There are no useless by-products of  evolution. What evolves is what evolves, without judgments of right or wrong. And AFAIK, there is no line of evolution that is not eventually supplanted by another. So you could say humans are a useless by-product of evolution as we will some day be supplanted by something else.

Death is arguably bad for individuals but it is ESSENTIAL for the survival of a species. If we did not die, resources would quickly be exhausted. Objectively, dying is just as important as living.

Which ironically leads to theism - it is the ultimate form of avoiding death, of persuing life, of screaming at the cold, hard universe, "I don't want to die".

Hi Vessel,

I'm answering this post directly (and individually) because I would like to clarify that my intent was not to question objectively valuing life. To me it is objectively true that one should value what life is, just as it is known to and experienced by us. I don't consider it necessary to juxtapose ones knowledge and experience against their limits in order to value them. So, I mean you could say $5 is not $0 and it is therefore valuable, but to me that's not necessary when you could rather say $5 buys me a meal therefore it is valuable regardless of where it stands in regard to $0 (or $100 if you are a heaven believing theist).

Then, to clarify further, my point is that I don't believe the only objective value of life is that it is something rather than nothing, rather I feel life is objectively valuable because something and value are intrinsically linked concepts, something is inherently many possibilities of applicable/conceivable value.

I also need to clarify that I don't mean to suggest that death should necessarily become desirable to the individual, only that it should not necessarily be taken to be undesirable.

Continued life is, frequently, a most desirable outcome for any individual, (sometimes it's not but that is not essential to this point) this desire invokes creative action, in the individual, and creative action invariably fulfills some value; this is an observable truth so we can presuppose this without any need for contrast against what it isn't.

As Wave noted, we can observe the impact of death on the collective of physical life, this has value which we can measure through our empirical observation, we can even say that death is good for the collective.

On the other hand, the impact of death on an individual is unobservable, it's simply mysterious. It doesn't have value that we know and it doesn't lack value that we know, the value of death in terms of the individual is just not measurable, because it is unmeasurable presupposing a measure of its value is not logical.

Overall, my point is that death is regarded by just about everybody through this lens of presupposition in their ordinary daily lives. It is only necessary to life existing that continued life be desirable, death is not, then, by default, undesirable, it is simply unknown and unmeasurable (to date) that we can place no essential (referencing the individual) value on it.

I think I see now, for the most part, what it is you are saying.

But the value of that $5 is contingent. It is, we could say, inter-subjectively true that $5 has value. If something happened to the world economy, or we simply agreed that $5 no longer had value, and $5 became equal to $0 and no longer had the power to buy one a meal, or anything for that matter, then $5 would no longer have value. $5 can be said to presently have value but it has no necessary value. But a living being's life is necessarily valuable if it is objectively true that one should value one's life. That is what I was trying to establish.

I was hoping to put forth a line of reasoning by which life had value to all living entities in all possible situations working from an atheistic worldview.

I may be misunderstanding your point as that seems to be my M.O. so I am just trying to clarify what I was trying to establish by stating that life had objective value for the living.   

Something and value may be intrinsically linked concepts in that only something can have value, but that is not saying that everything necessarily has value. So, to say something is necessarily valuable, or has objective value, requires that we establish a line of reasoning by which to support that it is indeed objectively true that it has value.

But I think it should be taken to be undesirable, to the individual, though not dependent on the individual's subjective opinion. I think it is objectively true that death should be undesirable to the individual. Again, this is assuming no afterlife. 

I'm not sure what you mean by creative action.

I would put forth that continued life is always a most desirable outcome for any individual. That is what I was trying to establish. Given atheism.

For the collective, yes, but never for the indiviual, given no afterlife.

I may understand what you are saying. I gather it is something like, since death is unknowable we can not say that there is necessarilly no value in death. We can not assign a value or lack of value to an unknown. My original reasoning for how life is objectively valuable, though, was answered, as was requested by the person who originally asked me the question, from an atheist perspective, which I took to mean one in which there is no afterlife. I realize that this may not have been wholly relevant to the comment of your's I quoted in my original response, but I commented in response to your question of whether or not we ever question the assumption that death is to be avoided.

Working from an atheistic worldview, or a worldview without a presumed afterlife, many will make the claim that life has no objective value. What I was trying to establish is that even given as true that there was no afterlife there was a way to establish that life is objectively valuable. And from such a worldview, I think, that it is necessarilly true that if life is desirable then death is undesirable, or at the least less desirable.

 It seems that you are saying we can't say death is necessarilly undesirable without knowledge of what happens in death. And I agree with that. But, if we are to work from a particular worldview, which we most often do, then we can ask these questions such as why is life necessarily desirable, or more desirable than death, and arrive at objective truths of the matter within the worldview.

Many may say, well, of course, even given an atheistic worldview, life is desirable and death is not, but I have often heard it asked how we can establish it as objectively true and that is what I was trying to do. Even saying that with life one has existence and in death one does not, the theist can then ask what about having existence is objectively valuable. So by answering the question in a way that I hoped demonstrated necessary value without appeal to underlying assumed value I tried to show the value of one's life was, at its base, as simple as always having the possibility of non life or life as long as life was present, while death removes that possibility. Come to think of it, one could even say, even if it is possible that death and life were both good for an individual, or if it is possible that death is better than life, only life allows one the continued possibility of either and thereby has more value.

Many theists claim, that without a deity to assign value, nothing can have objective value and they require that one presents a line of reasoning to establish the objective truth of any value statement. By establishing, if one can, that it is neccessarilly true that a living entity should value its life, then one can perhaps establish that living entities in general should value life in general and this leads towards establishing that one should value the lives of others, all value statements and therefor things that theists often claim the atheist can not show to be objectively true.

Anyway, I think I have possibly strayed off into topics irrelevant to the conversation. What were we talking about?