, it is not simply because they have a long evolutionary pedigree which culminates in a perfected type of species in their line. The common house fly, as Simpson pointed, is the culmination of its line of evolution, partly for the same reasons (perhaps because of its adaptability to nearly all types of environments) as humans represent the culmination of primate development. Yet we do not think of houseflies as higher forms of life. This is because they lack the spontaneity and hence the individuality of the truly higher forms, particularly as found in the mammals. So too, while honeybees may have developed very intricate and well-ordered societies (which some people would like to see emulated by our own), no one mourns the loss of an individual bee, including the other bees, all of whom live, with the exception of the queen, for only about six to eight weeks. All bees, at least of their own class, are equally alike and equally expendable (especially the drones) for the sake of the whole colony. In contrast, the loss of a beloved dog, or even of a particular wild animal with which one has become familiar, is something else. These higher animals are individuals in a very real sense. Any- one who has tried to replace a faithful dog companion of many years' standing will never believe that one dog is just like another even if, through careful breeding, the new dog looks just like its predecessor. While it may be true that pets, especially dogs, reflect to a large degree not only the training given to them but also the personal habits of their masters, no one who really knows dogs believes for an instant that they are all pretty much alike.

One may be accused of too much anthropomorphism in a discussion like this, Naturally we value in animals those traits that reflect aspects of ourselves. Simpson once commented that elephants might perhaps question our supposing of ourselves to be the highest of all animals, considering that they weigh a lot more, live just as long or longer, and have, undoubtedly, longer noses. That they might but in fact are unable to ask such questions is exactly the point. Nor is the ability to ponder as we do simply a result of large brains (again the elephant and most certainly the whale should win the prize in this category) or even the size of the brain in proportion to the body -- not only the porpoise but even the common house mouse outclass us in this. There is something else.

The reason that humans can be said to rank highest on the evolutionary scale is to be found in their powers to reason and reflect. One may, of course, object to our setting the scale on the basis of these powers, but in order to object one must rely on these same powers. There is no way around this. Nor is there any way around the fact that humans alone can consciously think of death precisely as an evil. Animals indeed can fear or shun death, but only humans can "know" death in anticipatory awareness, not only knowing death as a phenomenon around us, but "knowing that we know" and dreading the revelation of that which we can not escape. Just as our individuality is not merely a question of unique set of genes or a numerical distinctness, but of human reflective awareness, death too is something that we do not just avoid by blind instinct or even by a simple awareness that death is the end of life. Death is the end of me! -- the period at the end of a sentence that can never be repeated.

Is death, then, just a peculiarly human hangup? No, there is something more to it than that. We do not consider death an evil just because we do not like death, particularly our own death. Evolution, although it is built upon death, is the story of life. No species, no individual, exists in order to die, even though the death of individuals, and even sometimes of whole species, is necessary to make way for further life. The goal of evolution, if it may be said to have a goal or purpose, is life. In the peculiar sense of the word assigned to it by Teilhard de Chardin, there is a true "orthogenesis" (or goal- directed process) within evolution as implied in the very catchword or phrase "survival of the fittest." What is survival or life but a kind of purpose in itself? If being or existence in this sense seems to be the whole point of evolution, then the nonbeing of death is an anti-value, the counterpoint to life which evolution flees even while using it. Death is the physical expression of nothingness. No amount of life, by itself, can make death or what leads to nonbeing or nonexistence into something good in itself.

Viewed from these perspectives of death as natural, as necessarily part of the whole process of evolution, yet, at the same time, as metaphysically the antithesis of the emergence of the life for which evolution exists, we seem to be caught in an irresolvable paradox. God appears not only as The Author of Life but also (despite the statement in Ecclesiastes) as the author of death as well. Yet we believe that God irrevocably stands for life and the enhancement of life. God has committed himself in the struggle against death, yet even here there is a further paradox, for the one whom Christians believe manifested God's will to live ("I have come to bring you life and life more abundantly") himself knew that he must undergo, indeed sacrifice himself in, death. Why? Where is the answer to this riddle? Or is there one?

