By Dan’s Brother Nate

Some of my favorite memories with Dan involve our shared love of highly-quotable media like Homestar Runner, Mystery Men, and Red vs Blue. We always envied the Gilmore Girls for their ability to quote obscure media at a mile a minute, and actively worked to improve our own repertoire of inside jokes so that we could annoy Mom with greater efficiency.

One quote that found common expression between the two of us was the opening line of Red vs Blue, “Do you ever wonder why we’re here?”

Simmons: You ever wonder why we’re here?

Grif: That’s one of life’s great mysteries, isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.

Simmons: What? I mean why are we out here in this canyon?

Grif: Oh.

While I was usually compared to Simmons for being a brownnoser, in the above exchange I was definitely Grif, and Dan was definitely Simmons. I always buried my head in philosophy, trying to understand this life we’ve been given, and Dan always spent his time actually living it. He understood more about people by instinct than I will ever know by theory, and I always envied his more natural charm. Yet I still think it’s valuable to intentionally think about the world around us, especially the deep questions of life. The death of a loved one in particular gives us a moment in time when the inevitability of our own demise is unearthed, a truth that we otherwise bury beneath the bustle of everyday life.

You can see of course why Dan was always more popular than me :-). He was thoroughly enjoyable to be around, in part because of the humorous way he would instinctively move a conversation away from the natural friction that comes when people converse about things, great and small. In most situations, Dan’s humor was a tremendous asset.

But it was also the reason that he and I could never really talk about the important things of life, or at least it was a contributing factor. For my part, I was usually too much of a coward to broach any subject of real significance, and in those rare moments when I did, Dan would predictably direct the conversation in a more pleasant direction. A joke, a quote, an eye-roll and a tease, whatever would ease the tension of the moment. We never made it past the jokes and the video games, and that will always be a point of regret for me.

I don’t much care for discussing religion, politics, or any of the other forbidden subjects myself, except when there’s an eager partner standing on common ground. Debate is exhausting, and people don’t usually appreciate it. But then you get hit with a funeral, the death of someone you love, and you know that a joke, a quote, an eye-roll and a tease aren’t going to cover this one. The important things matter. Is death the end? Or is there really a God watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff.

So I’ve learned to force myself and others around me into difficult conversations, to varying degrees of effectiveness. How do you talk about important things with people who love to watch conflict as spectators in video games and movies, but who avoid it at all costs in their own lives? I don’t know, but it keeps me up at night.

Well, a doctor cures people. A medic just makes them more comfortable. While they die.

— Doc from Red vs Blue

A Philosophy of Reasonable Hope

Of course, anyone who’s made it this far into an article like this is someone who can handle discussion of uncomfortable topics. I trust that if you continue forward in it, you’ll receive what I have to say in the spirit in which it is intended — as an educated, but fallible, opinion of someone who has spent time reflecting on the problem of death. I’ve committed myself to an understanding of the world which I believe to be true, and I do believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God describing our reality, even if I am just a fallible man with an ever-developing understanding of it. But I welcome good-faith disagreement on any level as the seed-bed of greater reflection, and trust that you will as well.

One of the philosophical problems with death is that it undercuts morality, assuming people cease to exist when they come to the end of this earthly life. The apostle Paul seems to have recognized this in his argument for the resurrection, though the point is abruptly stated.

I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.” (1 Corinthians 15:31-33)

Paul’s point according to the broader context is that he’s spent his life taking great loss for the benefit of Christ and others, and that commitment to self-sacrifice only has value if eternal life is a real hope for the person laying down his life. If Heaven and Hell give varying degrees of eternal satisfaction and torment (respectively), then we should live in the light of that eternal consciousness of pleasure and pain — sacrificing ourselves for greater gain in the future, instead of sacrificing others for temporary gain that will be ultimately lost . If on the other hand this life is all there is, then the logical thing to do is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in the context of this life alone, without regard for the happiness of others, except insofar as it produces happiness in ourselves. Selfishness is the product of short-sightedness, whereas true love only makes sense in a world with eternal consequences.

For example, soldiers who die on the battlefield to protect their loved ones are idiots, not heroes, if the dead are not raised. They’re not going to care one way or the other if their sacrifice prevented their wives from being ravished, and their children from being taken captive. They won’t care about anything, because they’re dead — just matter and energy that reacted together to produce temporary experiences in the cosmic accident of human life. Rather than sacrifice their lives for others, the logical soldier should flee the battle and find a place of refuge where he can maximize his pleasure and minimize his pain until a later point of death, if the dead are not raised. Eternal life is the only way to justify moral behavior, which is why Paul viewed the anti-resurrection view as corrupting good morals.

