“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the bird of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
The exhortation to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion…over every living thing” in the first chapter of Genesis, is perhaps the only divine commandment that humankind has universally taken to heart. As the human population explodes, many of the fish in the sea and the birds in the air and the livings things that move upon the earth, are facing extinction. Other living things might welcome extinction rather than continue as victims of human exploitation, whether they be featherless hens imprisoned in battery cages to lay eggs they will never sit on, or toothless bears strung up by their noses to ‘dance’ for tourists. The first case is said to be a matter of economics, the other a matter of ‘entertainment’; both are examples of needless suffering that human beings, as self-proclaimed ‘Lords of the Earth’, inflict on other animal species.
But on what grounds do we proclaim ourselves ‘Lords of the Earth’? And do living things others than humans ‘welcome’ anything at all or ‘suffer’? Are there any senses in which we can rightly regard other creatures as having attributes that require them to be conscious or aware? It is questions such as these that this thesis will address, with a view to better understanding the place of the human species in God’s creation and what this means in terms of our notions of personhood within a theological framework.
Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the creation accounts have been interpreted in such a way that humankind is set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. We not only deem ourselves set apart for God’s special purpose, we regard ourselves as the chief, if not only reason for God’s creative act. The mandate to “have dominion” has been seen as a license to plunder the earth and ravage its resources; to use and abuse without recrimination.
More recently, however, the western world has become increasingly mindful of ecology as concerns have been raised about global warming, holes in the ozone layer, depletion of rain forests (and with them our oxygen supply) and other effects of the human regime.
As the west has become more aware of the earthly devastation left in the wake of human “progress”, a number of eminent theologians have reinterpreted the Creation narratives to include elements of responsibility and stewardship.
"The special responsibility in this case rests primarily on this, that the world of animals and plants forms the indispensable living background to the living-space divinely allotted to man and placed under his control. As they live, so can he. He is not set up as lord over the earth, but as lord on the earth which is already furnished with these creatures. Animals and plants do not belong to him; they and the whole earth can belong only to God. But he takes precedence of them. They are provided for his use. They are his "means of life." The meaning of the basis of this distinction consists in the fact that he is the animal creature to whom God reveals, entrusts and binds Himself within the rest of creation, with whom He makes common cause in the course of a particular history which is neither that of an animal nor of a plant, and in whose life-activity He expects a conscious and deliberate recognition of His honour, mercy and power. Hence the higher necessity of his life, and his right to that lordship and control."
The responsibility here advocated by Karl Barth is anthropocentric. Accordingly, humankind has a responsibility to the earth and the creatures that share it with us, not because of their value as God’s creation in their own right, but because they are indispensable to the welfare of humanity. “As they live, so can [we]”.
As humans, we are understandably, inevitably, and perhaps necessarily, anthropocentric. We can, after all, only view the world from a human perspective. The problem lies in our propensity to absolutise our anthropocentric view, and to regard that view as ‘objective’ . We deify our human worldview, claiming it as God’s.
As ecology has become a central, cross-disciplinary issue, numerous ‘green’-minded theologians have advocated a more environmentally sensitive theology that places greater emphasis on the inherent goodness of the natural world as God’s creation, and the need for humanity to care for what is God’s. But many branches of theology continue to stop short on some aspects of reinterpreting Christian anthropology. Rather than seeing humankind as animals on a continuum with all other creatures, some theology continues to posit a creative break; human beings, created, according to Genesis, in the image of God (although it is far from clear what is meant by the ‘image of God’), are still commonly regarded as discontinuous with all other living inhabitants of our planet. This view persists even among otherwise sophisticated evolutionary biologists.
The desire to establish criteria that set humankind apart from the rest of creation might be seen as a manifestation of human narcissism. Those of us within the monotheistic traditions like to regard ourselves as the primary purpose behind God’s creative act. The answer to why God created the world is often given in terms of divine love for the human species: God created humankind as free-willed subjects able to enter into relationship with God. The rest of creation, from this perspective, is little more than an afterthought - a means of bringing about and sustaining the human species.
