Facing our own mortality

Hello all, I am writing to you tonight about a serious topic that many people face when they lose their faith and develop an open, skeptical, rational mind. One that I faced myself when my mind was awakened. Our own mortality and life. Is there a reason to it? Do we have a purpose? This was sent to me yesterday by a fellow atheist and I was asked to respond.

"I can't process. I can't make sense of it. I just wonder why. Why are we able to partake in such magnificent, immense, grandeur thought processes; just to have it all wiped clean? Why do we bond? Why does our subconscious want our species to procreate; just to feel loss and end up torturing one another? Why don't we all just stop having babies and end the viscous cycle? Death leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Not because I'm scared of there being a hell; but the thought of being nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing...is unbelievably terrifying to me. How can everything just vanish in an instant? I'm overwhelmed."

This is a real issue that all of us face. Whether religious or not we all deal with our own mortality. After all we are mortal beings that have an expiration date we just happen to not know when. The differences between a theist and atheist answers are vastly different. A theist tells you that this isn't it, that there is more after we die. They will tell you this with an enthusiastic, gleeful cheer in their voice. I have no doubt that they truly believe this with all their heart. The problem with this explanation is they do not actually know. There are 4200 different religions being practiced today. All with their own versions of an afterlife. You have utopias in some, others state you spend eternity doing battle to earn your seat at the feasting table. There ares some that state you will get your own planet when you die, a few say that we are reincarnated into another living creature and the species of that creature depends on how you live your life. Some even combine a heaven and reincarnation, where you spend time in a utopia reflecting on the events of your life then you are reincarnated into another creature. There is even an afterlife where you must spend years upon years going through trials and tests to achieve utopia.

With so many different versions of an afterlife how do we know which one is correct? How do we prove which is real when the very ability to confirm it is to cease to live life as we know it. We cannot plain and simple. We cannot know which is correct and which ones are false. Are they all correct? Are they all false? We just cannot answer that question. Some Christians will claim that they have died, seen Jesus and then they came back to life. The issue with this is that this same thing happens to Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Norsemen, Greeks, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and the list goes on and on. So, we have to go back to the original question. How do we know which is right?

This is where Science comes into play. Science is our way to understand reality, ourselves, the Cosmos and everything in it. The great Carl Sagan once said

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us, there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Why does he say that the Cosmos is all that is, was, or ever will be? Because that's what we know. We know how time and space started, what we don't know is what happened before time began or what happens after it stops. But to say you don't know isn't admitting that it is unknowable but rather we are just being intellectually honest. I admit that an atheist cannot give you a comforting feeling by explaining to you the reality of life. But they won't lie to you. They won't lie right to your face just to make you feel better. A theist will lie to you, they will lie and smile while they are doing it. They may even want money to lie to you. This is one of the issues I have (among many) is the utter lies they will tell you to serve their own agenda.

Now back to the universe. There is no evidence to show what happened before or after. There are a few theories of what happened before the big bang happened like the multiverse theory which I personally think is the most logical explanation. We once thought that our planet was the center of the universe. That we were the only planet. Well then we discovered the other planets in our solar system. So, we thought surely we are the only solar system and have the only sun. Nope, we discovered there are millions of solar systems in our own galaxy with billions of stars. Then we believed that surely we are the only galaxy...wrong again there are billions of galaxies in our observable universe. Well, surely we are the only universe. Why? Why should we believe that nature creates anything in ones? The Cosmos has proven to us that the evidence vehemently points to the contrary. Our universe may be just one droplet of water in an ocean of universes.

(Below is a conversation between Joe Rogan and Neil Degrasse Tyson about the multiverse)

Now, think about that for one second. There could be billions of universes with billions of galaxies and trillions of planets of their own. How could we possibly say that we know for sure what happens after we die. How could we be so arrogant while also being so naive at the same time? This is one of the biggest mysteries in our existence.

To answer the question as to why we exist. I, nor anyone else knows. You, I and everyone else are merely a product of reproduction. I look at it like this. I am very thankful that I was one of the lucky ones that got to exist. How many eggs and seeds never became a living organism? How lucky are we that we get to be those very select few? Then you wonder why? Why me? Why was I chosen? You weren't, you were not "chosen" by anyone but rather the natural process of reproduction. Religion again will tell you that you were chosen. That you are special and important to some deity. Why would a deity allow you to be born into a home that is somehow capable enough that you survive to adulthood yet 15-20 percent of all pregnancies are miscarried in the U.S. alone. Is that the deity just playing tricks on us? Is he/she evil? Or are the miscarriages merely a sad product of reproduction? The answer is yes they are. Statistically speaking for every eight fetuses that make it to term there are two that do not. This is a tragic reality of nature. We should feel lucky that by the tiniest stroke of luck we are the ones that made it.

Reproduction is hard wired into our brains. The very survival of any species is predicated on its ability to survive. That is how evolution works. Survive long enough to pass your genes along. I wouldn't say that we are merely torturing ourselves by reproducing knowing that all we will do is die. There is no need to focus solely on death when the one life we get is so worth living. To answer the question of why we bond, this is another hard wired instinct that our ancestors needed to survive. We had to live in groups to survive. Just like our ape cousins live in large groups we do as well. These are leftover instincts that we no longer necessarily need to survive but we still do it subconsciously. We all have friends and family that we keep close. No one likes to be alone. This isn't by accident, we had to have this feeling or there is a huge possibility we would not be here today.

Being worried about there being nothing is a reasonable feeling. I often hate knowing that I won't be here in 200 years when major technological advances are made and amazing discoveries happen. This is a scary, saddening thought. But then I remember again that I am here now. I was one of the few. Ask yourself this, do you remember what it was like before you were born? That is the same thing that happens after you die. We should make the best of the life we were lucky enough to have and not worry about getting another one. I often think about the vastness of the universe. Sometimes my primate brain simply cannot wrap itself around it. Its so huge!! There is so much out there, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be known! We have a way to be immortal. Do something that transcends the limits of our mortality. Authors, scientists, discoverers, inventors, people that made a difference in one way or another. We still speak of Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Tesla, Hitchens, Darwin, Epicurus, Alexander the Great, and many others. We must live on through our kids. Be something special to them at the very least. In closing I will leave you with a short excerpt from a speech given by Sam Harris. Please watch it, it is strikingly beautiful to listen to. I wish you all the best and remember life is what we make of it. You are living your own movie. Do you want your life to be a straight to DVD or a huge blockbuster? The choice is yours...choose wisely.