Are we animals?

[jredden92]

I like to think we are a type of animal. We happen to be the most intelligent and technologically advanced animal. I think we got lucky. What does the church say?

 

[Fauken]

God did not play dice to make us. Who we are and our personalities were not cobbled together by chance. We are created in the image and likeness of God, made by and for God with who we would be since before time began.

 

[adamhovey1988]

What do you mean by “animal”?

 

[jredden92]

An animal like a deer or a bear.

 

[on_the_hill]

Absolutely yes, we’re biologically animals.

And with the advent of Facebook, pet dogs became people.

 

[Gorgias]

I like to think we are a type of animal. We happen to be the most intelligent and technologically advanced animal. I think we got lucky. What does the church say?

Yes, we are beings that are physical. In that sense, we’re “animal.” However, the Church teaches that we are a body+soul composite, and we have an immortal, rational soul. That makes us more than simply “animals”, in the way that all other animals on earth are such.

So… it’s not “technology”, per se, that distinguishes us. It’s our soul, made in the “image and likeness of God”, that makes the difference.

 

[jredden92]

That’s great thank you.

 

[DaveBj]

Some of the Church Fathers referred to humans as animals, but not in the same class as what they called “beasts”.

In the same vein, it can be said that humans (and, of course, “beasts”) are electro-chemical machines.

D

 

[Dimmesdale]

I am more sympathetic now to the Christian notion of imago dei as I do not see how moral capacity could have “evolved” and been instantiated in the way secularists might want to claim. There is something radically “other” about human beings which sets them apart from other living things. A chimpanzee could never, it seems to me, devote his entire life to serving the poor selflessly. A gorilla can never martyr himself for a set of convictions. Why should humanity be so radically oriented towards the moral life? Simply by virtue of increased inelligence? Progressively, as it were…? Perhaps, but something just doesn’t sit right with me here. Maybe I am too ignorant about evolutionary biology but, I dunno…

 

[tomarin]

We are human primates and mammals so yes. There’s an entire field of study called biological anthropology that studies our evolutionary origins based on fossil, genetic and archaeological evidence.

 

[Wesrock]

We are a type of animal. The traditional definition is that we’re rational animals, with our rationality being our specific difference from other animals.

 

[Welshrabbit]

I am in fact, a party animal.