Messianic monkeys

Jason Engwer recently did a post on the possible afterlife of our pets. John Loftus then did a post attacking Jason’s:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/08/do-all-dogs-go-to-heaven.html

Before I respond to Loftus and his commenters, let’s keep in mind the scope of Jason’s post. In context, he was dealing with Christians who mourn the loss of a pet animal. And he was discussing the possibility or probability that God will restore their pets to them in the world to come.

He wasn’t dealing with animals in general, and he wasn’t dealing with pet-owners in general. Although Christians are not the only pet-owners who grieve over the loss of a pet, when Jason talks about the restoration of a pet to its owner, that has reference to Christians in particular, not pet-owners in general.

Loftus’ post was just a pretext to ride some of his hobbyhorses. Much of what he said wasn’t even related to anything Jason said. And where he did respond to Jason, he spent his time burning straw men.

I’ll take this occasion to reply to his irrelevancies. Loftus begins with some tendentious bragging about how Evan and Avalos won a recent debate with Tblog. Of course, we wouldn’t expect Loftus to admit they lost they debate, even if they did. So his claims have all the credibility of Mafia don who professes his innocence. If Loftus wants to make good on his idle boasting, then let him personally rebut my material on the Legend of Sargon, and see how well he fares at my hands.

He then makes the claim that:

“They’re snarling their teeth because we also gained Touchstone recently as a new Blogger who used to be a Christian who discussed various issues with them, whom they now disown.”

Of course, as the record will bear out, I never owned T-stone as one of my own. I always pointed out that he acted like a nominal Christian. He always sided with the enemies of the faith. A “Christian” Quisling. He operated with a thoroughgoing methodological naturalism which was indistinguishable from metaphysical naturalism. I always pointed out that his profession of faith represented a highly unstable compromise and transitional position trending in the direction of outright atheism. Peter Pike made similar observations.

DC is more than welcome to have him. That’s where he belongs. He finally defected, like Kim Philby.

Moving along to what passes for the substantive aspects of his post:

“I have repeatedly talked about the problem of pain for sentient animals due to the law of predation in the world as animals prey on each other for food, including animal consumption by the top of the food chain, human beings.”

i) Loftus has repeated the same repeatedly-refuted argument from animal suffering. As I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, Loftus is not entitled to attribute pain and suffering to animals until he is able to refute eliminative materialism. That position represents a rigorously and ruthlessly consistent version of naturalized epistemology.

Loftus is not entitled to assume the common sense view of animal sentience since that is in conflict with his materialistic ontology.

ii) Loftus also needs to make a case for animal rights. If secular ethics can’t even underwrite human rights, it can hardly underwrite animal rights.

“Due to predation in the natural world there has been a horrendous amount of animal pain for hundreds of thousands of years before the ascent of human beings.”

Notice what version of theism Loftus is attacking here: theistic evolution. Since I’m not a theistic evolutionist, he’s welcome to attack theistic evolution to his heart’s content. That leaves my own position untouched.

“There has been a great deal of slaughter due to our supposed need to eat animals down to today.”

I don’t know how many people eat steak and lobster because they need to. They eat steak and lobster because it’s tasty. It’s also a good food source. And there’s nothing wrong with eating steak and lobster.

“In some parts of the world, like China, they eat dogs.”

The only dogs I eat are hotdogs. But in a poor country like China, you can’t afford to be too finicky.

“We hunt them…”

Of course, animals are hunted in the wild regardless of whether we hunt them or not.

“Trap them for their furs.”

There are countries where a fur coat is more than a fashion statement. Some people wear fur coats to stay warm.

“Grow them for consumption in intensive farms.”

We eat chickens. Chickens eat worms. Big deal.

“And we experiment on them, sometimes in grotesque ways.”

Sometimes. And I think we should avoid cruel experiments where possible. However, humans are more important than animals. Medical experimentation on animals is morally licit. Indeed, it would be immoral not to experiment on animals for medical purposes.

BTW, is Loftus a vegan? Does Loftus disapprove of animal experimentation?

