Paul asked:

Why are we so scared of death?

Answer by Julian Plumley

Dear Paul, that is a good question, and one that I have not thought about for a long time. I am not sure I can give you a really satisfying answer, but I hope I can make a few points that make sense.

Firstly, there is an empirical question. When people fear death, what exactly are they fearing? It is unlikely to be the same for each and every person. One way to find out would be to interview a representative group of people. (Or maybe a death focus group!) But I don’t have time to do this, so the next best thing is to scan the web and find out what people say when they talk about their fear of death. This is not hard to do – for example, there are several discussion threads in yahoo answers which are very helpful.

The results are fascinating. There are many ways in which people are scared of death. I have tried to pull these into categories, so that we can think about them better. Here they are with some rough notes to get across the feelings associated with each category. (This is not meant to be exhaustive – there are probably more categories I did not find yet.)

Fear of the unknown: death is the ultimate unknown; it is impossible to understand or grasp; fear of the dark, of caves and tunnels; fear of the new, the untested.

Fear of being lost: rootless, with no foundation, no reference.

Fear of separation/ exile/ isolation: death separates me from people and things I like; I have to go, to leave my place; I will be separated from everyone else.

Fear of reality: being found out, revealed; facing up to things I don’t want to.

No control/ deadline: I am not in control; I don’t know when it’s going to happen; there is no defence; I am forced to go; there is no appeal; death is the ultimate deadline; time is up, I can’t change anything anymore; like an exam, or not wanting a holiday to end.

Non-existence: horror at the idea of non-existence; the idea of being gone, forgotten; perspective of our short existence vs. eternity.

The state of being dead: the thought of not being able to breathe is scary; not having any experiences.

What happens next: heaven, hell… oh dear!; not enough faith in afterlife; fear of an afterlife; what will happen to others when I am gone.

Game over: there is no more life; I am going to miss life and things in it, people I love, etc.; I am loving life and I don’t want it to end.

Fear of regret: regret for things left undone and unsaid, for life not well lived; regret for dying early.

Rationalised answers: our instinct for survival makes us fear death; if we did not fear death, we would have died out.

Process of death: fear of painful death; particular kinds of death e.g. drowning.

So what can we make of this? A lot of these categories are basic fears we have while living our lives, but projected onto death: fear of the dark; of being lost; of isolation; of being found out; of being out of control. Other categories are more specific to death itself: fear of non-existence; of how it is to be dead; of what happens next; of the end of the game. The rationalised answers are not fears at all. Lastly, there is the fear of pain before death.

As philosophers, having clarified the facts to some extent, we should ask: is it rational to fear death? Those fears that we project onto death seem to be irrational. We do not have enough information about death to justify them. But most of us know what this kind of fear is like from situations in our lives. It takes an effort of will to suppress these fears, but people can manage to do this.

The fears that are specific to death are more interesting. Probably each of these deserves an essay, so I will just discuss one of them briefly: fear of non-existence. I have seen people try to argue that this is unjustified on the basis that we do not exist before we are born, but that thought is not fearful for us, so there is no reason why the thought of non-existence after death should be scary. Does this argument work?

It doesn’t. I had a vivid counter-example when my daughter (about 7 or 8 at the time) asked me: ‘Where was I before I was born?’ When I told her she wasn’t anywhere, she was horrified. I could see that it was exactly the same fear as that of non-existence after death (which I am acquainted with). There is something peculiarly inexpressible about this fear, which makes it a horrible perspective to experience. Often children ask the best philosophical questions – the ones the adults have forgotten. I don’t think we can rationalise this fear away so easily. Is it a basic part of having a subjective viewpoint, or is it merely a psychological defect?

Fear of pain before death, and of the way we die, is entirely reasonable. We are all acquainted with pain and it is something we justly fear. But this is really a fear we attach to a part of our lives, the final part, not to death itself.

I am painfully aware that this answer is inadequate as it stands – it leaves more questions than answers. For a start, it would benefit from having input from some professionals who are used to dealing with death and with fear: nurses, psychologists and priests, for example. There is a lot more to say about each of these fears and I will keep pondering this. Thank you for raising the question.

Pauline asked:

How can earth and water produce a live frog?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Up to the late 19th century, some educated people believed that frogs could arise directly from earth and water, rats from mud, and flies from compost – so called spontaneous generation. But not many thought that, and very few do nowadays.

