Animal Souls

This is my answer to the following question, posted on Quora.com in 2020.

Why does the Catholic religion teach that animals don’t have souls and that they can’t go to heaven after death?

When you talk about what “the Catholic religion teaches,” or any other religion, you have to note what level of authority is involved. There are things that Catholicism absolutely teaches, written into documents like creeds and catechisms, and then there are things that are widely believed, or allowed beliefs that have no official endorsement, and so on down.

That animals do not have immortal souls and so do not go to heaven is a widely received Catholic belief, but I don’t think it’s part of any official pronouncement. It just isn’t that important. The idea is widely received in Protestant Christianity too.

I am a Christian, though not Catholic, but I don’t think the idea has any merit. It is a hangover from medieval Scholastic philosophy, based on Aristotelian philosophy. Pre-Christian Greeks regarded being divine and being immortal as the same thing. Their philosophers regarded reason as the most divine, eternal, therefore immortal, aspect of humanity, and the thing which distinguished humans from animals. Therefore, they regarded animals as lacking in natural immortality.

The Catholic church, along with medieval Islam and Judaism, simply carried this idea along with all the rest when they took on board Greek philosophy. It has no particular Biblical basis.

If you start with Genesis, you will read of God creating “living things.” The original Hebrew word there is nephesh, a word that is commonly translated “soul” everywhere else—so animals are the first souls mentioned in the Bible.

The Bible makes no distinction between animal souls and human souls, and in Ecclesiastes says, “All go to one place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal descends into the earth?”—Ecclesiastes 3:20-21

As for higher animals like horses, dogs, and cats, they can love and they cannot sin, so I hold that “all dogs go to heaven.”

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