Having covered the physical basis of Hamartia, how the abnormal human amygdala produces human moral thinking, and how it produced the ego, I want now to turn to the subject of how, as Paul put it, that "death entered the world through Hamartia." This is considered one of the defining contributions or hallmarks of Hamartia, that the only reason we die is because of it. What, if anything does an abnormal amygdala have to do with death? First, we have to look at why the death of an animal organism, such as human beings, occurs.
In an article I was reading at one point, in an interview with him, Molecular Biologist Venki Ramakrishnan says, "Aging is an accumulation of chemical damage to the molecules inside our cells, which damages the cells themselves, and therefore the tissue, and then eventually us as an organism. Surprisingly, we start aging when we’re in the womb, although at that point, we’re growing faster than we’re accumulating damage. Aging happens throughout our lives, right from the very beginning. The body has evolved lots of mechanisms to correct age-related damage to our DNA and to any poor-quality proteins we produce. Without ways to correct these sorts of problems, we would never live as long as we do. Still, over time, damage begins to outpace our ability to repair. Think of the body as like a city containing lots of systems that must work together. Once an organ system critical to our survival fails, we die. For example, if our muscles become so frail that our heart stops beating, it can’t pump the blood containing the oxygen and nutrients our organs need and we die. When we say someone dies, we mean the death of them as an individual. In fact, when we die, most of ourselves, such as our organs, are alive. This is why the organs of accident victims can be donated to transplant." (DuLong, Jessica. "Why do we die? The latest on aging and immortality from a Nobel Prize-winning scientist." CNN.com, Tue April 9, 2024.)
In an online Chemistry textbook from Western Oregon Universtiy, it says, "In multicellular organisms, the response to DNA damage can result in two major physiological consequences: (1) Cells can undergo cell cycle arrest, repair the damage and re-enter the cell cycle, or (2) cells can be targeted for cell death (apoptosis) and removed from the population." (Flatt, P.M. (2019) Biochemistry – Defining Life at the Molecular Level. Published by Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR (CC BY-NC-SA). Chapter 12.3.)
So, it stands to reason that, if this damage never outpaced the organism's ability to repair it, the organism would never grow old and die a natural death. It would be functionally immortal, assuming no accidental death would have occurred. I should mention that the body under constant psychological stress (such as a constant survival mode) will eventually begin to show deleterious effects. At the very least it will impact the immune system and the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain. This alone could have possibly tweaked the human body's damage response systems to where they stopped being able to respond as well after so long, but even if this was a main culprit, I think the Biblical text offers us another explanation as well.
The second thing to take into consideration is the role death plays in the cycle of life. In short, where the entire environment and ecosystem is concerned, there could be no life without death. Plants (and other animals) must die in order for animals to live. Animals (and other plants) must die in order for plants to live. There is no exception to this rule of nature. With life comes death, and out of death is produced new life. This was as true during the time of our original ancestors as it is today. Even just plucking a fruit from a tree causes that fruit to die, because it has been removed from its source of nutrients. A nature without death or decay is a static existence akin to statuary or window dressing as there would be no eating (neither need nor source of food), no growth, and no new life. Death and decay in their proper place is absolutely necessary for new life and growth to occur as the new life feeds on the dead life.
From an evolutionary and geologic perspective it makes no sense that there was a time in Earth's history when death did not exist at all. Found within the geologic record are fossils of plants and animals which died as far back as half a billion years ago. Our Homo Sapiens ancestors didn't emerge until rough three hundred thousand years ago, and if we are to take the Genesis account seriously as to the timing and order of things, didn't start wearing clothing until between seventy and a hundred thousand years ago. If this is true, then the events surrounding the onset of Hamartia occurred hundreds of millions of years after death was introduced into the ecosystem.
Finally, on this subject, in Genesis 2, our ancestor is told, literally, "on the day you eat from it (also possibly 'from them' in Hebrew) you will die a death." The Greek Septuagint translation renders it "you (pl.) will die by death." Notice also that it does not say "immediate death." If there had previously been no death in the world at all, how would our ancestor have known what that meant? It would have been a nonsense statement and meaningless, because our ancestor would have had no frame of reference for it.
So then how can Hamartia have been the cause of death if death was already in the world? The key, in my opinion, to understanding the answer to this question is that the emphasis in the Biblical texts always refer to this imposition of death as applying specifically to our ancestors and their descendants specifically. Death was already a part of the ecosystem, except for our specific ancestors. The warning given was for "them" to not eat from a particular tree, or kind of tree, or else they would die. There was nothing said about the other animals eating from it.
There was however another tree placed in the garden described as the "tree of life." What's interesting about this one is that there was no prohibition initially placed on eating its fruit. It's reasonable to assume that our ancestors were eating from its fruit just fine up until the point that they ate from the wrong tree.
At the time these events were taking place, presuming that they coincided with the beginning of the wearing of clothes, Homo Sapiens shared this planet with at least two other species of Homo, and possibly more: Neanderthalensis and Homo Erectus (there is also the possibility of Homo Floresiensis as well). Furthermore, there had been several migrations of these species of Homo out of Africa and into various parts of Asia and Europe as well as those remaining in Africa. According to Genesis 2, God took our ancestors from where they first arose and placed them in a garden "in the east." It is not an unreasonable conclusion that our ancestors were actually separated from the larger populations of Homo which existed and were singled out for relocation, either by migration or other means. And so, rather than just having two individual Homo Sapiens in the entire world, we have perhaps a family group or clan of specific Homo Sapiens being singled out and relocated, and it is this family group which was affected by Hamartia and through tens of millennia, through breeding or violence, became the dominant, and then only species of Homo left today. And one of the primary and accessible food sources for that family group, and only that family group, was the "tree of life."
Another data point here is the unnaturally long lifespans of recorded Biblical figures between "Adam" and Isaac or Jacob. According to the Biblical text, Adam lived to 930 years old before succumbing to death. His descendants all lived for hundreds of years, though the length of lifespan steadily decreased from one generation to the next until, as the psalm written by Moses states, a man has only 70 years, or by reason of strength, 80. It should be noted that he himself is recorded to have lived for 120 years.
Speculating a little bit, it stands to reason that the fruit of the tree of life held a natural compound that supported and induced these repair responses in such a way so that the natural cellular repair systems were able to keep up with DNA damage at the molecular level and not be outpaced by it once the person who ate it had reached physical maturity. My thought here is that the fruit of the tree of life might have induced the mechanisms within the body to remove the cells with damaged DNA far more aggressively than normal, effectively scrubbing them on a regular basis after being consumed. With no damaged cells, the mature adult would not age, and thus would not die from old age. They would be effectively immortal as long as they continued to eat from this tree on a regular basis, barring physically fatal accidents. Also speculating, I would suspect that aggressive apoptosis or ketosis induction was not the only effect this fruit would have, but it would possibly be the major one in terms of anti-aging, and thus anti-dying properties.
By exiling our ancestors from their garden home as a consequence of eating the wrong fruit, and making it impossible to ingest the fruit from the tree of life again, they began to suffer the effects of what we would now consider normal aging. Damaged and mutated cells began to build up and their bodies could no longer remove them at a sufficient pace. They became mortal, and their bodies subject to disease, old age, and finally, natural death like any other animal. And so, through the choice our ancestors made, they brought death to all of their descendants, that is, every human being alive today.
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