There is a problem that you may not be aware of in your statement that it’s moot.
People originally did not have “immortal souls” either! It was a fairly late development in Hebrew thought that anything at all involving conciousness trancends death.
It took several stages of pre-Christian and Christian development before we came to immortal souls surviving death and either burning (somehow) forever in a “lake” of fire, or enjoying bliss without end, depending on the reception of salvation.
There were many ways a person could experience retribution in this life. And the virtuous were supposed to lead blessed lives. When this did not happen, as in the story of Job, it was mysterious enough to warrant a book or two trying to explain the contradiction. For instance, the Book Of Job.
The idea of sinfulness is certainly older than soul-immortality, so while I know of no examples of musings of early Jewish thinkers on animal “sin” it would be very interesting to see some. And not completely astounding to me.
The simple answer is that Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. By that act, they became corrupted and introduced sin to the world, and to humanity.
The animals did not disobey God and did not eat from the Tree. Ergo, animals do not know good from evil and cannot sin.
Genesis 1:26 – "Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
I’m not sure what you mean; distinguish how? And yes, animals were saved to re-populate the earth with the assumption that plants and minerals didn’t need saving.
Good question, I’m not sure how literalists explain this.
Again I’m not sure what difference you are looking for. Animals are treated differently because they are alive and feel pain (or pleasure), and so we have an obligation for kindness / humane treatment that we don’t have for plants or minerals. Is that’s what you’re getting at?
Basically yes, this is what I’t trying to get at. Can a human sin against an animal, as opposed to a plant?
Maybe I should take a step back from there to get my terminology right. I think of one person killing another as the first sinning against the 2nd. Though perhaps I am mistaken here – is this sin against the other person, or against God, or both?
But (using my definition for the moment) can a person sin against an animal? Or a plant? Or a rock? My impression is that while they might use one of these to commit a sin against another person, but they wouln’t be sinning against it. Essentially that sins are committed against God or other people, but not against things.
For instance, is it a sin to kill another person’s horse? Would it be a sin if it was a wild horse? Would it be a sin if you tortured the wild horse to death for fun and had no intention of eating the meat or using the hide, etc?
Animals have precisely as much free will as humans do: which is to say, none at all.
Actually think about it for a moment. We are told by some that God has made us in such a way that we have this thing called “free will” that makes us able to choose between good and evil, and that on the basis of this choice we are judged. Fair enough: but what is the nature of such choice, and from what, if anything, does it arise?
If a man chooses to do a bad thing, we can dispose the possible motives thusly:
[ol]
[li]The choice was caused; i.e., it arose from some nature, whether in the man or in his environment, either spiritual or worldly.[/li][li]The choice was not caused; i.e., it arose from nothing, was not predictable, was random.[/li][/ol]
There is no room here for any culpability that you could not with equal fairness apply to an animal. In the former case, the man lacks indeterminacy; in the latter he lacks agency. Even if you propose a soul as the motive in the former case, you have only created a distinction without a difference: one nature stands in for another, and nothing about the scenario has changed.
It seems to me that this is a case of using a phrase (“free will”) without actually meaning a damned thing by it and hoping that nobody will examine its use too carefully. But if we’re going to talk about it as a factor in the sinfulness or non-sinfulness of a creature, then hadn’t we better lay down exactly what we mean when we say “free will?”
Stealth Potato, that looks like circular reasoning to me. I understand “free will” to denote an alternative to complete determinism or complete randomness.
That is why I phrased the dichotomy the way I did. There is no “alternative” outside the union of A and Not A, unless you are proposing that we leave behind all rules of logic and inference for the sole purpose of making this idea less assailable. I see no justification for doing that.
What I am saying is, essentially, a tautology: “A motive for choice comes from the nature of the man, or else it doesn’t.” What you are suggesting in response is: “No, it is possible for it to simultaneously come from him and not come from him.” Unless it is your intent simply to seize up a contradiction as dogma, and thereby exempt yourself from inconvenient scrutiny – and I will admit, this is a time-honored and sometimes very effective tactic – I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.
If you insist on this idea of an “alternative,” perhaps you could explain what you mean by “free will” in a way that makes it consequential. For example, what is the difference between a scenario in which free will exists and one in which it does not?
Okay, well, the more I wrestle with it, the less sure I am that I can explain. I went and looked up “free will” in online sources such as Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Catholic Encyclopedia, but I have by no means read, let alone understood and digested, everythiong they have to say. I have learned about the distinction between compatibilism, which believes in a “free will” that is compatible with determinism, and metaphysical libertarianism, which believes that it isn’t and therefore rejects determinism.
Compatibilism is open to your criticism that “the man lacks indeterminacy”; but that’s not the version of free will that I had in mind. But, now that I think of it, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be logically possible for human beings to have a “soul” or a “moral nature” that other animals lack, which is among the factors that determine the choices the human beings make.
The sort of free will I had in mind is, I now discover, the “incompatibilist sort.”
If your Alternative 1 is one in which a man lacks indeterminacy, the incompatibilist sort of free will is incompatible with this. But I would not want to say that the only other alternative is randomness, although I am hard-pressed to define “random” or to definitely spell out the difference. But if I choose between two or more alternatives, a choice made randomly feels different than one in which I exert my will in making the choice.
FWIW, here’s what I wrote on the issue in a thread from a few months ago, which is still about the best I can do at explaining what I mean by “free will”:
I can define random for you: “Selected without reference to any determinable origin or cause.” And this is why he is wrong. We may choose badly, but we all see, feel, and do the act of choosing in numerous things great and small. In fact, if he is correct, then thought itself does not exist, including the thought which he thought to argue against will.
