Our faith affirms that everything that exists has been created, and that God alone stands as the first cause of all things—Himself uncaused, not created but the Creator of all that is. Within this view, the question of what existed before God is a misunderstanding of reason itself, because God is not part of the chain of created causes. Asking what came before Him is like searching for a black cat in a dark room when there is no cat at all; the question assumes what does not exist. The same faith also testifies that something catastrophic entered the universe and altered the whole condition of creation. Humanity and nature alike bear witness that something is deeply wrong.
Death, decay, sickness, and the strange disorder of the human mind reveal a wound that runs through the entire fabric of life, appearing in the individual human condition and extending across the micro, mezzo, and macro dimensions of existence. Evil in the heart and the inner conflict of the human mind show that something fundamental has gone wrong within us. At the mezzo level, this same disorder appears in broken relationships, wounded families, and communities that struggle with distrust and conflict. At the macro level, the sickness becomes visible in the structures of society itself—nations marked by injustice, violence, and systems that fail to reflect the good they were meant to serve.
In this sense, humanity resembles a gravely ill patient rather than a healthy being, and the human race therefore requires an ultimate Physician to heal the deepest sickness that lies within it. The question of why we die reaches beyond biology and touches the reality of God, for the root of death is spiritual before it is physical. This condition does not affect only our universe of religious belief or theology; it also shapes the social, political, and economic realities of the very world we inhabit. Science is not the enemy of this understanding; it simply studies the symptoms of a condition whose ultimate meaning lies in the moral and spiritual history of creation. As it is written, “For the wages of sin is death.” — Rom. 6:23
Eternal Agora 