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Within the popular Western Judeo-Christian tradition, death has usually been understood to be a consequence of original sin. This has, of course, not been a scientifically informed belief. And where theology has been in conversation with science on this point, or when theology is indirectly informed by a growing ecological consciousness, natural death in and of itself is increasingly seen as a natural piece of the creation that God called good.

Western religious perspectives

The growing perspective that death according to natural processes is not necessarily a consequence of sin would cohere with the early Christian tradition, as well as with Eastern Orthodox theology. The second-century Christian theologian Irenaeus, for example, emphasized how the first parents, as described in one of the Genesis accounts, were driven out of paradise so that they would not eat of the tree of life after they had sinned. Their being secured from that temptation by expulsion into a hard life was thus a gift—for who would want to live eternally estranged from God?—and presupposes that they were mortal beings. Indeed, death was already part of the natural order designed by God. Eastern Orthodoxy reiterates this anthropology with its emphasis on the incarnation as more a leading of humanity into the next aspect of God's creative work than of rescue from sin and evil; the need for Christ to redeem the creation from the new exigency of sin was, as it were, added to the original agenda of leading the creation into the new age.

Western theology is beginning to adapt this perspective. Christian theologians like Karl Rahner (1904–1984) and Karl Barth (1886–1968) at the beginning of the twentieth century already recognized this impulse, and such thought is more advanced in this ecumenical age. Death is not so readily understood as an "evil." It is, rather, a "problem" in Christianity because sin became attached to it. Sin constitutes alienation from God, and thus the experience of death most often is attended by fear, loneliness, and loss. Though biblical scholars still debate the meaning of the apostle Paul's assertions that the wages of sin are death (Rom. 5:12) and that the travails of the creation are attributable to human sin, more and more exegetes are less willing to claim biblical warrant for the dominant Augustinian idea that physical death, along with physical suffering and corruptibility, are consequences of the Fall. Further, an ever more scientifically informed consciousness, one that ever more understands how consciousness itself has evolved from simple matter, is also less inclined to fix material processes, including natural physical death, in dualistic terms of good and evil. Concurrently, such consciousness may recognize that its own knowledge of finitude—and so, an intuited transcendence—is precisely the "problem" that is occasioned by fear of death.

Other religious perspectives are less ambivalent in asserting a spiritual origin to death, and will ascribe death more to God's direct agency than to natural processes. Islamic thought, like some Christian perspectives, links natural death more specifically to the will of God. The Qur'an teaches of death that God determines the span of a person's life: "He creates man and also causes him to die" (Qur'an, XLV:26). How this might cohere with Western religious notions of divine agency, design of creative processes, and so forth, are a ripe field for exploration as the science-theology dialogue begins more to engage Islamic scholars.

Eastern religious perspectives

Hindu tradition, with all its variety, is distinguished by the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul, that is, the passing at death of the soul from one body or being to another. Life and death are aspects of an eternal cycle, as over and against the linear understanding of time embedded in Western science and theology. This process of samsara refers to journeying or passing through a series of incarnational experiences. One's karma accompanies one through these stages, and can be roughly defined as the moral law of cause and effect. Some popular reflection attempts to correlate karmic doctrine with Newtonian physics. The thoughts and actions of the past determine the present state of being, and in turn present choices influence future states. This karmic process characterizes the ever-changing flow of everyday experience, as well as the successive rounds of deaths and rebirths. Each moment conditions the next, and karma impacts the reincarnational flow of being.

An interesting new trajectory might yet be explored with respect to the linking of the spirituality of Hindu self-abnegation and new science. According to Hinduism, underlying the apparent separateness of individual beings is a unitary reality. Just as the ocean is composed of innumerable drops of water, so undifferentiated being manifests itself in human experience as apparently separate selves. The goal of life—lives—is, in the end, to realize the eternal self, or Atman, which by nature defies description. This assuredly difficult task (of the realization of something beyond description) aspires to deliverance from a potentially endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. To achieve deliverance, one must act with pure insouciance and detachment, with no attentiveness to cause or effect or reward; "one must act without desire or purpose, independently of the results of the action (Kramer, p. 33)." Thereby the detached self dies to self and into Krishna, becoming a "True Self." The goal of Hindu religion, in other words, is to transcend or leave karma and its cause and effect activity behind, which is perhaps not unlike new science's movement away from Newtonian physics.

The general understanding of death in Buddhism in all its varieties (Zen, Tantric, etc.) is not greatly different from Hindu thought. Generally (there are notable variations in Buddhist thinking) Buddhism understands death as a transition toward either phenomenal rebirth or release from the phenomenal realm into pure nibbana (nirvana). Practicing a life that would ensure the latter, or at least ensure a return to a desirable station after rebirth, requires total moderation of self-will and desire. Death itself involves grieved losses; thus, a certain kind of pastoral care obtains at Buddhist funerals. Even so, death is a phenomenon to be transcended, and so a reality that is not as real or as significant as the transcendent. A Buddhist, in other words, might well question the relevance of an entry about death. Likewise with other Asian religions. Confucianism, the philosophy of Lao Tze, and Daoism, for example, significantly moderate the Buddhist perspective of death, and locate the meaning of life more in practiced simplicity and propitious behavior than in preparing for a hereafter. There are ritually correct ways to conduct life and death, and so human consciousness is at its best simply when it is attentive to the fullness of the present.

Death and ultimate destiny

Finally, the question of whether death is an end is, to be sure, energetically discussed. This, of course, is where religious faiths diverge from final entropy as the last word. Christians believe in a resurrection of the dead—though not necessarily in physicalist terms—which is subject to a coming judgment by God and the possibility of eternal joy (heaven) or despair (hell). Within Judaism, only the most mystical and apocalyptic fundamentalists share any similar concept. In the main, Judaism understands the legacy of a person's life as the moral example left to the next generations. Biophysically there is nothing more. Islamic thought, on another hand, is more detailed with respect to an afterlife and the Qur'an vividly describes the spiritual cum physical states of bliss or torment that await after death. Some of the above, though certainly not all, could cohere with contemporary scientific perspectives. Natural science understands death as the final expenditure of energy, as dissipation into stasis. Yet, that which has decomposed may well be fodder for the recycling of life. Stars turn to dust, stardust has come to mind in human being, human being may become again stuff for stars, and untold other phenomena. Nevertheless, death as a modus unto new, organized, and sentient life is not a theme that natural science readily explores or articulates.

See also ESCHATOLOGY; FALL; ETERNITY; KARMA; LIFE AFTER DEATH; TRANSMIGRATION

DUANE H. LARSON