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.

"Sacred Causes" a WSJ book review

Michael Burleigh has written a book called Sacred Causes, reviewed here in the Wall Street Journal. It is worth a read since it makes me want to read the book as an antidote to a certain smug triumphalism on the part of soi-disant secularists. While I consider myself a secularist in a political sense it is because I am a child of the Enlightenment. I do not share the view that a totally secular society is something good in its own right, nor is it the end point of human social and intellectual development. So I find this paragraph, for example, compelling:

By undermining European stability, Mr. Burleigh notes, World War I created a space for radical alternatives to the bourgeois norms that had gone before. He shows how the Protestant middle classes in Germany, for instance, distanced themselves from their churches, viewing traditional religious observance as the remnant of a discredited past. Science and culture, along with militant nationalism, filled the role that churches had once played, and the pattern replicated itself beyond Germany. A traditional outlook gave way to cultural pessimism, intensifying throughout the 1920s.

This type of secularism is a peculiarity of the horrors of the 20th century. And it can be pernicious if it leads to a blindness to the spiritual needs of the human creature.