Mainul H Khan said,

“I found the following two definitions in a popular source   :

‘Death’ means ‘end of the life of a person or an organism’.

‘Life’ means a condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter. 

Are these too simplified expressions of these terms? Do we really know what life is. let alone death? 

If you view the recent trend in science, it seems to suggest that organic things are not much more different than inorganic things. Natural selection appears to have made a transition from inorganic world to organic world possible without a need for a non-material thing as soul to be in the scene.  

I always assumed there is a non-material soul that keeps a matter-based body alive and in that sense life is synonymous with soul. If there is no soul that keeps an animal or plant alive, then why is death irreversible? Why does science that has made it possible to land on the moon and mars and that has looked into atoms seem to be so lost when it comes to biological systems? 

Or am I getting it all wrong?”

M Samir Hossain said in reply,

“I should clarify that even after being an advocate of science, I strongly believe that not everything is comprehendible or identifiable no matter how much time or effort is given within the humane limit, even if that’s only one or two things amongst all we know.

I believe in the soul but I also believe that the identity of the soul is too obscured to be discussed as a matter of public interest. However, it seems quite clear to me that our body does not represent our entire existence; in my view, our body is just a percentage of our present existence. As we discussed earlier and in some of my existing writings, in our sleep when we dream or in near-death experiences, often a part of us roams freely of the body; that I prefer to call our non-physical part. Our body can be best described, in my view, as a suit for that non-physical part.

Now if we think about the body as a functioning suit, the body must be alive. By alive I mean anything starting from the body under machine support after death for organ collection purposes. As a result, I see the living body as not always a living being. For a living being, we must have the non-physical part discussed above, but a living body is possible in the absence of the same. Life, as mentioned in your email, is a combination of physical and non-physical parts – that’s my view. As a result, I do not see Biology as the complete science for life.

Inorganic material, organic material, body, or living body after death – these I consider as parts of the same continuum for matter with different levels of complicacy. As a result, each took different amounts of time to develop in nature or on Earth. It’s still my belief that a Creator created the universe; however, I do not necessarily think that it must have happened in His “bare hands”. That way, if a man comes from a monkey over time, I would still consider that as feasible as well as His creation. In my understanding, the Creator is undetectable for us, so every process of creation by Him should also be the same. I’m not trying to discuss any religious issue here, just clarifying my stance so that I am not misidentified.    

Apart from what you said in your email, we could also address life as a phenomenon, like death. It gets a bit complicated when we consider death as a part of life. Nevertheless, if we consider life as the bigger phenomenon of the two, the proper antonym of “death” would be “birth” (and not life), and the part we call “life” would be better represented with “life before death”. Therefore, in that case, the appropriate question about the identity of life would be how is life and not what.”