Yep. Sorry to report nothing has changed in this category.

And now science is weighing in to fix this conclusion even more firmly – as if it needed fixing.

According to Keith Kleiner, writing on the Gravity and Levity website, statistics continue to lead to the conclusion that all human beings are going to die and that the older we get, the more certain death becomes.

We can deny it all we want, kick against it with the fury of a Camus, or act like it’s no big deal, but death is still the elephant in the room for every one of us.

The reason for this, explains Mr. Kleiner, is that our bodies are meant to die: “By looking at theories of human mortality that are clearly wrong, we can deduce that our fast-rising mortality is not the result of a dangerous environment, but of a body that has a built-in expiration date.”

Like all material things, bodies break down and wear out. No amount of our medicating, exercising, or implant-chipping them is going to change that. According to Mr. Kleiner, we are created to die, so get over it.

Well, not so fast. Mr. Kleiner is certainly looking for more. He hopes that one day “some brilliant biologist” will be able to give us “real insight into why we age the way we do.” Then, at least, we can die knowing why. That should be comforting.

I beg to differ with Mr. Kleiner’s otherwise very interesting article in two points. First, biologists will not be able to discover why we age and die. Certainly they will observe and isolate processes and variables that change and decay over time, and then they’ll have to explain those, and then the explanations behind those. But in a purely materialistic worldview, it can only ever be turtles all the way down, ad infinitum, and that doesn’t provide any real ultimate explanations.

Scripture teaches that we die because of sin: “The wages of sin is death.” Biology will never be able to isolate and measure that. It’s an article of faith, just as the belief that there is no such thing as sin is itself an article of faith. But the Christian view provides a cogent explanation for death, not to mention a great many other things as well.

Second, the human body was not created to die. It was created to live forever, glorified and in the presence of the glorious God of heaven and earth. It is indeed appointed to every human being (most of us, anyway) to die physically. But they who know Christ and trust in Him look forward to being clothed with immortality, in new, decay- and death-proof bodies, where neither worm nor rust nor faltering health will be able to lay us low.

The materialist can only contemplate death and shrug (and, for most of them, fear, Heb. 2:15).

The Christian looks at death, nods, and looks beyond it to a glorious new and eternal beginning, without death, and without the curse that makes death a scourge for every living creature.

The Christian way is the way of hope and contentment.

The materialist way is the way of, Oh well.

We have a message of hope to proclaim to a dying world. Let’s not allow secular science to have the last word on so important a subject as this.