Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column (now found at NFL.com) occasionally tackles subjects other than football, since Easterbrook is a religion writer as well. In this week's column, Easterbrook maintains that the human body's release of large quantities of endorphins upon death is proof that there is a benevolent God.
He writes that God is sparing us from an unpleasant, horrible experience by such action, and that Darwinian evolution has no explanation for such an occurance. He reasons that a pleasant feeling at death has no evolutionary advantage over an unpleasant feeling upon dying.
I won't argue the point either way here other than to say that if Easterbrook is correct, then God created us to die. Why else would He incorporate such a feature in humans? One could argue though that humans were not originally created to die but rather that the introduction of sin into the human family brought about death. In that case, God would have had to somehow alter human makeup in respect to the release of endorphins after He sentenced humans to die.
Another question that does pop into my mind is this: could this release of endorphins be a response to many milleniums of human death experience, an adaptation developed over time as humans formed rituals and beliefs connected with the death experience?
You can find Easterbrook's argument here, but you'll need to scroll down to the heading "And How Come She Asks For Your Credit Card Number?"