Of course on a Darwinian, naturalistic view, things like logic, pleasure, and pain are themselves merely abstract concepts that describe what particular bags of chemicals with higher evolved processes (“persons”) use to navigate the world and facilitate reproduction. There’s no ultimate meaning or value in logic, pleasure, pain, human life, or human civilization, so there’s no real justification for even eating and drinking, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. Humans will think logically, pursue pleasure, and avoid pain, because of how we’re wired. But there’s no ultimate reason why someone “shouldn’t” just blow up or poison the whole human race, because the concept of “shouldn’t” is itself an abstract, evolved construct of human consciousness, subject to change like everything else. The mass-casualty terrorist is as equally valid in his work as the orphanage worker, because both are equally meaningless and amoral in their work, experience, and personhood. If there is no God, and the universe is just an impersonal mass of matter and energy that accidentally created persons and morality, then there will be no one around to care if all of life in the universe just dropped dead one day, and all that was left was the slow march of the universe toward its own heat death.

The reason that human life is valuable — why e.g. it’s okay to eat plants but not humans — is because humans are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27). The meaning that we see in the universe — in our moral sense, in our relationships, in our aversion to death, in our scientific pursuits, etc — the things that we are and the things that we do have meaning because God spoke meaning into the impersonal chaos of the world, ordering it into his own artistic self-expression, culminating in the creation of human beings (Genesis 1-2). It is actually wrong to rape a woman, or to murder a man, etc., because man and woman have meaning in God’s design for this world. We are more than just chemicals reacting together. We are chemicals with deep and important meaning in God’s great masterpiece of creation.

The human need for meaning is an interesting phenomenon to think about. I used to think that such pursuit was merely a subjective, psychological need that some people would experience and write about, but that I didn’t personally share. But as I’ve come to understand more about philosophy and logic, I’ve learned that objective meaning in the universe is central to everything, whether or not we feel a need to personally discover it. We don’t just need meaning to give us comfort during the loss of a loved one. We need meaning to stand at the foundation of everything we do as human beings, or else the decisions we make cannot be evaluated as “good” or “bad,” because they are just accidents of meaningless chaos.

Put another way, it is impossible for the naturalist to ultimately make a moral distinction between stabbing a human with a knife, and stabbing a shovel in the ground. These are just meaningless effects from causes, because there is no ultimate difference of purpose or design between one thing or another in the universe. Therefore, there can be no binding prescription for how personal accidents of chaos are supposed to make decisions in their treatment of other accidents of chaos that we find in the universe. God’s word that speaks meaning into the chaos of our world makes moral and wise decision-making possible, which in turn has value to a human being if and only if the dead are raised to life.

Fortunately, we have ample reason to believe that God does exist, and that the dead are in fact raised to life in the end, such as is presented in Mike Winger’s excellent study through the book of Mark. Christianity stands above all other religions in the sheer amount of evidence that supports its supernatural claims. The reputation of Christianity in the modern day is that our views are insupportable, in part because of an anti-intellectual mindset infecting much of the modern Church. But in addition to the Church’s failings, the Bible also claims that sinful people are willingly ignorant of the truth, because we don’t want to be accountable to God. Like Adam and Eve, we want to be our own gods, defining our own meaning and morality, not living in submission to God’s word and way of life.

If you haven’t yet returned to God, I would encourage you to take seriously the problem of death. As much as we would like to, human beings do not set the terms of our existence. We live in God’s world, and are accountable to him for how we live our lives. We all fall short of his righteous standard, thereby destine ourselves to Hell. But the good news is that God sent his son Jesus to take the penalty that we deserve, dying brutally on that old Roman cross, and giving us a way out of the Hell that we are making out of his universe. Jesus stands as the watershed of human history, separating those who return to God from those who persist in rejecting his way, and he gives to each group the ultimate end of their worldview — meaning and chaos, respectively.

I for one trust that God knew what he was doing when he made our world, and gave us our purpose and meaning. I pray that you would see the value of living life his way. He promises that it will be difficult in the moment — a cross of our own to bear — but incomparably worth it in the end.

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, [Jesus] said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:34-38)