“In the Bible we see where God supposedly even required humans to sacrifice animals on altars to him.”

For reasons given in Scripture.

“The amount of pain among the animal world calls for an explanation for the reasons why a good God supposedly created them. I argued that there was no need for animals at all, and that there was no need for the law of predation in the natural world. God could’ve made every single creature a vegetarian (or vegan), and made vegetation as plenteous as weeds are today.”

i) What position does he think he’s attacking, exactly? In Christian theism, there’s no “need” for any creature. God is the only necessary being. I’m glad that God made a “needless” creature like myself. If Loftus disapproves of needless creatures, then why not commit suicide?

ii) To say that something isn’t necessary doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Moreover, human beings create a lot of useless devices. How useful is a violin? Does that mean violinmakers are immoral? What about a florist? Does Loftus disapprove of cut flowers?

Christian piety is characterized by gratitude and thanksgiving. That makes it possible to rejoice in life even when times are tough. Loftus illustrates the way in which atheism embitters your outlook on life.

iv) Notice how Loftus presumes to speak for animals. For predators and prey alike.

But animal pain cuts both ways. If sentient animals can experience pain, they can also experience pleasure. Loftus is claiming that God was wrong to create predators. God should have restricting himself to making herbivores.

But while that might reflect the viewpoint of the herbivore, it doesn’t reflect the viewpoint of the carnivore. If you’re going to talk about animal sentience, then carnivores (or higher carnivorous animals) enjoy their carnivorous existence.

God isn’t wronging predators by creating predators. Indeed, if God followed Loftus’ advice, God would deprive predators of their predatory pleasures. Leopards enjoy their antelope steak. If Loftus were God, he would deny all the carnivores their opportunity to enjoy a carnivorous lifestyle. He is eliminating one species pain at the expense of another species pleasure.

v) But why should we assume that a pain free nonexistence is better than a sometimes painful and sometimes pleasant existence? Once again, if that is what Loftus’ really thinks, why not commit suicide?

Pain and pleasure are not mutually exclusive. Some pains make the alleviation of pain more pleasant.

It’s unpleasant to be hungry and thirsty. And the more hungry and thirsty you are, the more unpleasant that is. But by the same token, food and drink never taste better than when you’re parched or famished.

vi) Loftus is also assuming a hedonistic outlook, as if the only justifiable existence is a purely pleasant existence. But why should we regard pleasure as the greatest good?

vii) Moreover, there’s a tension internal to hedonism. What if someone takes pleasure in another person’s pain? You can’t attack sadism on hedonistic grounds, since sadism is a form of hedonism.

viii) So while he presumes to speak on behalf of the animals, Loftus isn’t doing the predators any favor. To tell a predator that you don’t have a right to exist because you inflict pain on prey species represents the viewpoint, not of the lions and tigers and bears, but of an effete monkey.

Loftus is imposing his simian values on the rest of the animal kingdom. But since Loftus is just another animal, shouldn’t the other animals get a vote? They didn’t elect him to speak for them or act as their representative.

If fact, Loftus is a simian bigot. An ape with delusions of grandeur. A monkey with a Messiah complex. He thinks the rest of the animal kingdom should submit to his simian value-system.

What’s worse, he doesn’t even speak for all simians. For example, baboons are quite predatory. Who does Loftus think he is? Who appointed this uppity primate to be the morals police for the animal kingdom?

“I have asked what animals did to deserve the pain they experience.”

i) Of course, this involves an anthropomorphic projection onto the prey. But how much pain do the prey actually feel? We know from men and women who have survived shark attacks and maulings by lions and tigers and bears that they don’t feel anything at the time. They go into a state of shock.

It may seem to an outside observer that being eaten alive would be very painful, but where’s the empirical evidence?

To take another example, when domestic animals are injected by a veterinarian, they take it in stride. It’s easy to exaggerate what animals supposedly suffer. Wild animals aren’t a bunch of wimps.

ii) Some animal notions of play involve biting and scratching. We’ve all seen lion cubs engage in leonine rough-and-tumble. It looks painful to the outside observer, but lion cubs seem to relish this activity. And that’s true of other predatory species.