Instead we think earth and water produce frogs through the intermediary of parent frogs mating, egg laying, and hatching of tadpoles which become new frogs. Normally we think of the frogs as doing it using earth and water, rather than earth and water doing it using pre-existing frogs, but it’s a matter of perspective and your views about causality and agency.

So there’s your answer.

Of course, the question arises as to how the first frogs arose. Before 1859, there was no convincing natural explanation, and the popular view was that the first members of each species had been specially created by God. Then Darwin and Wallace suggested evolution by natural selection: starting with a single, simple, life form, some descendants show heritable variations, and variants most fitted to their environment leave more descendants, driving the gradual appearance of variety and complexity.

Not only is this a great explanation for the varied biosphere, it is (I think) the only possible natural explanation. But there again, although the idea is obvious once you’ve thought about it, it eluded minds as great as Aristotle, Kant or Hume, and it could be that another explanation currently eludes all of us.

A brief aside: of course, once intelligent life emerges, it could itself create life, e.g. Venter labs produced the first bacterial cell fully controlled by a synthetic genome in 2010. Or you and I, and everybody else, may exist in a vast computer simulation run by superior intelligences or even by 26th century humans.

The chronology of life on Earth is well-documented now. Frogwise, the branching into amphibians (later including frogs) and amniotes (later becoming reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals including humans) occurred 340 million years, and frogs have been producing other frogs, without much thought, for 300 million years.

How did the first life-form arise on Earth (probably only one because all life forms share the same genetic code)? Nobody knows. The when is about 3.5 billion years ago, but there is debate as to where and how.

As to where, popular suggestions include warm ponds with sunlight as the energy source; deep sea vents with superheated water providing the energy; clay surfaces providing a structure for chemicals to organize on; and more way out ideas such as arrival in meteorites knocked off Mars (then life-bearing) or from outer space in cosmic dust.

As to how, there is debate as to whether bare replicators came first (probably RNA) and protective coats (cells) evolved later, or whether dividing globules (cells) came first, and were later invaded by replicators (RNA) that divided with the cells, and came to control cell function. Either way, RNA was largely superseded by DNA as the genetic material.

Finally, as to whether frogs can sometimes become handsome princes, I have an opinion on that as well, but will let you make up your own mind.

Emmanuel asked:

My question is based on the refutation that the Verification principle of the logical positivists cannot verify itself, but I feel personally that for the verification principle to verify a proposition empirically, it is verifying itself. Therefore I see verification principle being verified. And I term it self-demonstrable. What’s your own say on this?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

No I’m sorry but I don’t see any sense in your answer. The Verification Principle says ‘A factual proposition (statement) is meaningful if it can be empirically (directly or indirectly) verified by empirical observations.’

The Verification Principle is a proposition but there are no observations we can make that would verify it so therefore either the Principle is meaningless or it is an arbitrary assumption or it is a metaphysical truth or it is a truth of logic or mathematics. It doesn’t seem to be any of these things except maybe an arbitrary assumption.

The Verification Principle does not allow for self verification whatever that might mean.

The Logical Positivists recognised only two sorts of statements, those that don’t need verification (definitions, truths of logic and mathematics etc.) because they don’t make assertions about the world and those that do need verification.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

What Emmanuel is suggesting is a pragmatic justification of the Verification principle. Every time we use the Verification principle ‘successfully’ (whatever that means) we pragmatically verify its efficacy. I think some Verification theorists might be tempted to say this, but this doesn’t meet the objection.

Consider the principle, called the Humour principle, according to which the only propositions which are meaningful are those which are funny, i.e. those which actually make us laugh. If it doesn’t make you laugh, then the proposition has no meaning. No-one has seriously suggested this, or maybe they have, I wouldn’t know :-)

Is the Humour principle humorous? Suppose we tried it out on a sufficiently large sample of philosophers, and sufficiently many were provoked to laughter. Then that would be sufficient proof that the Humour principle is meaningful, at least by its own criterion.

In other words, the Verification principle fails a test which the Humour principle passes, or at least could in principle pass. The reason that the Verification principle fails is the interesting part. It fails because it is, in fact, an example of the very thing that the Verification principle was designed to guard against: ‘metaphysical’, or non-empirically verifiable propositions.