The desire to distinguish ourselves from other animals is not unique to the biblically based traditions. Aristotle saw all living things as comprised of body and soul, regarding the soul as, “in some sense the principal of animal life”. According to his understanding, the soul is “the first grade of actuality of a natural organized body” and thus inseparable from the body. Aristotle settled on the mind as the distinguishing feature, marking humankind from other animals. Whereas the soul was regarded as tied to the mortality of the physical body, the mind was thought to be impassible and divine. Accordingly, animals were said to be like humans in that they have souls, perception, and imagination, but, unlike humans, in that animals lack belief and the ability to reason.
Thus, in arguing that non-human animals cannot hold opinions, Aristotle claims:
"But opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and in the brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief. Further, every opinion is accompanied by belief, belief by conviction, and conviction by discourse of reason: while there are some of the brutes in which we find imagination, without discourse of reason."
Aristotle’s assessment is that although non-human animals have souls, they lack minds, and are thus, entirely mortal creatures. It is not entirely clear what function Aristotle understands the mind to have. For example, he argues, “[t]hinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind, but of that which has mind, so far as it has it,” yet he seems willing to recognize animal intelligence (albeit as lesser than human intelligence.) It would seem that “speculative thinking” by which Aristotle means knowledge, opinion, a sense of right and wrong, and, above all, reason, to be the attributes of the impassible mind, unique to the human species.
Aristotle’s philosophy met and blended with Christian theology, largely through the person of Thomas Aquinas, who remains powerfully influential in contemporary theology, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church. Like Aristotle, Aquinas held all living things to have a soul, but where plants have a nutritive soul, and animals have a nutritive and sensitive soul, the souls of human beings are claimed to be nutritive, sensitive and rational. Unlike other animals, therefore, humanity is regarded as having intellect, and, according to Aquinas, it is the intellect that makes humans spiritual beings.
As puissant as Aquinas has been, Plato’s notion of a substantial soul, capable of existing apart from the body, has played a more prominent role in Christian theology than the body-bound soul of Aristotle.
For Plato, the soul is connected to the invisible and eternal form of the Good and shares in its atemporal nature. While imprisoned in flesh, the soul strives for its freedom in the eternal world of the Forms, and that freedom is attained by dwelling on higher [intellectual] matters – the concerns of the philosophers. It was the Platonic soul that helped to shape Augustine’s anthropology. Like Aquinas who followed long after, Augustine accepted that animals had souls. The difference between a live body and a dead one was the presence of the soul, but how body and soul were linked was deemed to be a mystery.
The influence of the Platonic notion of the soul took a new turn in the seventeenth century when René Descartes identified the mind (res cogitans) as the soul; an indivisible, non-spatial substance totally distinct from the physical body.
Descartes postulated a more mechanised view of the world and regarded all animal bodies (including the human body) as biological machines. In his philosophy, what set humankind apart from the other animals was the presence of a divine soul that is precariously related to the body through the pineal gland. For Descartes, the soul is the centre of feelings, thought, reason and consciousness, and is unique to human beings. Non-human animals have no mind (and, accordingly, no soul) thus are only capable of automatic responses to stimuli, and incapable of any feelings, thought, or reason.
Descartes’ philosophy has been widely influential. Regarded by many as the father of modern philosophy, it was he who first applied the inductive methods of science, and the rational deductive methods of mathematics, to philosophy. His dualism is attractive from the moral point of view because “it takes as axiomatic that the mind is capable of rising above causal necessity and dominating the machinations of the bodily machine during the short time they are conjoined." In other words, his theories allow for the power of mind over matter. Further, his concept of soul proved to be endearing to the Christian community; it not only set humanity at the peak of creation, in special relationship with God, but also affirmed cherished notions of immortality and sat comfortably with the gnostic elements within Christian thought.
