Is Human Immortality Once Again On The Horizon?

Did men once live to be hundreds of years old? According to the Bible there were many. Why then do men live only 70 or 80 or so years today? Will modern science change that? Will we once again live to be hundreds of years old?

Christian authors Fazale Rana, Hugh Ross and Richard Deem tell us  that

"the mere assertion that humans could live more than 900 years—as Genesis 5:5 states—seems, for many people, nothing short of absurdity. The mention of long life spans in Genesis 5 hinders these people from openly exploring the Christian faith. Unable to accept 900-year human life spans, skeptics and others view the Bible as unreliable, a book of human myth rather than divine revelation."

Here's what the Genesis 5 passage says:

• Adam lived 930 years
• Seth, Adam's son lived 912 years
• Enosh, born when Seth was 105, lived 902 years
• Enosh's son, Kenan, 910 years
• Mahalalel 895 years
• Jared 962 years
• Enoch 365 years and then "God took him away"
• Methuselah, Enoch's son, lived 969 years
• His son Lamech lived 777 years
• Lamech's son Noah was 500 years old when he fathered Shem, Ham and Japheth

This means that Noah's father, Lamech, spent many decades with Adam before he died. And all these men "had other sons and daughters." How many people were there on the earth when God sent the flood? One author estimates 6 million and finds that a ridiculous number for God to destroy. He views the flood as a parable anyway. Other estimates range all the way from 300,000 to 17 billion. No one knows. I'm not pursuing that question today. I'm rather asking whether the long ages suggested by Genesis could once again come to pass. 

Journalist and bestselling sci-fi author Ben Bova wrote a 2009 novel, The Immortality Factor , as a follow-up to his earlier report on medical advances, Immortality: How Science Is Extending Your Life Span. In that book he predicted that advances in understanding why people age and die will soon lead to the ability to reverse aging. Immortality will soon be possible and the 900 yr. + lifespans of pre-flood men will become possible. He writes about the same scientific advances outlined by the Christian authors I quoted above, namely

• Reversing the effects of free radicals or reactive oxygen species
• Caloric restriction, i.e. a vegetarian diet to prevent the intake of toxins from animal flesh
• Altering the loss of telomere length
• Genome size - the Human Genome Project indicates humans have 3 billion base pairs, but only 28-120,000 genes. Non-coding DNA makes up about 97% of the human genome. There seems to be a relationship between a large genome and long life
• Cosmic radiation that plays a significant role in limiting life expectancy
• Advances in endocrinology and hormonal control.

In later blogs I'd like to link this information to what the Bible means when it speaks of death. Note for instance that when Adam and Eve disobeyed, they immediately died. The LORD told Adam,

“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:16-17).

 When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they died. They were no longer in a loving, faithful and open relationship with the LORD. The full, abundant life they had known before their disobedience was gone. Thousands of years later the LORD came among us as the second Adam so that He might restore life as full, complete and eternal fellowship with our Creator (1 Cor. 15:22,45). As Jesus said, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). I'll pursue the implications of that in later blogs. The point is this: the LORD may allow us to discover ways to extend human longevity. Lifespans already have lengthened in the past hundred years, but that in itself cannot even begin to bring us the life that the LORD Jesus speaks about.