Haran

This topic probably sounds strange, but I believe it has bearing on morals among other things.

I have had animals brought up to me before as an example of morals without God. However, I have a couple of problems with this idea:

(1) We don't know whether animals have any concept of God or not...

- This may sound silly, but does anyone know of any research done with the more "intelligent" animals such as Gorillas, etc., in an effort to determine whether they possibly have any concept of "God", "good", or "bad"?

(2) If animals have no concept of "God", "good", or "bad", then we seem to be unique in this way out of the whole animal kingdom. This is interesting to me...

Oh well, I haven't put a whole lot of thought into this as you can probably tell, but I just thought I'd see what kind of information I could glean from anyone out there who knows more about animals that I do.

Thanks for answering stupid posts,
Haran

Vorkosigan

It sounds like you are asking whether animals have any self-awareness of being "moral" -- for animals certainly have behaviors that appear "moral."

Michael

Francois Tremblay

Er, most animals cannot conceptualize, so they cannot have any "idea of god". And it has nothing to do with morals anyway, since gods don't exist in the first place (but you probably already knew that).

ohwilleke

I wouldn't be surprised if some animals have some conception of God.

Mageth

Sagan and Druyea, in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors argue that young male chimpanzees seem to, in a sense, "worship" dominant adult males in the troop, and so to them the dominant males may be a kind of "god."

Francois Tremblay

God is a chimpanzee ? That would explain a lot.

DRFseven

Bill

I would be very surprised if any animals had any such conception.

You see, the idea of God is a symbol, and as Deacon's book, <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">The Symbolic Species</a> pretty clearly demonstrates, mankind is the only species with any facility to understand and think about symbols. For that reason, I think that the idea (symbol) of God is necessarily unique to humans.

== Bill

Pandora

Some people consider that a proof for God would be discovering that an alien species also believed in the Christian God. If these aliens did not, would they then be classed as "animals"?

Bill

First, I find it impossible to believe that any self-respecting alien would have any knowledge whatsoever about an animal-sacrificing cult (of Jews) that existed in Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago and who just might have gotten one of their number executed by the Romans for some reason that almost certainly represented a challenge to Roman authority.

In other words, how in Hell could an alien ever know anything at all about the "Christian God?"

Second, from a scientific standpoint, the difference between humans and animals amounts to the presence or absence of the human ability to think symbolically. (See <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">Deacon's book</a>.) Thus, in my view, any alien race which demonstrates the ability to think symbolically is prima facie NOT an animal. Receiving SETI signals would be clear evidence of that state of affairs.

So, thinking people would not class non-Christian aliens as "animals." However, fundamentalist Christians just might. After all, they were pretty-much the same crowd that was behind human slavery (which classified humans that were "different" as "animals").

== Bill