Kim asked:

Nagel considers the prospect that life is just absurd. What does it mean to say that life is absurd? Are there good reasons to believe that life is absurd? What does Nagel think, and why?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Last item first: I don’t know what Nagel thinks; all I know is what he wrote. What he thinks might be reconstructed circumstantially from his writings. But sometimes I wonder, and maybe you should too. Philosophers sometimes just want to rouse their readers from complacency about all the ‘facts’ we worship. Bear that in mind.

Life can be absurd in two very different meanings of the word. The first is, that life is pretty meaningless. All plants and animals exert themselves for a bit of fun for a few moments and then they die. Worse: most suffer as a result of being alive, because ‘the bit of fun’ tends on the whole to be very difficult to hang on to, especially if others want to deprive you of it. So either you live like a worm, or you live like a human. The problem with us is, that we have a mind and understand. Many of us feel that the problems of life are just so great, and insoluble, that maybe a worm’s life is better, after all.

The other sense of absurd is ‘irrational’, like an irrational number in mathematics. It doesn’t seem to make sense. The universe is so immense, and we are so small, how come we are alive when the rest of the universe is dead? Thus, life is felt to be anomaly to the norm of material existence.

I don’t remember (or care) if Nagel was aware of, or bothered to mention, the fallacy in both those arguments. And I certainly don’t have the space here to embroider the issue for you. But I’ll suggest that you think about it in another light, namely, What can be more absurd than a totally dead universe?

So many trillion and quadrillion tonnes of stuff in every planet or star that add up to nothing! What is that supposed to be all about? Does it mean anything? So at least, on this puny planet of ours, there are a few people who think and find that there is value in all this gargantuan waste: namely the little candle of life that we represent. Not perfect, but precious, despite all its defects. So yes, sometimes we need someone to remind us that we shouldn’t take it for granted – but not, of course, to put it down or wipe it away as not worth a crumb. Without us to wonder about it, the universe would not be worth a crumb. Bear that in mind!

Shivangi asked:

What makes Cosmological Argument an impure argument?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Hi Shivangi, I take it that when you use the term ‘impure’ you are referring to the fact that the cosmological argument for the existence of God has been found to be fundamentally unsustainable. In the following response I hope to show why this is the case.

The cosmological or causal argument for the existence of God takes the view that there must be a cause either in the sense of a prior event, or a reason for the occurrence of an event. That is, there must be a reason or cause for everything that happens. If we trace back from effects to their causes, we can either continue indefinitely, or reach a point where we are forced to acknowledge that there must be an ultimate or first cause – some point from which everything begins. The cosmological argument is that this first cause is God.

Amongst those philosophers and theologians that make the cosmological argument for the existence of God are Aristotle and Aquinas. Aristotle calls the first cause the ‘Prime Mover’. But it is a prime mover which itself does not move. There is a God, says Aristotle (for how else does motion begin?), but God himself is changeless. He is the final cause of nature, the drive and purpose of things, the form of the world, the principle of life, and the sum of its vital processes and powers – but he does not move.

Aquinas put forward his arguments for the existence of God chiefly in his two main works, the Summa Theologiciae and the Summa contra gentiles. In the Summa Theologiciae he presents his ‘five ways’ to demonstrate the existence of God. The first way is called the argument from motion, which is better understood as ‘change’. It is in this first way that Aquinas follows Aristotle’s ‘prime mover’ thesis. Aquinas begins by claiming that it is evident that some things are in the process of change. Change, or motion, he says, is an observable fact. It is important to say that Aquinas does not say that everything changes, but that some things sometimes change. Aquinas believes that change requires an explanation – a cause. Change, he says, must either come from chance or design, but he rules out the possibility that change is explainable by chance. If change occurs, he concludes, it must be caused.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas concludes that for any change there must be a first principle that causes the change, but which itself is unchanged. This first principle, he claims, is God. God is the cause of change that is not itself changed. This is what everyone understands as god. Therefore God exists.

However, most philosophers (and many theologians) have great difficulty in accepting this cosmological argument. The first difficulty is in the assumption that anything requires a cause. Aquinas rules out the possibility of random or accidental change. Whilst it might be the case that things cause one another, it could still be argued that the cause of events is mere chance and is not connected to a continuous link to a first cause.
The second problem is that we cannot assume that things actually have a first cause. It may well be that things actually do go back ad infinitum.

Thirdly, why should it be that things go back to a single cause? Why can there not be a whole host of different ‘first causes’? it could be that that which causes the physical world to exist is altogether different to that which produces animal life.

