"Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death!"

A reader writes:

My following question stems from an article on CNN.com about a futurist who is trying keep healthy so that he can live long enough for science to be able to provide immortality:

LINK SHORTENED BY JIMMY

Hah! As if! Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen.

I know you’re a sci-fi lover so I figured you may have though about how this might rest with the Faith. Would it be sinful to try to achieve immortality? I get the feeling that the answer is "yes" because God intends us to eventually join him in Heaven but I’m guessing there is a lot of grey area.

I would disagree, at least with the grounds stated. Dying is not a necessary precondition for joining God in heaven. St. Paul writes that at the last day, when Christ returns, those who are still alive will be transformed in the twinkling of an eye and be united with Jesus (at which point heaven and earth will become one, Revelation tells us). So if someone (in a state of grace) extended his own life indefinitely then he’d still be here when Jesus comes back and be untied with God.

One could argue that death is a punishment God means us to have and that it would be wrong to throw off the yoke of this punishment, but God doesn’t seem to mind us working to undo other effects of the Fall (e.g., striving against our fallen natures by his grace), so I don’t think that one could prove that it would be wrong to indefinitely extend one’s life by those means. We already know it’s kosher for physicians to help us extend our lives (Sirach is explicit on this point). At that point, it’s hard to see how any "you must not let your life go beyond this point or it’s a sin" command could be derived from the deposit of faith or natural law.

For instance, the nanites, stem cells (non-embryonic, of course), and other medical treatments could be used just to fight disease and not repair cell aging. In this way, you might live 2 or 3 times as long as you normally would. Would it be wrong if you used the technology to keep you alive for an extra 10, 50 or even 100 years and then stop using it? Would that be immoral? If not, how do you draw the line?

From what I can see, it would not be immoral. It also would not be immortal. "Immortal" means "exempt from death" (lit., "not mortal," with "mortal" meaning "subject to death"). If all you’re doing is upping the human lifespan, but not exempting a person from ultimate death, it ain’t immortality, just a longer mortality.

I don’t know if this makes a difference but this "immortality", would only protect against natural death.

Yeah, like Lorien on B5, who wouldn’t die on his own but could die from illness or accident.

No matter how many nanites you have pumping through your body, if you fall into an incinerator you’ll die.

Yes, though you might survive if you fall into a lava pit during a light saber battle. You might then need life-sustaining technology. In fact, you might end up more machine than man.

I hope this isn’t too frivolous a question; I’m sure you have a many more pragmatic questions thrown at you every day. I just find the topic of technology and morality interesting in this day and age.

Not too frivolous at all! As I often say, "There are no bad questions, only bad answers."

That being said, I’m quite dubious about this guy’s plan to live on indefinitely. There are a number of problems with it:

  1. There is a very good chance that humans have a "death gene" that causes us to die. Evidence for this is found in the fact that, while the medicine of the 20th century has somewhat (not as much as people think) increased the average human lifespan, it hasn’t done anything to change the maximum human lifespan. Something seems to be impeding that, and that thing may be a gene. When you get to a certain age, the death gene reaches out its tiny microscopic hands to your brain’s lifeular lobe and does a Vulcan death grip on it, and that’s it. If we can find and turn off the death gene then we may get significantly more life out of life, but it still won’t go on forever, because . . .
  2. Even if there is no death gene, the body will simply wear out over time (i.e., as soon as it gets out from under the service warranty you bought when you first acquired it), and I’d doubtful that combinations of nanites and stem cells could be applied in such a way to forestall this indefinitely.
  3. Even if the body could be kept going indefinitely, the odds of getting into a fatal accident (e.g., on the freeway) or contracting an incurable, fatal illness go up as life gets longer. Eventually, something’s gonna get each of us.

There is absolutely no harm in trying to stave that off for as long as possible, though. After all, God built a survival instinct into us. So I say: Let’s go with our instincts! Bring on the (morally-developed) high tech!

Personally, I’m waiting for the Cellular Regeneration and Entertainment Chamber.

Oh yeah, and scientific immortality is one of those projects that has "Danger: May Cause Confusion of Tongues!" written on the box it comes in.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

26 thoughts on “"Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death!"”

  1. Leon Kass has done some intelligent critiques of attempts at immortality. His mid-’80s book, Toward a More Natural Science, includes a chapter on “Mortality and Morality: The Virtues of Finitude.” More recently, he published a piece in First Things called something like “L’Chaim and its Limits,” basically a slight reworking/updating of the book chapter.

  2. I’d still rather stick with the teaching that it is not necessary to extend life by extraordinary means. Those people who wish to continue living indefinitely in this life have a lack of faith – like so called atheists.

    I’m actually looking forward to sometime over the next 50 years or so to , hopefully, get to heaven. The only difficulty is the way in which it will happen – the final leap of Faith.