The Final Enemy

Death may well be the ultimate negation of individual life in this world. For the believer, it may also be the threshold to greater life. For believer and unbeliever alike, however, it remains the inevitable cessation of the life we have known. Perhaps, for those for whom life has ceased to be tolerable and for whom continued living is too wearisome, too pain-racked, or too psychologically torturous to be endured any longer, death comes as a liberation. Death then assumes the guise of a Janus, a two-faced god, whose visage scowls upon most of life and yet, when life itself can no longer be sustained, turns a merciful smile toward the victim of life.

Death, like all physical evil, but perhaps even more than any experience of pain, displays a certain ambivalence. Like pain, it remains a condition of life. Just as the sensation of pain warns us and protects us from what is harmful to life, so too death must provide for new life and to a large extent even sustain it. Yet, taken in itself, death still remains the great barrier, the inevitable enigma, which consumes not only the banquet it sets but the guests as well. How then can we deal with such a host if we are not at liberty to refuse the invitation?

One thing is clear -- if death must be faced, we would choose to face it on our own terms. If the ancient warrior often chose to die in battle rather than languish as a prisoner, even at the risk of being left abandoned or unburied in an alien land, it was because he believed the loss of control over his life or afterlife was preferable to the loss of control over the very act of dying. The moment of our death is, as theologian Karl Rahner insisted, the summation of our life, thus it should be the recapitulation of how we have lived. So if a man lacks the ultimate power to avoid death, at least he would aspire to choose the mode of his dying.

All this suggests that the worst aspect of death is its unpredictability. It is significant that the movement for "living wills" and even the practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide has grown in proportion to the modern ability to prolong physical survival. If the unpredictability of chance or random mutation has been seen as an enemy in the first protoplasmic beginnings of our lives, it is not surprising that many would protest its having the final say in our demise. To die at the end of a long, happy, even prosperous life, full of years and blessed in the memory of descendants and friends, is a bittersweet tragedy, an end that is not without its grace. But to be stricken with a lingering terminal illness in one's youth, or to be consigned to a prolonged senility or useless confinement, these are the kind of living deaths against which death itself seems a welcome friend. Innocents cut down before knowing what life is about seem lucky in comparison.

I am now speaking, of course, of human suffering, of psychological evil, which must be distinguished from the biological phenomena of pain or death. To separate our reactions to these experiences from the hard physical facts themselves remains psychologically impossible. However we may choose to attempt to thwart its effects, chance continues to play its capricious game with life (our lives!) through all its phases: conception, birth, growth, prime and decline, and even in death. Like the shadowy character in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, we gaze spellbound and horrified. Our world is like the beach at the Galapagos where we, like the newly-hatched sea turtles, rush headlong toward the sea of life, only to be slashed to pieces by the hovering, diving birds of prey. In this death- and life- filled scene we too can see the story of evolution and perhaps even the face of God!

To grasp this vision in all its brutishness and simply to cast it off with a casual shrug is too little, or too much. If humans must die, they are intent on at least dying with a sense of purpose or dignity. It may seem strange that we are so concerned to make the greatest common denominator in life, which is death, in some ways the very climax of our existence. Why is it that for us there may be only one greater indignity than having lived in vain, and that is to have died in vain? To have both lived and died as a victim of chance is for humans the epitome of senselessness and for a rational animal, for one who seeks purpose above all, such meaninglessness seems the height of all evil.

But is it? Observing the seeming irrational choice of death in the face of the otherwise overwhelmingly universal desire to live, Freud at one time postulated the existence of a death instinct. He believed, at least for awhile, that some force rooted beneath our conscious self was quite capable of driving us to death as surely as lemmings sometimes unaccountably drive themselves into the sea. Is such a thing possible for humans? Altruistic motives can propel a person to willingly accept death. Is this, however, for the sake of dying or is it not for a vision, the hope of a better life for oneself or for others? Even in the case of suicide, especially since it is almost universally agreed that it is psychologically impossible to really envision our own death (we can only imagine ourselves as live bystanders at our own funerals), it would seem that what we really imagine is not death but somehow another, better, life.