Understood, and I acknowledged this possibility in my first post. But as I said, I don’t think it changes anything. We’re only talking, then, about the extent to which the nature of the soul contributes to the decisions of the man, and we could regard the soul as just another aspect of nature. Not too much different than the higher brain functions which we possess and which other animals do not.
That’s exactly the nature of my objection to the idea of free will. If we require a plurality of futures, all of which are compatible with the singular past, we cannot define that tipping factor as anything but randomness. Any consequence within those futures that was not random – i.e., not unpredictable – would, necessarily, have some antecedent in that singular past which determined it. This is simply by definition. But that would contradict our premise, that all of these futures were compatible with the singular past. Therefore the plural futures view mandates randomness.
As for the feeling of making choices: of course we have that. Why wouldn’t we? I’m not saying that we can’t think, or can’t weigh external facts against our internal inclinations and come to a decision. But the feeling that we are making a choice, the feeling that we have the power to decide between multiple possible futures – to decide whether or not to hit the “Submit Reply” button, as in your example – by itself proves nothing. Thoughts and feelings are physical things, states of matter, and it is no contradiction to imagine their existence even if their causes were purely deterministic.
And since my argument does not exist, ergo, that proves that free will does, yes?
I am not sure what seeing, feeling, and choosing have to do with anything. Nor do I see that my argument has as its consequence the repudiation of thought. I have said that thought is a deterministic, natural process, not that it doesn’t exist. But in any case, that is the wrong definition of random. The use of the verb “select” in your definition already implies an agent. By “random” I mean, more or less, “unpredictable.” That is, having no origin or cause.
All sin is ultimately a sin against God. Obviously, I can also sin against you: if I have an affair with your spouse, I’ve sinned against God, you, your spouse, and my own wife.
Now, the rest of my post is my own thoughts – I don’t believe there is a universal Christian answer to your question. But it seems to me that humankind has been responsibility for what my church calls “the just and proper use of Creation.” If we are treating animals cruelly, or wasting resources, or needlessly damaging the enviornment, those actions violate the charge given to us by the Creator and in that sense are sins against God.
But if I kick a puppy, I’m not sure that I’ve sinned against the puppy any more than I’ve sinned against a tree by cutting it down for no reason. I recognize that one is more condemnable than the other but in my opinion, I’ve offended God and not the puppy or the tree.
To relate this to your example:
Yes, yes, and yes. If you’re looking for a “target” of the sin, in the first example you are sining against the horse’s owner (as well as God). In the other two cases, you are sinning against God by misusing his gift of creation (the horse). IMO.
The topic of Free Will is huge, but really a completely different subject.
'Kay, so this is what I understand from my readings. (Please excuse my clumsy language; I am not always so good at writing down philosophical concepts).
Animals don’t have free will. Their instincts are their commandments, so to speak. That is to say, people get a book which says, “Don’t lie, don’t steal, be a good person”. Animals get impulses that say. “Hunt, sleep, reproduce”. A cat that licks itself, kills mice, and sleeps eighteen hours a day is fulfilling God’s will.
In short, an animal’s desires are identical with God’s will. So they fulfil their purpose by default, with no choice in the matter.
(Most of this from Rabbi David Fohrman’s brilliant Serpents of Desire series, in which he frames the Garden of Eden story in the above terms. Adam and Eve had to choose whether they were people listening to external commandments, or animals listening to their impulses. Needless to say, they messed up).
2. Animals don’t have rights, but humans have responsibilities. Kicking a puppy makes you a bad person, and that’s why it’s forbidden. Probably it would be forbidden to kick a robot dog that looked and acted exatcly like a puppy, even if it couldn’t really feel anything. People need to have compassion and empathy, and so we don’t go around harming living things.
There are many laws about the humane treatement of animals, catagorized as baalei tzar chaim (Pain to Lving Creatures). Animals of unequal strength cannot be made to pull a plow together. Kosher slaughter is meant to be quick and humane. A person should feed her animals before she feeds herself.
I have never seen a commandment that says, “Thou shalt not kick puppies”. Was that on one of those broken tablets? Nor have I heard the quote attributed to Jesus. The closest I can think of is “Don’t Be Cruel”, by Saint Elvis.
Did the people of the time know that (land) plants could “drown?” I’m not sure of this.
Asimov, in his *In the Beginning *contrasts the origins given in the Book of Genesis with modern scientific models of origin, and also contrast the state of general “scientific” (if you can call it that) knowledge of the authors with current.
His claim is that the Deluge would have been no problem as far as plants were concerned because of this lack of specific knowledge about them.
But it’s not just a matter of knowing that (land) plants need oxygen from the atmosphere, and cannot survive in bodies of water. That’s not going far enough.
Even though plants clearly grow, the people in question did not even know that plants were **living things **in the first place!
More internal, direct evidence he considers is noting the difference between plants and animals in the Creation Week account.
Animals (which did not count Man) required their own Creation Day, number 5. Not so with plants. They share their creation with the dry land separation. It seems to be not a separate part of the Creation order, but the direct sequel of the first part of Day Three.
(I note that there is no mention of aquatic plants, one of many other “omissions” that mark Genesis as pre-scientific.)
I’m pretty sure that there was agriculture back then. They knew thay had to plant seeds to harvest crops (the whole sowing and reapinig thing). They would surely have figured out that if their fields flooded for too long their crops would not grow. I think that’s enough to know, aside from the issue of whether they were ‘alive’ or ‘dead’.
And they surely knew that if they planted gold or flint or rocks, they didn’t grow into more.
It’s my belief that sentient beings are the only ones that have a soul. Humans must be taught how to find food and prepare it, they also are taught religion. Humans can choose to believe or not to believe where as animals go on instinct and do not need to be trained.
It’s phrased a bit broader than that.