I came to realize this when I attempted to fill out the prompts in the survey you listed. I couldn’t make a realistic claim; none of my parents or grandparents have even turned 80, let alone had the opportunity to live past that age. With this incomplete information, the survey claimed that I should “plan” to live to 102. This speaks volumes about how much heredity must play into the figures; once I know how young/old my parents and grandparents die, I’ll have a much more realistic age. But the very fact that I don’t have any relatives over 80 yet makes me realize my own ignorance of mortality, in a way.

Anyway, back on the topic of the post, theists make many lofty claims about what we “need” religion to do. They claim we need religion to have morals, and they claim we need religion to have peace of mind regarding issues of life and death. We see plenty of responses both new and old to the former claim, but this post gives a solid response to the latter.

In the Bible’s book of Genesis, God barred Adam and Eve from eating of the Tree of Knowledge, for doing so would bring them death. However, was this truly such a bad thing? What if Adam and Eve had NOT eaten from the Tree of Knowledge? Would any of us have ever existed? If God had allowed Adam and Eve to procreate without death, what would our living conditions be today?

Indeed, one of the arguments I’ve heard from some Fundamentalist Christians, as they try to comport the Bible’s 6000-year history of humans with science’s 4-billion-year history of our planet, is that the Bible does not actually say how long Adam and Eve frolicked around in Eden — by themselves — before Eve ate the fruit and began having children. These Fundamentalists suggest that perhaps Adam and Eve frolicked for 4 billion years, thus making the Bible’s history of humans consistent with the known age of our planet. If so, however, this would suggest that NONE OF US WOULD EVER HAVE EXISTED had Eve not eaten the fruit and brought death to our species. Had Eve not eaten the fruit, the human race might never have grown beyond a population of two.

A similar thing happens today, every time hunting or fishing season comes around. For example, the population of white tailed deer in America greatly exceeds the winter food supply available to feed them all; thus, the fall deer hunting season culls the herd, reducing the population to one that is more consistent with the available food. The result: more deer survive the winter because of hunting than would have survived without hunting.

The bottom line: although each of us might worry about our own death, death (of our ancestors) has actually enabled each of us to have the lives we do. Whether we believe in evolution, or the Bible’s creation story, the fact that humans die has made our lives far better than they otherwise would be, just as our deaths will make the lives of our descendants better than they otherwise would be. Indeed, many species live only just long enough to produce the next generation, suggesting that nature (or God) finds great value in killing off the parents before they consume more food than the next generation requires for its own survival. Indeed, some people even ask: if medical science ever figures out how to stop our biological clocks from ticking — i.e., enable us to live for hundreds of years in relatively good health — would this actually be a good thing for our species?