Life and Death are Unquantifiable

"'A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?'" (Moore 21, Chapter 1, Panel 3).

Throughout the novel, Dr. Manhattan is considered a kind of God figure and viewed as such. He has almost every power imaginable, including the ability to know the future. This passage however begins to set him up as an indifferent God, one apathetic to human's lives. This point is emphasized many times throughout the novel, but here is where it is first mentioned and begins to be shown. Since he can see that life and death are, essentially, the same, he cares nothing about them, therefore not caring whether humans, mortals, live or die, or what happens to them. We see him create, as he does on Mars, but not control life. This is like the Deist view on God. The Diests believe that God created the world, and then sat back and watched, interfering no more in its affairs than that. http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm