An Atheist Talks About Death to His Children- Pt.1

Inspired by a post and subsequent discussion here.

When my kids were growing up, we had this little thing we’d do. Not really a ritual, though we did it almost every night. While I cooked dinner, they’d sit in the kitchen with me, and we’d talk. And since my culinary preparations tended toward the elaborate as often as not, these conversations would sometimes stretch out over 2, 3 hours (except on wonton and eggroll nights, when it took longer and I made them help). This tradition started around the ages of 5 and 2, respectively, and continued on and off for a number of years. We talked about science, philosophy, religion...even sex. And while I tried my best not to talk over their heads (some might feel that conversations regarding quantum physics and star formation are categorically above a young child’s head, but I disagree most vehemently), I also made sure not to dumb it down too much. There’s a lot to be said for encouraging intellectual struggle, I think. The thickest eggshells make the strongest chicks, or so I’m told. On the other hand, maybe that’s just some more bullshit folk wisdom, and it actually kills them. LOL! In that case, perhaps my kids are fortunate to have come through their childhood relatively unscathed from having knowledge jammed down their throats, and they’re not TOO mad at me for it, anyway!

One of the things we talked about was death. A pretty natural subject to discuss, what with it being the universal source of most of our fears and all. Yet because of that, we really don’t talk about it much, do we? But death confronts all of us sooner or later, whether we like it or not. Not only is it the primary source of our fears, it’s also the main impetus behind the many world mythologies designed to allay those fears. Kids think about death. Perhaps more than adults, especially if they’ve not been so indoctrinated in religion’s stunted apologues that they’ve learned to lock the questions away inside themselves.

Anyway, over the course of raising two daughters, there’ve been plenty of conversations along these lines. In response to Spanish Inquisitor’s post, I thought I’d try to distill those discussions down to 2 or 3 main ideas, as a way of answering the question, ’How do you tell your kids about death?”

The first part of my answer has to do with the subject of personhood. When we think about ourselves, about what we are at the very essence of our existence, we generally see ourselves as invisible minds inhabiting bodies made of flesh, and bone, and blood. All of us see things this way from an intuitive level- even atheists. We speak of our body parts as if we own them, albeit also inhabiting them in some way. ‘I’ instruct ‘my hand’ to perform this or that function, and hopefully it obeys. Our bodies are objects to be manipulated from inside, in much the same way that we drive a car, or ride a bike. ‘We’ are the agents giving the orders, housed inside our biological vehicles. This is what’s generally known as ‘dualism’, the philosophy that mind exists separate from the body. Mind/body duality is still the principle belief of most of the people on the planet, and although not everybody believes in this anymore (materialistic atheists, for instance), everybody- and I mean EVERYBODY- still acts in the main as if it were so. Yes, mind/body dualism is most likely a delusion, and according to the strictest of naturalistic, scientific guidelines it is most certainly a delusion. But it is a delusion built into the very intuitional fabric of the abstract world inside our heads. The world which moves us, and gives us a sense of personal meaning beyond the strictly utilitarian functions of moment to moment existence. It’s the world of our aspirations. The world of our hopes, and fears. Curiously, it’s also a world which more than likely doesn’t exist. Is that scary? No worries, because there’s more. We don’t exist, either.

Here’s what science has to say on the whole matter. In the beginning...well, who knows? It’s still an open question. But shortly AFTER the beginning (and even the idea of a beginning isn’t quite right, but that’s not part of the subject matter of this post), zillions of teeny tiny particles began moving outward away from each other, becoming and expanding what’s generally known as space/time. At first, everything was so outrageously hot that they didn’t have anything to do with each other. But eventually, as things cooled down, some tiny bits got together with other tiny bits to form somewhat less tiny bits, and things grew from there. Long story short, you eventually got space dust, and stars, and galaxies, and planets, and all the stuff on those planets, including us (this is the extremely abbreviated version, naturally). But remember, at the most basic level everything is still just these very teeny tiny bits clumped together into various patterns, replicating ithemselves according to relatively simple ‘rules’ which are really nothing more than expressions of intrinsic properties (think ‘round pegs fit into round holes’). This includes the stuff that makes up our brains, from which our minds ‘emerge’ as the natural property of the combined movements of all these teeny, tiny bits, moment to moment. In other words, you (and I’m using ‘you’ as synonymous with ‘mind’ here), are simply the end result of ever shifting pattern of matter in motion. In this sense, the ‘you’ who is reading this paragraph is not the same ‘you’ who read the last paragraph. And now you’re new again! And now, again! Whoops, there goes another one!

Here’s an example. Think of a tornado, moving across an open field. What is a tornado, really? Is it a living being, perhaps hunting down box kites and trailer parks for substance? Of course not. In fact, a tornado doesn’t exist at all according to this way of thinking. A tornado is simply the ever changing emergent property of the whole environment- air, temperature, and terrain, for the most part. It is an observable pattern, a particular expression of the flux of the world. Flowing through time. Changing its very substance each and every moment. Something rises up out of the churning maelstrom of sub-atomic existence. It SEEMS to take shape, SEEMINGLY moving across the landscape, when in fact it is one loosely defined expression of EVERYTHING as described in one particular locality. Before you know it, the tornado is gone as if it never existed. BECAUSE it never existed! That is, it never existed as an isolated entity moving across a plain of ‘otherness’. The tornado was simply something the universe did for a while. And that’s what we are.

None of us will ever die, because none of us have ever lived. That is to say, there’s no real demarcation between ‘death’ and ‘life’; other than a delusional one, that is. When we are happy, that’s the universe being happy. Or, more technically put, happiness is reflective of a particular biological/chemical incident. And what is a biological incident? Nothing more that the randomly shifting patterns of teeny tiny bits, all the way down to as far as those tiny bits can be broken down to, I guess. Of course, when I say random, I don’t mean to say that all hypothetical possibilities are present at every place at every possible moment. Coin tosses are random, but you’ll only ever get either heads or tails, with the extremely rare edge-landing thrown in. This is why the creationist’s argument about the impossibility of tornadoes sweeping through junkyards to produce 747s is invalid. It’s more like 1s stick to 3s, and 2s stick to 4s, and 2/4 combinations stick to 8s, while 1/3 combinations stick to 16s, and on up from there. This is more or less how complexity builds up, given the billions of years the universe has existed.

Whoops! Got sidetracked there...where were we? Ah yes! Death. There is not death, nor life for that matter. The whole of existence shifts from one state to the next, moment by moment by moment. Patterns emerge. Patterns recede. Everything is nothing more than shapes in clouds. Including us.

Of course, part of the emergent property of this thing we call human life is the generation of illusion. Like the illusion that we are something else than what we really are. We’ll never get away from that altogether-it’s built in. I go back over what I’ve written here, and recognize where the illusion is built right into the very structure of language itself. It’s impossible to talk about it in a thoroughly logical way, though I think I’ve tried my best. Then again, who am I?

Didn’t we already go through all that?

P.S. Note to self: new nickname for my kids-dustdevils. Seems appropriate, yes?