    “Everybody wants to get to Heaven, but nobody wants to die….” – you know the tune.

  4. “‘Everybody wants to get to Heaven, but nobody wants to die….’ – you know the tune.”

    By Black Oak Arkansas? Oh yeah! Great tune.

    Only the lyric is:

    “Ev-ry-bo-dy want to see heav’n,

    “No-o-bo-dy wants to die.”

  8. Is there also the danger that the longer you live the greater the chance you may choose to leave God? I would hope for most of us we would just get closer to Him but you never know.

  9. I am reminded of the science fiction novel “Cestus Dei” by John Maddox Roberts (which is probably _not_ a book Jimmy would recommend) that deals with the Church in the far future.

    At one point, one of the main characters , a Jesuit priest, tells another character that he is trying to convert that the church has developed a process whereby the human lifespan has been extended to between 300 and 400 years.

    The other character states that she is surprised that he would mention such a base concept while trying to convert someone.

    The priest agrees that a lengthened lifespan should not be the reason to convert, especially since 400 years of this life still does not compare to an eternity in the next.

  10. I read a sci-fi novel where the human life span had been extented to about 250 years. The only problem was that after about age 90 people got so set in their ways their “productivity” fell way off.

  11. All I say to this is — remember Tolkien’s Numenoreans. It’s unnatural and in opposition to our God-given destiny to wish this present life to last forever, or to focus too much effort and attention on greatly prolonging our physical lives. There comes a time when you just have to give back to God what He has loaned us.

  12. Jimmy,

    I agree with everything you have written here except point 1 and 2 of your doubts about the posibility.

    1. First I don’t think there is a death gene. I would speculate that this concept is built into the mutation and damage that is caused to DNA through repetitious replication. But even if there were a death gene, I doubt it just kicks in after a certain programmed time. I would think there would need to be certain conditions such as a certain level of failing neurons or something like that. Either way this could theoretically be prevented if nanites could deativate the gene or just repair DNA to prevent the tigger mechanism.

    2. The wear and tear that you’re talking about is just aging. This is caused by a cycle of DNA degenerating and then replicating. So again, nanites could theoretically repair or prevent damage restoring the DNA to a previously recorded copy.

    I guess then, the only moral danger is the possible pridefull obsession that you referenced in your “Confusion of Tongues” warning.

    But thinking about it, there are also physical dangers. If nanites could be used to heal, they could also be used to harm. They would be the ultimate artificial bio-weapon, able to tear you apart cell-by-cell from the inside.

  13. it is not necessary to extend life by extraordinary means

    But will these means be extraordinary?

    Time was — before anesthesia — all surgery was deemed extraordinary.

  14. My Gosh, there is much too much time spent on even thinking of this topic… I would say get a life, but then perhaps that might next be the next blog title. Sorry for the critique, Jimmy, et al…

  16. Hi, John Castrucci!

    Why would we need a “death gene” when we have a perfectly good Second Law of Thermodynamics?

  17. The most common immortality fantasy I come accross is the whole “Singularity” phenomenon, where humans will “upload” to an enormous computer network and live forever as data. Vernor Vinge got the idea started with his paper on the Singularity, but it was movies like The Matrix that raised it to cult status. Of course, there a lot of assumptions made by the “uploaders”- that computronium can be developed, that a Mastroika brain can be constructed, etc., but that doesn’t stop them from believing.

  19. “Lions and Gigers and Bears.”

    “Oh my.”

    (Just wanted to let Jimmy know that his reference to DS9’s “In the Cards” had not gone unappreciated 🙂

  21. We also need to remember that the longer we live the more we might cling to living and less to God. Kosh almost did not do the right thing for Sheridan and the others because in his 8000 years of life he had grown rather fond of it. Granted we don’t face the possiblity of being pulled apart by Shadows!

  22. True, but I don’t know if this was a point in the show that was realistic to how human psychology would work.

    Kosh is an alien, and so his psychology works any way JMS says it does, but I think that an abnormally long-lived human would likely get bored and stop caring as much about his life and develop a deathwish (either that or get totally paranoid about threats that might end his life and draw into himself completely).

  24. I think that an abnormally long-lived human would likely get bored and stop caring as much about his life and develop a deathwish

    Like the other Q in the Voyager episode Deathwish.

  25. The Numenoreans (like Methuselah and Co.) lived a long time naturally, as a gift from God, basically. Their long life diminished because of sin, basically, and instead of focusing on being better people as long as they had life, they focused on trying to live longer and thus lived shorter and worse lives instead. They also became more and more morbidly afraid of death.

    If long long life was normal, then, I’d see no problem with it. If you have to half-kill yourself to live a little longer…aeh, give the money and effort to the poor instead.

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