Or consider how lions “make love.” Again, a lot of biting and scratching. Doesn’t seem very romantic to a human observer—unless you like to frequent S&M bars. But it works for lions and tigers. That’s their idea of foreplay. They prefer fangs and claws to roses and candles.

The more you think of it, Loftus is a big killjoy. A simian sissy. Why should he get to impose his simian inhibitions and culinary hang-ups on the rest of the animal kingdom?

Loftus is like one of those uptight prohibitionists who went around with a baseball bat, smashing speakeasies to rid the world of Demon Rum. You know the type: a sanctimonious spinster with granny glasses, hair in a bun, and a face like a Pekinese.

But the predators I know share a far more liberated outlook. They defend the right of consenting carnivores to scratch and bite.

“Would there also be a hell for animals that do wrong?”

Here Loftus is blurring the distinction between immoral behavior and dangerous behavior. Animals are amoral, not immoral.

“What about rabid dogs, or those trained by their masters to kill other dogs in those hideous dog fights we hear about? Will these dogs go to heaven too? Or do only the sweetie petite lap dogs get to go to heaven?”

This is irrelevant to the scope of Jason’s post. It does nothing to undercut his argument.

However, turning vicious dogs on their vicious owners would be poetic justice. I’ll take a wait-and-see attitude on that infernal possibility.

“Will the dogs of unbelievers get to go to heaven, or will they go to hell with their unbelieving masters?”

Once again, the cogency of Jason’s argument doesn’t rely on answering that extraneous question.

“Would we really want mosquitoes in heaven with us?”

Unless Loftus owns a swarm of pet mosquitoes, the example is irrelevant. Is Loftus another Renfield?

“Or would there be separate heavens for each distinct species; a dog heaven, a cat heaven, and so forth, since many species just don't get along with each other?”

Loftus is assuming the new earth has to be fundamentally different from the fallen world. He needs to justify that assumption. There are both continuities and discontinuities between the new earth and the fallen world.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that my pet doesn’t get along with your pet? So what? How, exactly, would that undercut Jason’s thesis?

“Where would whales and dolphins live?”

Does Loftus own a pet whale? He must have a pretty big fish tank.

Why does Loftus even think this is a good question? Does he imagine that on the new earth, whales and dolphins can’t swim in the sea? Is he alluding to Rev 21:1? But that’s metaphorical.

“Would birds still be able to fly?”

Why not?

“Would a tamed cat still be a cat if it didn't hunt mice?”

Why not?

“These are ridiculous questions, if you ask me, but they are entailed by such a bizarre belief.”

To the contrary, Loftus is begging the question by presuming, without benefit of argument, that conditions on the new earth preclude these eventualities.

Speaking for myself, I don’t attribute predation to the fall. I don’t think the conditions inside Eden were replicated outside Eden. Eden was a garden. An enclosure. The surrounding countryside was wilderness.

Now, man has a capacity to tame and domesticate wild animals. Man has a capacity to cultivate the wilderness. To turn a briar patch into a town or garden. That was part of the cultural mandate. To extend Eden. To export Eden.

In the new earth, I assume that man will resume that aspect of the cultural mandate.

“The bottom line, according to philosopher C. E. M. Joad, is that ‘either animals have souls or they have no souls. If they have none, pain is felt for which there can be no moral responsibility, and for which no misuse of God’s gift of moral freedom can be invoked as an excuse’.”

Of course, pain is just a subset of sensation generally. You can’t have a capacity for physical pleasure without a corresponding capacity for physical pain. So there are tradeoffs.

For example, men find a kick in the crotch quite painful. The Loftusian solution would be to desensitize that part of the male anatomy. But normal men would resist that solution since there are compensatory benefits associated with the nerve endings of the genitalia. The benefits outweigh the occasional kick in the groin.

“If they have souls, we can give no plausible account (a) of their immortality, i.e., how to draw the line between animals with souls and men with souls?”

Jason isn’t making a case for animal immortality in general. So Joad’s objection is irrelevant.