If this is true, then what we instinctively fear is not death so much as nonbeing. So much do we fear this that we seem incapable, for the most part, of even imagining it. Yet, it is said, herein lies the key to all philosophical reflection - - why do we exist? What is existence? Why is there something rather than nothing? Useless questions perhaps, in the eyes of many, yet to avoid them, to brush them off as idle speculation, is to run the risk of never having fully, humanly, lived. What is more, the fear of facing them may block any realistic appraisal of the power of evil in our lives.

Ernest Becker, in two brilliant books published shortly after his own untimely death, attempted to link the Escape from Evil with The Denial of Death. Despite its being awarded a Pulitzer Prize, Becker 's "Denial" was termed "wrong-headed" by at least one critic and was very unsettling to many humanistically inclined reviewers. Following in the footsteps of Freud's disciple, Otto Rank, Becker made the bold claim that all human culture and civilization, all religion, all personal ambition, whether crassly expressed in the piling up of wealth and power, or more subtly and lastingly in artistic creation and intellectual achievement, is motivated by the refusal to accept death as inevitable. All these things, just as surely as doting on one's offspring or building a marble mausoleum for ourselves, or even giving an anonymous bequest, are attempts to purchase immortality.

That these things can be a force for good is obvious. Equally obvious is that these pursuits can become expressions of evil. Unlimited wealth and political power, selfish family concern for prestige, even religious causes, have all been, good excuses for tyranny, economic slavery, and murderous crusades. Not only do these things promise a type of life after death, they also bestow a certain illusion of deathlessness, flaunting defiance of the danger of dying itself. As Becker recalled Winston Churchill exclaiming, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result!"

If the young Churchill emerged from his first brush with death with a sense of immortality, what are we to say of the Kamikaze pilots of World War II or the waves of Chinese infantry in Korea, some of them unarmed, who rushed enemy emplacements to form a human bridge, whether dead or alive, for their comrades to clamber over? It is said that they were high on opium. Perhaps, but they need not have been. They were already high on a sense of their own immortal destiny. There is nothing new in all of this. People have repeatedly sacrificed themselves and their fellow humans in their eternal war with death. If the Twentieth Century seems to be a landmark era in this revelation of the power of death to pervert human life, with its propagandized ideologies of Thousand Year Reichs and utopian socialism, it has been, according to Becker, only a "refresher course" in the annals of human folly. The flight from death has always been and, unfortunately, will always be the greatest motivation for evil in the world. Unable to defeat death, humanity will first deny it, then flaunt it, and finally try to make death serve our purposes beyond the grave.

Christianity is, according to Becker (who considered himself an unbeliever), the only religion that attempted to fully confront the power of evil which can only be overcome through the acceptance of death. It would do so by the power of the cross by which death is turned against itself. Perhaps non-Christians, especially those who reject Christianity as too "death-centered", have realized this better than Christians have. Perhaps Christianity, in this very central sense as well as others, has, as G. K. Chesterton once said, "never been tried." If it was tried in its beginning, it soon became, as Bonhöffer suggested, like all the other "religions" -- an escape-hatch from reality, the "opium of the people" that the Marxists claimed it to be.

The lure of such an escape is strong. As the poet Montaigne once wrote: "It is not so much death we fear, but dying." Death, for all its capriciousness, is nevertheless inevitable; dying - - the willing acceptance of death -- is not. We will all some day be dead, but not everyone will fully experience dying, consciously and voluntarily commending our spirit back to the source of all life. The hallmark of all false religion has been the promise of immortality, the release from death, without having to face the process of dying. Such has been the great "escape from evil" which has only bred more evil in turn. Each of us in our uniqueness, as the "statistical impossibility" which somehow we came to be, fears return to that dark void of nothingness from which we came. That void, however, has another face, the face of God. Indeed, death is the final enemy, but it is in dying that we live.

Proceed to Chapter 7

Return to Table of Contents

File:Ee6.htm 3/23/2000