[T]here is nothing which leads feeble minds more readily astray from the straight path of virtue than to imagine that the soul of animals is of the same nature as our own, and that, consequently, we have nothing to fear or hope for after this life, any more than have flies or ants; instead, when one knows how much they differ, one can understand much better the reasons which prove that our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and that, consequently, it is not subject to die with it; then, since one cannot see other causes for its destruction, one is naturally led to judge from this that it is immortal.
Indeed, we can see that Descartes’ theory presupposes humanity’s special position of providence. To believe that non-human animals have souls like those of humans, is deemed to reject human hopes of immortality, because, for Descartes, it was inconceivable that non-human animals could have a place in eternity. That animals might have souls similar to human souls, seemed an abhorrent notion to his mind because of the underlying assumption that the aspirations of non-human animals can not be raised to include immortality; thus, to accept the notion of animal souls necessarily implies the exclusion of all human aspirations of immortality as well. The alternative case would be to say if that all animals have souls, we are left with no basis on which we could say that the souls of human beings survive death but the souls of other animals do not.
The influence of Descartes still pervades much Western thought. The question of animal consciousness is frequently dismissed; even the higher animals are often regarded as little more than biological automata. Non-human animals are believed by many to be creatures that respond physiologically to environmental stimulae, but have no conscious awareness of what they are doing, much less why. It is curious that today, when the number of those in the western world who take the Creation accounts of Genesis literally, is dwindling, so many humans continue to set humanity apart from other animals and see themselves as, in some way, ‘divine’. While a literal understanding of one or other of the Creation narratives does leave room for an eisogetic interpretation that puts humankind into a celestial hierarchy somewhere between ‘beasts’ and angels , there is little room for such delusions of grandeur when we accept an evolutionary origin.
Theories of evolution suggest we are the creatures that we are because, over millions of years, successive have adapted to our environments. Through random mutations and the process of natural selection bodies and brains have grown and developed in ways which enhance our ability to survive and procreate. So too, evolutionary theory forces us to admit, have the bodies of all living creatures.
Aspects of human life and behaviour that have, at different times, been considered unique to human beings (ie. the use of tools, language, culture, social complexity, etc.) have been found to exist in different forms in many different animal species. As might be expected, there is no single human feature that is unique to humankind.
Consciousness is one area that remains contentious. Some would still see consciousness as the dividing line between the human species and non-human animals; others question whether consciousness, human or non-human, really ‘exists’. Debates and difficulties surrounding the concept of consciousness will be discussed in the second and third chapters of this thesis.
The issue is significant for theology and for students of religion. When we ask, ‘What is it that makes us human?’ we are not asking – or perhaps it would be better to say ‘we are not intending to ask’ – a biological question. We already know that our DNA determines our biological makeup. Rather we are asking what it is that makes us aware of our situation on this planet. We believe that superior intellect has given us the competitive edge in the evolution of life on Earth, but it would seem that intellect alone is not sufficient to account for our ‘humanity’. Some theologians point to imago dei, the ‘image of God’, while philosophers look to conscious minds and rational thought; frequently the two perspectives seem to merge into one. Chapters four and five, then, will investigate some of the theological approaches to animal consciousness and their implications.
There is no clear understanding of what consciousness is, nor of where its source is ‘located’ other than that it appears to most scientists competent to form a judgement, to be a function of the brain. Yet ‘consciousness’, (if we allow the word to carry a multiplicity of meanings) is inextricably bound up in our theological and religious understandings of personhood, and how we see ourselves in relation to non-human animals.
It may be that humans have been content to take a Cartesian attitude to the conscious states of non-human animals for too long. Consciousness and rationality have been bound to language by numerous theorists, endorsing the notion that these features are uniquely human.
By addressing the issue of animal consciousness, the place of the human species amidst creation is brought into question with profound implication for the significance and nature of both religious life and theological reflection. If consciousness and rational thought are not uniquely human, wherein lies our personhood? Are all human beings persons, and are all persons human beings? These questions, in turn, raise issues about value and purpose in life, and penetrate to the heart of what might be called the contemporary crisis of the self.
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