Probably one of the most convincing arguments against the cosmological argument comes Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, the cosmological argument is fundamentally flawed (i.e. ‘impure’) in that it works from empirical evidence (our observations of causality) to non-empirical suggestion (that there is a God). Since the conclusion is outside the boundaries of what we know and have observed, we cannot know if our presumptions from empirical evidence can extend beyond those boundaries, so they cannot support the conclusion, which must therefore be erroneous, or ‘impure’. This argument draws the distinction between empirical and non-empirical evidence. As it seems logically sound to postulate that the two cannot be reasonably combined, this is therefore a very compelling objection to Aquinas’ theorem.

A further argument against Aquinas’s cosmological argument is presented by Anthony Kenny in his book The Five Ways. Aquinas, he says, depends for his first argument of causation on Aristotle. According to this analysis, the cause of change must possess a property which will initiate the change. For example, for something to become hot, the thing that causes the change must itself possess the property of heat. But modern science rejects this argument. The grain which makes a cow fat is not itself fat, and microwaves can generate heat without themselves being hot. Aquinas, says Kenny, is not giving a straightforward metaphysical analysis, but an analysis which presumes a classical, and discredited, physics.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

I wonder whether Shivangi wasn’t thinking of Kant’s classification, in Critique of Pure Reason between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ proofs of the existence of God.

The only pure proof — relying on what Kant terms ‘pure reason’, not making any empirical assumptions whatsoever — is the ontological argument.

The cosmological argument, on the other hand, assumes — admittedly something we all know to be the case, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question — that the world does, in fact, exist. That is why it is ‘impure’. You can’t prove that a world must exist on the basis of the cosmological argument. For that, you need the ontological argument, supplemented with the claim that God, being infinitely perfect and therefore omnipotent and omnibenevolent, would not choose to not create a world.

The teleological argument, or ‘argument from design’, is even more impure than the cosmological argument, if one may talk of degrees of impurity, because it makes the additional empirical assumption that not only does some world exists, but the world that exists exhibits an order and harmony from which one can infer an intelligent creator.

Dava asked:

I have previously submitted this question in relation to participation (not by me) in the London Marathon… If my feet were bigger would it be over sooner?.

What does the nonadoption of this idea on this website say about the state of contemporary philosophy in terms of the kind of questions it will consider? So my next question is this… why do some philosophical questions get responses whilst others are discarded with the supplemntary question of does this tell us anything about how we should understand ‘hubris’?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

Your question is not a philosophical question. If you think it is then you are mistaken. We answer questions that we find interesting. It has nothing to do with hubris.

If you could even be bothered to do some basic research, you would find:

1. There is no scientific evidence of a relationship between foot size and running speed.

2. You have finished a marathon when your upper trunk (chest) meets the finishing line. The race is not over because your feet are over the line. If you can ignore your own hubris, perhaps you would like to read some books about the history of philosophy. I recommend Bertrand Russell’s one volume History of Western Philosophy.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I’ve not seen the question; but since you now ask it for the second time, I will provide you with an answer. It is up to you, however, whether you like it or not.

Philosophy seeks answers to intelligent questions about problems with which intelligent people have great difficulties. For example: what does it mean to exist? Existence and especially conscious existence are a great puzzle for us, so this is an issue on which philosophers are likely to exert their ingenuity.

The question about the feet, however, is so trivial that no-one would be bothered. After all, you need only find two men, one with small and one with big feet, let them walk 100 metres and make your comparisons.

So you can see that hubris is quite an inappropriate word. The questioner asked the wrong people. You don’t ask your local policeman for a statement on the second thermodynamic law, a physicist how to grow tomatoes in your garden or an actor how to fix a leaking tap.

In short, when you put questions to a philosopher, keep to philosophical issues. If you want an answer about sporting issues, ask an athlete or physio. Asking the right person, and if possible asking the right question, is a good way to ensure that you get an answer.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

I did answer this question last week. As Shaun says, foot size is not a determinant of running speed. (That depends on length of stride and number of strides per minute.) You might think otherwise, but you’d be wrong. Was that it?!

I like to think that the problem of the truth conditionals for counterfactual statements was at the back of the questioner’s mind, even if they did not explicitly say so. Otherwise, the question is pretty trivial. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that I have stooped to answer a trivial question.