What Has Gone?
James Tour, the synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist, has often drawn attention to a remarkable boundary in nature: the boundary between a living cell and a dead one. Imagine a cell alive before us, engaged in that astonishing orchestration of activity we call life. Molecules move, proteins perform their functions, information is read and acted upon, energy is converted, membranes regulate what enters and leaves, damage is repaired, and countless processes cooperate within a microscopic world of extraordinary organisation.
Then the cell dies.
Its atoms have not disappeared. Its molecules have not suddenly vanished. For a time much of the physical architecture remains recognisable. Indeed, the dead cell possesses a degree of organisation incomparably greater than a collection of chemicals assembled in a laboratory. Yet something fundamental has changed. The ingredients remain, but the cell is no longer alive.
Tour's observation leads to a deceptively simple question: what has been lost?
Science can describe many of the events surrounding cellular death, and there is every reason to expect our understanding of those processes to deepen. But the question becomes more unsettling when we move from the cell to ourselves.
Stand beside someone who has just died and the mystery becomes painfully intimate. I know that experience, my first wife lay before my daughter and I when the life support was removed. The body remains before us. The eyes, the face, the hands and the brain are still physically present. Yet we instinctively know that something immense has happened. Our ordinary language reveals the intuition almost unconsciously. We say that the person has gone. We speak of someone having passed away. The words suggest that, at the deepest level, we have never quite believed that the person we loved was identical to the material from which his or her body was composed.
But what do we mean when we say that someone has gone?
It is here that the ancient voice of Ecclesiastes enters the conversation with surprising force.
Long before anyone could observe the machinery of a cell, the writer of Ecclesiastes looked steadily at the mystery of human existence. He watched generations arrive and disappear, youth become age, possessions change hands, achievements fade from memory and human bodies finally return to the earth. Few books of the Bible are more unwilling to disguise the reality of death.
Yet amid this uncompromising contemplation of mortality comes one of Scripture's most extraordinary statements:
God “hath set the world in their heart,” or, as many translations render the thought, He has set eternity in the human heart.
The sentence contains an entire philosophy of human existence.
We are creatures who live in time yet somehow conceive of eternity. Our lives are measured in years, hours and seconds, but our minds reach beyond them. We remember a past that no longer exists, anticipate a future that has not yet arrived, contemplate our own deaths and wonder what lies beyond them. We can stand beneath the stars and ask why there is something rather than nothing. We can contemplate the beginning of the universe and attempt to imagine forever.
There is something wonderfully strange about such a creature.
The human being lives for a short time and yet asks questions that reach beyond time. We know ourselves to be finite, but we possess desires that seem strangely resistant to finitude. We encounter beauty and want it to remain. We love another person and discover that love contains within it an almost instinctive protest against death. Something in us finds it difficult to accept that a person of immeasurable significance can simply cease to be.
Ecclesiastes takes us to the source of that ache; eternity has been placed within us.
Yet the verse does not end there. It immediately introduces a limitation. Although eternity has been set within the human heart, we cannot fathom what God has done “from the beginning to the end.”
We desire the whole story while living inside only a small part of it.
That may be one of the deepest tensions of human consciousness. We possess enough awareness to ask ultimate questions but not enough vision to answer them all. We want to see what God sees: beginning and ending together, suffering and its final meaning together, separation and reunion together, the unanswered prayer and whatever may ultimately become of it.
Instead, we experience existence moment by moment.
This is why life can sometimes appear incomprehensible. We are attempting to judge a story whose final chapters we have not read. What seems meaningless from within a particular moment may belong to a pattern visible only from beyond it.
Ecclesiastes returns to the mystery when it asks, “Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal descends into the earth?” Later, near the close of the book, the thought becomes more explicit: the dust returns to the earth from which it came, while the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Dust returns. Spirit returns.
The distinction brings us back to the question raised by the dead cell, although we must be careful not to claim more than either science or Scripture allows. Chemistry has not discovered the human soul, nor can the inability to restore a dead cell to life by itself prove the existence of spirit. A microscope cannot watch a soul departing from a body.
The significance lies elsewhere. Scientific description, however powerful, does not necessarily exhaust the philosophical question of what life ultimately is. We may understand more and more about the mechanisms through which living organisms’ function while still confronting the deeper mystery of why there should be living beings at all.
That last fact is so familiar that its strangeness easily escapes us.
None of us summoned ourselves into existence. We simply awoke within it. There was a time when the experience we call me did not exist in this world, and then, without our permission or participation, we found ourselves here. We opened our eyes upon a universe we had not constructed, inhabited bodies we had not designed and discovered ourselves capable of reason, imagination, love, grief, humour, cruelty, forgiveness, sacrifice and prayer.
We received existence before we could even understand what existence was.
And somewhere within this creature of dust and breath, Ecclesiastes tells us, God placed eternity.
This helps explain why temporal things, even wonderful ones, never seem capable of completely satisfying us. We reach something we have long desired and eventually discover another longing behind it. We travel to a beautiful place and wish the moment could remain. We hold someone we love and know, sometimes painfully, that neither of us can stop time.
Much of human civilisation might even be understood as our resistance to disappearance. We paint pictures, write books, raise monuments, preserve photographs, tell stories and speak the names of those who have died. Memory itself becomes an act of defiance against oblivion.
The writer of Ecclesiastes might tell us that this restlessness is not entirely accidental. The creature who carries eternity within his heart will inevitably find transience difficult.
Yet Scripture does not permit us to turn this into easy consolation. Ecclesiastes knows there is “a time to weep” and “a time to mourn.” It knows there is “a time to die.” Death is not made harmless merely by speaking hopefully about what may lie beyond it.
Christianity makes a much more startling claim.
Jesus Christ does not observe human mortality from a safe distance. He experiences it. His breathing stops. His body becomes still. Those who love Him confront the same terrible silence that human beings have confronted beside graves throughout history.
Then comes the claim upon which Christianity finally stands or falls: the tomb does not keep Him.
Christ rises.
Here the Christian hope moves beyond the vague idea that some invisible part of us may continue after death. The great biblical horizon is resurrection. God does not finally abandon His creation or discard the body as though matter were a mistake. He restores the human person.
The God who can breathe life into dust is not defeated when our bodies return to dust.
That thought changes the way we might approach Tour's original question. The dead cell remains scientifically fascinating because it stands at one of nature's most profound boundaries. What exactly distinguishes living matter from the same matter once life has ceased? Science will continue investigating that question, and Christians should welcome whatever truth such investigation uncovers.
But standing behind the biological question is a greater one.
What is this extraordinary phenomenon we call life? A question I will return to.
Reference: We can’t Resurrect a Cell.
