Animals Go to Heaven or God Doesn't Exist

Eternal Salvation: It's not our place to judge

How could a powerful and loving God allow so much animal suffering?  In the case of humans, an answer might seem easy and forthcoming: free will.  Humans bring a lot of suffering on themselves, but the good of freedom makes the suffering worth it.  Not so, it seems, with non-human animals.  If God knew that non-human animals would suffer so much, why would he create them in the first place?  And if he were to create them, why would he allow so much suffering?  It seems that he wouldn't. So we have reason to think that God doesn't exist.

Philosopher, Trent Dougherty, has recently written a book on the issue.  He thinks that it's reasonable to believe that at least some animals go to heaven.  Not only that, but they will end up like the talking animals in Narnia. (!)  

Here is a link to a short podcast at Dale Tuggy's website on animal suffering (click on the arrow at the top left to listen.)  I haven't quite finished listening to it, but so far it's not only interesting but entertaining.  (I believe at about 6:30 he makes a reference to one of my philosophy colleagues who did a dissertation with Dougherty on this very issue.)  Tuggy interviews Dougherty about his own conversion to Christianity as well the Problem of Evil more generally in another episode here. I have listened to this interview in its entirety and also recommend it to the reader.  In some ways it sets the stage for the talk on the Problem of Animal Suffering in the first link.  

There's also an interesting discussion of cats, so cat lovers might find the first link particularly interesting.  

Animal Euthanasia and Annihilationism

If my dog would've lived another minute or two, I would have euthanized him.  "Big Dread" (or The Clean Cut Artist Formerly Known as Big Dread) points out that there is a seeming conflict between thinking one can euthanize one's dog out of love and an argument I gave against annihilationism here.

Whereas I see no formal contradiction, Big Dread aptly points out a tension.  If euthanizing one's dog who is suffering can be a loving action, then why think that God's annihilating someone cannot also be an act of love? 

Here is, then, an argument that annihilation can be a loving action:

1. Killing a dog is bringing about the dog's nonexistence.
2. Bringing about something's nonexistence is relevantly similar to annihilation such that there's no moral difference.
3. Loving is a moral action.
4. Killing a dog can be a loving action.
5. Thus, annihilating can be a loving action.

I accept 1.  A dog cannot survive death except by resurrection.  If a dog is resurrected it will have a "gappy" existence.  I also accept 2 and 3.  4 is the questionable premise.

Can I love my dog by killing my dog?

I Had to Shoot My Dog Last Night

“Bailey died July 9^th, Wednesday, 1:45 a.m., 2014.  He was 12 years old.”  So my daughter, Malea, wrote on a notepad last night which I just discovered in the kitchen this morning.  Bailey Hercules Borland was a 12 year old boxer, one year older than my oldest daughter.  We had raised him from a puppy.  We saw him through surgery on a broken leg because of a bad Frisbee toss and his ability to leap very high.  He was loyal and smart.  He once busted through an electric fence to chase two horses across a field because he mistakenly (but reasonably) thought that one of the horses bit our youngest daughter.  When he was younger he would run with Amy and me.  He protected the family when I was gone, and the family felt more at ease at night knowing he was there and always alert.  And last night he died and was buried.

Bailey had been getting worse and worse this last month.  He stopped eating dog food about a month ago and started getting skinnier.  He lived off the scraps our one-year-old threw on the floor and from meat (lots of hot dogs) I fed him when I realized he would eat such things.  Then a couple days ago he stopped eating.  I forced pain pills down his throat for the past week.  And for the past week I’ve had to pick him up to walk because he couldn’t stand on his own. 

The last couple days he started moaning more, and yesterday his feet were very swollen. We had thought about taking him to the vet to put him down but couldn’t go through with it.  We did not want to bring our dog to the vet’s office to have him killed, pay the people at the desk for killing our dog, and then bring his body home in a bag.  He was a part of the household and a part of the family (2 Samuel 12:1-3).  I briefly entertained having the vet bury him but we wanted to bury him at our home, so we were hoping he would die peacefully in the night.  But that didn’t happen.