“Or (b) of their moral corruption.” “Moral corruption” for Dr. Joad, is the fact that animals are purportedly no longer in a state of innocence and as such they prey upon one another.”

For reasons already stated, I reject the premise of Joad’s objection. Animals are neither innocent, nor guilty. They’re amoral. And I don’t attribute predation to the Fall.

“What I hear from them instead is that we cannot understand God’s ways; that we are ignorant; and all we can do is guess about this, and guess about that. This is simply not enough. Whether it comes to the beginningless existence of the trinity, divine prophetic foreknowledge, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the atonement, the general resurrection of our bodies, free will in heaven, the problem of evil, or a great many other beliefs, including animals in heaven, Christians retreat to this position far too many times for me to have enough reasons to believe. Period.”

Who does Loftus think he’s responding to? Not to T’blog. We constantly defend Christian doctrine. We don’t retreat into an all-purpose invocation of mystery.

“I also criticized the probability of having resurrected bodies too. How is it possible to resurrect any body, whether man or beast, if that body no longer exists due to being completely eaten or burned to dust?”

There are numerous problems with this objection:

i) One perennial problem is that, as a former Church of Christ minister, Loftus has never had a very sophisticated grasp of Biblical hermeneutics.

Resurrection terminology is idiomatic. The imagery of “raising” someone from the dead, or someone “rising” from the dead, is based on the fact that bodies were buried or entombed in a supine position. Likewise, sleep is a metaphor for death, and sleepers generally sleep in a supine position. It’s also based on the fact that human beings walk upright.

Consistent with this imagery, glorification would naturally be depicted in terms of sitting up and standing up. When you wake up, you usually sit up and then you stand up (although it’s possible to roll out of bed).

And there are cases in which the idiom is factual (e.g. Jesus, Lazarus). But the idiom itself is figurative. You can’t build a model of the resurrection from idiomatic usage. That gets carried away with metaphors and linguistic conventions.

We’re dealing with a picturesque way of describing the reembodiment of the soul. The figurative reanimation of the corpse is the metaphor for the literal reembodiment of the soul. In some cases, the two coincide.

ii) Bible writers were certainly aware of the fact that decomposition ranges along a very wide continuum. At one end of the spectrum you have bodies lost as sea (Rev 20:13), or bodies exposed to natural scavengers (Rev 19:17-19). At the other end of the spectrum you have people alive at the Parousia (1 Cor 15:51-52; 1 Thes 4:17).

In between you have skeletal remains (e.g. Gen 50:25; Exod 13:19) or an intact corpse (e.g. Jn 11:38-42).

Bible writers knew that in many or most cases there was no body lying in a tomb, waiting to be reanimated. The Biblical doctrine of the resurrection isn’t predicated on that condition.

Conversely, Christians alive at the Parousia are gloried, but they aren’t “resurrected,” since they never died in the first place. Yet resurrection terminology is applied to them all the same. That’s the conventional idiom.

iii) Loftus seems to be assuming that an immortal body must be continuous with its mortal counterpart at the level of atomic or bimolecular identity. But, of course, the Bible doesn’t specific any such criterion.

Even if you operate with a model predicated on identity, identity can operate on different levels. It isn’t necessary to reassemble all of the biomolecues which originally composed the body.

A body is a particular organization of matter, and what individuates or differentiates one body from another is the unique, abstract pattern: the distinctive organization of matter—and not the constituent elements. That’s the level at which it’s a unique, individual body, and that’s the level at which it’s continuous with or identical with its former counterpart, even if there’s temporal dislocation or discontinuity when it no longer existed.

iv) But why should we insist on strict identity? Glorification is intended to reverse (and improve on) the physical effects of the fall. Suppose a Christian suffered from dwarfism. Must he be resurrected as a glorified midget?

No, because dwarfism is a disease. I’d expect a Christian dwarf to be resurrected, not with an immortal version of his mortal body, but with the body he would have had if his body had not been stricken with dwarfism.

