The Human/Animal divide
Christians believe that the possession of a soul separates humans from animals. Some secularists I know, even the ones who are adamant atheists, claim that evolution has created a distinct consciousness that irrevocably separates humans from animals.
But I don't think either are quite right.
Consider Nim Chimpsky, a baby Chimpanzee who was taken away from his mother to be raised in New York by humans in an experiment to gauge how much, if any, language ability a chimp might have. He grew up thinking he was a human. Then, the experiment ended and funding dried up. Nim was sent promptly off to a dreary lab to reside with other chimps serving science.
Here is a description of some of his behavior among his fellow chimps, as told by the author of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp who would be human:
There was a children's book all about Nim while he was in New York, basically a photo book, and Nim kept his one copy of this book safe, even though chimps tend to wreck everything. He would bring it down and show the other chimps, then bring it back to his bunk and keep it under his sleeping area so that no one could destroy it. He would just look at pictures of his New York City family, and himself, over and over again.
So where does the soul, that precious human consciousness, begin?
The quote is from an interview for Salon.com that is worth reading.
Labels: animals, religion, secularism
posted by Clemens @ 3:02 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Actually, if my seminary education was correct, medieval Christians, or at least St. Thomas Aquinas who's as good a pinata as any, believed that everything had a soul, except maybe inanimate things like rocks. The very broad classification was plants, animals, and humans. Presumably there could have been a grading of souls within these categories, and since they didn't know about chimpanzees (I would be very surprised if they did) then they might very well be inclined to say that chimpanzees are something near to human.
The difference, as I recall it, is that human souls have the capacity to be made divine.
It's a shame about Nim Chimpsky. I remember reading about him in college, a course called "Principles of Language". That was one of the best classes I ever took.
Thanks for the insight! I've turned this question over in my mind ever since my Buddhist sister-in-law asked me, in the wake of the death of her sons kitty-cat, if I thought the cat would go to heaven.
Still not sure of that, but I am certain that chimps ought to at least be in the foyer or somewhere up there.
Another chimp who'd been taught sign language and then dumped back into the 'prison' population was finally visited by his original trainer. He sprang to the door and when he saw his old human friend and signed "Get - Key!"
I thought I had no heart until you started telling these stories about the chimps. I had no idea that they went back to the prison population, although I guess they don't make such good pets.
I should probably clarify/correct some things I wrote before. When I said that human souls could be made divine, I meant it in the orthodox Christian sense that they could be divinized, or made to partake of the divine nature, as St. Peter writes, or as the Greek Orthodox call it, θεωσις. "God became man so that man could become God," as someone writes (St. Athanasius?).
Also, I think (not entirely sure) that another difference was that animal souls were not eternal. Medieval Christians were not infected with Descartes' dualism, so their notion of a soul was not that of a ghost in the machine. The soul is, literally, that which animated the body. In the case of humans, the soul can live without the body, but it cannot be fully happy without the body, which is why a resurrection of the body is such a great thing. I don't know if that applied to animals, although I think (in my uninformed way) that medievals, who could produce texts like St. Bonaventure's Ascent of the Mind to God, had a deeper respect for animals than we—although I could easily be corrected.
Post a Comment
<< Home