Do little people go to heaven?
By ‘rational thought’ I do not merely mean the kind of cleverness
we notice in our dogs, or in the cleverest mammals, dolphins or, if
you are Lyall Watson, pigs. Descartes thought animals were mere
automata, but he was wrong, for they clearly have feelings, can
learn and make decisions.
If you accept the standard post-Aristotelian arguments for the
immortality of the soul, you will link it to intellectual reason.
This is more than mere mathematical calculation. Though we are
animals when we are thinking intellectually, the thoughts themselves
are not bits of brain or electrical charges being arranged. Of
course the original information came in through the senses, but
ratiocination is immaterial, and immaterial things cannot decay,
having no degradable parts.
But even if you accept this unfashionable view of thought, is it
not hard to see where on the continuum of intelligence our ape-like
ancestors qualified as having true immaterial rationality? Well,
naturally it is hard to detect a step-change on any continuum, but
the scientists are ready to claim a new species in Flores, a
specific difference that is more than a matter of degree.
I suspect that the Neanderthals did not have the spark of reason,
and thus their souls departed, as any form of a substance does, when
their bodies died and decayed. Only if the Floresians were brighter
and could conceive of universal ideas, conversing excitedly perhaps
about what should be on Saturday night television once Saturday
night and television had been invented, would they be capable of
sustaining an immortal soul.
The presence of these rational animals is no weirder than the
belief millions of Christians hold, that there are lots of angels
around, each a spirit individually created, like immortal souls, by
God.
But would the Floresians be fallen creatures, like the children
of Adam, or still walking in unsevered friendship with God? C.S.
Lewis wrote about unfallen Martians in Out of the Silent Planet, one
species at least of which, the sorns, were more intelligent than
human beings. If the Floresians are fallen creatures, how would they
be redeemed? Would the incarnation of Christ and his resurrection
save them?
Not that I can see, since God did not become a Floresian but a
human, a Homo sapiens. Still, the Incarnation and Resurrection have
had a universal, cosmic effect, so it could well be lèse majesty to
criticise divine arrangements for the redemption, if necessary, of
an intelligent species, the existence of which is posited only on
the evidence of some dry bones. Ezekiel had a vision of a valley of
dry bones, and was much surprised by what happened next.
Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of the Daily
Telegraph.
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