If you still insist on strict identity, we could gloss this in terms of counterfactual identity. The template would ‘t be his mortal body, but his unfallen body in a possible world. Like the body of Adam had Adam never fallen, and had he—in his unfallen state—eaten from the tree of life.

v) One might also distinguish between the general resurrection and the resurrection of the just. Perhaps, in the case of the damned, God raises them with their medical disorders in tact. Immoral arthritis. Who’s to say?

Scott said...

“But if Jason is going to claim that animals go to heaven, he needs to create some kind of distinction between living things that are part of an ecosystem, such as plants and animals, and Fido. However, as John has clearly noted, he has made no such distinction. __For example, we eat animals for food and we need plants to generate oxygen from carbon-dioxide. Some of these animals need to eat plats and even other animals. Will this new earth have the same ecosystem?”

Jason can speak for himself, but as far as I’ve concerned I don’t see any reason why the ecosystem on the new earth would be radically different from the ecosystem on a fallen world.

Scott and Loftus are tacitly attacking a particular model of the new earth, a model popular in YEC circles. But Jason isn’t committed to YEC. Moreover, YEC is not all of a piece. You could be YEC in some respects and OEC in other respects.

Because many apostates are former fundamentalists, that’s the version of Christian theology they attack. And they continue to operate with the hermeutical method they were taught in their fundy days.

Apostates spend a lot of time shadowboxing with someone like Tim LaHaye. But not all, or even most, conservative Christians, operate with that paradigm.

Loftus is always debating with himself. It’s an argument between Loftus the apostate and Loftus the Church of Christ minister.

“What about the vast number of animals we've spent hundreds of years breeding as pets? Will Rover be "restored" to the form of his ancestors with the rest of the earth? Would his owners even recognize him?”

That’s not an objection to Jason’s position, although it was meant to be. That’s actually an objection to Loftus’ position. Loftus objected to animal resurrection on the grounds that such a resurrection would require strict identity between the mortal and immortal body.

Scott is raising the opposite objection. He’s insisting that animal resurrection would require a discontinuity between the mortal and immortal body. A dog would have to revert to its lupine ancestor.

Scott doesn’t bother to explain why Jason’s position would commit him to such a model. And Scott is contradicting Loftus in the process.

Speaking for myself, I see no reason why a domesticated pet would have to revert to its wild ancestor.

“But, again, Jason fails to indicate on what basis would such a distinction be made.”

To the contrary, Jason did indicate on what basis that would be made. Pet animals that Christians were attached to, or vice versa.

At the risk of stating the obvious, some pets are more equal than others. Lower animals like snakes, frogs, lizards, goldfish, birds, turtles, rabbits, gerbils don’t have much personality. They’re pretty interchangeable.

That’s different from cats, dogs, and horses. Take dogs. Because dogs are fairly intelligent social animals, they bond with human beings. And that’s reciprocated. We can “read” dogs. Dogs can “read” us. There’s even evidence of canine telepathy, viz. dogs that can sense when their owners are on the way home. By contrast, a frog doesn’t form an emotional bond with its owner.

On a related note, a child may cry over the death of a pet turtle or gerbil. Even hold a funeral. But we expect him to outgrow that. And we don’t expect a grown man to form an emotional bond with a lizard. If that happens, then something clearly went awry during his formative years.

By contrast, we don’t necessarily expect an adult to outgrow the loss of a pet dog (or cat or horse). It’s a different kind of relationship. You can’t really relate to a goldfish. Its social repertoire is decidedly limited.

“In addition, Jason has utterly failed to address is the gradation of sentiency we observe in all living things.”

i) Once again, that’s not an objection to Jason’s position, although it’s meant to be. It’s actually an objection to Loftus’ position. If Loftus is going to mount an argument from evil based on animal suffering, then it’s incumbent on Loftus to draw the line. To distinguish between higher and lower animals. A beetle is not a beagle.

What is the threshold of sentience at which point there is even such a think as animal suffering? And at what point up or down the scale does animal suffering become morally impermissible?

“This is the kind of narrow, human-centric view of reality I'd expect from theists. Animals do not make it to heaven not because they are living, sentient creatures, but by being valued possessions of God's favorite species.”

That’s a dismissive description rather than a counterargument.