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Today is Rapture Day, and I'm writing this a few minutes before High Noon. I'm camped out in my living room and waiting to be Taken Up. I've got my toothbrush and toothpaste packed (sure, teeth won't rot in heaven, but what about breath?) and a change of underwear and socks. Or will we go naked in heaven? I don't think so!
I've also got a supply of dog food and a pair of leashes. My two dogs, Smoke and Spike, are lying on the floor right beside me. We're ready!
What? Dogs can't go to heaven? Who says? What about cats?
Fransican Friar Jack Wintz, author of Will I See My Dog in Heaven? (2009), promotes the idea that our beloved companion animals, too, can hope for salvation. But the standard Christian belief is that only humans have immortal souls and that only humans, therefore, will reach heaven.
These ideas have a history that takes us back to the time when no one tried to distinguish "soul" from "mind," so that the argument about whether animals had souls was identical to the argument about whether animals had minds.
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The medieval universe was a place gloriously filled with minds: from the mind of God on high, to the minds of angels and demons in the aether and the air, the minds of people and animals on earth, and on down to the mind of Satan himself, situated in the earth's fiery interior. This imagined universe cohered partly because all those minds shared some fundamentally human-like qualities.
The mystery of how humans could be both physical and intellectual beings was explained by a theory of souls, which was simultaneously a theory of minds, and it distinguished plants from animals from people. All plants had vegetable souls, accounting for growth and reproduction. All animals incorporated vegetable souls within a sensitive soul, giving them sentience. Humans maintained both vegetable and sensitive souls within a rational soul, and with that rational soul a person could hope to touch the intelligence of angels right below God. At the same time, possessing a sensitive soul kept humans in communion with the sentience of animals, which was itself a surprisingly rich and flexible kind of intelligence.
The medieval vision of animal minds as intelligent entities constructed in a humanoid form--under-endowed human minds--is what I call the First Way of thinking about animals. I would contrast it with a system of thinking and belief that generally replaced it. This Second Way is sometimes associated with the writings of René Descartes.
In his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes described a world stripped of intelligence and emptied of minds, save for those belonging to God and humankind. Animals, Descartes wrote, "have no reason at all," and as a result "nature acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, just as a clock, which is only composed of wheels and weights is able to tell the hours and measure the time." Animals are machines made by nature.
The American novel, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), draws the problem of how to think about animals into the world of nineteenth-century industrial whaling by posing the following dilemma: What if a whale is not an object or a thing but rather a living biological entity self-directed by some force or quality we might recognize as a mind? That radical question drives the springs and gears of this great big book about a big bad whale. The two most legally-responsible men aboard the whaling ship where the bulk of the action occurs, the captain and first mate, take the two most clearly-defined positions on the matter.
Captain Ahab, having lost his own leg to the gnashing teeth of an enormous white whale named Moby Dick, vows revenge. Ahab, thinking of animals in the First Way, is convinced that the whale he seeks is aware and morally responsible. First mate Starbuck, who has signed onto the voyage with the commonplace purpose of earning money through harvesting whales, embodies Second Way thinking about animals.
The first mate is provoked to challenge his captain. "Vengeance on a dumb brute!" Starbuck cries out in alarm. To take revenge against a mere animal, a "dumb thing" that acted from "blindest instinct" is a terrible error. Starbuck's words challenge not so much Ahab's dangerous actions as they do his alarming ideas. Starbuck embraces the values of a conventional man from his time and place, and among his unshakable certainties is that animals are things, fully disconnected from the psychological reality known only to humans. To think or to behave otherwise, he blurts out to Captain Ahab, is to violate the most fundamental tenets of secular and religious convention. It would be "madness," a "blasphemous" act.
So Ahab and Starbuck take radically opposing positions on the problem of a strangely persistent and obviously dangerous animal . . . and both are wrong. The way to proceed is to triangulate from their two positions and find a possible Third Way. This Third Way would incorporate Ahab's unshakable conviction that an animal can have a mind with Starbuck's opposing certainty that no one will find a mind out there except the one inside another human. The Third Way allows for the existence of animal minds, but it considers them alien minds--alien, that is, from human minds. The Third Way looks for both real similarity, between human and animal minds, and genuine dissimilarity.
Herman Melville's famous contemporary and fellow South-Seas adventurer Charles Darwin suggested the Third Way of thinking about animals when he promoted his theory of evolution through natural selection in On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin tells us that the enormous number of anatomical similarities we can identify among separate species is the result of a shared evolutionary history. You and I have eyes that are very similar to the eyes of, say, dogs, elephants, rattle snakes, and ring-tailed lemurs, along with a few million other species, primarily because eyes evolved a very long time ago, long before those species branched out and developed their particular dissimilarities from one another. A shared evolutionary history can explain much about the vast number of physical similarities among biological entities. That's the evolutionary principle of anatomical continuity. Yet Darwin understood very well that there was no good reason why such continuity should be limited to anatomy. He argued in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) for the existence of an emotional and psychological continuity among animals and humans as well, based on a shared evolutionary history, and he believed in a mental continuity to the degree that one might even speak of animals as having morality or something very similar to it. "Besides love and sympathy," he wrote in the Descent of Man (1871), "animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts, which in us would be called moral."
Given this added complexity about minds and souls, morality and responsibility, I'll ask the question once more: Can dogs go to heaven?
Ahab would say, "Certainly. Just as an evil whale will go to hell."
Starbuck would say, "No. Of course not!"
Darwin would say, "Maybe. . . . But if so, it would be a heaven for dogs, one filled with glorious smells, grassy fields, and endless sweet rabbits to chase--a heaven very different from the heaven for people."
