Origin of Soulish Animals

Ongoing debates over the origin of life have focused only on the origin of the physical attributes of life. The origins of the “soulish” and spiritual aspects of Earth’s higher life-forms remain largely ignored. However, two recently published papers, one in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the other in Nature, now alert the scientific community to the severe challenges the origins of soulishness and spirituality pose to naturalistic models for life.

On three occasions in the Genesis 1 creation account God claims to perform a transcendent creation miracle. (A transcendent creation miracle occurs when God creates something brand new that never existed before, independent of, or from outside of, any of the material components of the universe, including the laws of physics and the spacetime dimensions of the universe. Transcendent miracles are distinguished from transformational miracles where God takes something He already created [for example, the dust of the Earth] and transforms or manufactures it into something far more complex [the body of Adam].)

Genesis 1 describes three transcendent miracles: the creation of the universe in verse 1, the creation of “soulish” animals in verse 21, and the creation of human beings “in the image of God” in verse 27. These passages represent the only ones in Genesis 1 where the Hebrew verb, bara (“create”), appears. They imply that the origin of life has three components: the origin of physical life, the origin of soulish life, and the origin of spiritual life.

According to the Bible, soulish life includes creatures in which God endowed mind, will, and emotions so that they can form relationships with members of their own species as well as with human beings. God designed soulish animals so that each kind serves and/or pleases humanity in its own distinct way. The Bible claims that before humans even existed soulish animals were preprogrammed by God to relate to and to serve and please human beings.¹

The Bible defines spiritual life as a God-given capacity in creatures to discover and to form a relationship with Him. In the same manner that He designed soulish animals to serve and please humanity, He made humans to serve and please Him.

Secular scientific literature has paid scant attention to the origin of humanity’s spiritual attributes, and virtually no research considers the origin of the soulish features observed in the higher animals, particularly birds and mammals. From a philosophical perspective, avoiding the origin of soulishness and spirituality makes perfect sense. For Darwinian explanations of life both issues are dangerous minefields.

During the “year of Darwin,” marking the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origins of Species, Reasons To Believe (RTB) is publishing several articles on the theme, “what Darwin didn’t know.” And he didn’t know what challenges the origins of the mind and the spirit present to his theory of evolution.

In his book The Descent of Man, Darwin explicitly states that the difference between human and nonhuman minds is merely “one of degree and not of kind” and that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”² As proof, he pointed out “there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes …and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and a man.”³

Darwin’s “proof,” however, doesn’t establish his premise that man is naturally descended from lower animals. From a biblical perspective fish possess no soulish qualities at all whereas both apes and humans do. So, of course, a wider gulf in mental power exists between a fish and an ape than between an ape and a man.

In a recent opinion essay in Nature, biologist Johan Bolhuis and psychologist Clive Wynne accept the premise that species of life on Earth have naturally evolved and, thus, possess shared ancestry. But they contest the Darwinian principle “that species with shared ancestry will have similar cognitive abilities.”⁴ In particular, they point out that from an evolutionary perspective “the appearance of similar [cognitive] abilities in distantly related species [with respect to purely physical attributes], but not necessarily in closely related ones, illustrates that cognitive traits cannot be neatly arranged in an evolutionary scale of relatedness.”⁵

Bolhuis and Wynne contrast the cognitive capacities of birds and primates. In the Darwinian models, apes and humans are closely related and share a relatively recent common ancestor. Birds, on the other hand, are distantly related to both humans and apes. Thus, Darwinists predict that of all animals, apes come closest to manifesting the cognitive capabilities of human beings.

The authors give examples where birds defy this prediction. They cite how “Caledonian crows outperform monkeys in their ability to retrieve food from a trap tube–from which food can be accessed only at one end.”⁶ They also refer to an experiment demonstrating that “crows can also work out how to use one tool to obtain a second with which they can retrieve food, a skill that monkeys and apes struggle to master.”⁷ Evidently, certain bird species exhibit greater powers of the mind than do apes.

The researchers show that the high cognitive abilities of certain bird species challenge both Darwinism and a purely physical explanation. One example they provide is the marsh tit. This bird stores seeds in tree bark or in the ground and is able to retrieve them days later while its “close relative” the great tit doesn’t store food at all.⁸ Biologists presumed the difference would be explained by a larger hippocampus in the brain of the food-storing birds. Alas, the evidence doesn’t support this suggestion.⁹ Studies also show that food-storers do not perform any better in spatial memory tasks than do the non-food-storers.¹⁰

In their paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, three psychology researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), boldly declared Darwin’s idea of the continuity of the mind (from lower species to higher) a mistake.¹¹ They argue “there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system.”¹² They go on to show that “this symbol relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain.”¹³

The UCLA study addressed only the properties of mind that pertain to symbolic thought. Putting aside the unique spiritual attributes of human beings, the UCLA team demonstrated that even in the soulishness that both humans and the higher nonhuman animals share, there is such an enormous discontinuity that Charles Darwin’s descent of man theory must be wrong.

RTB scholars conclude that God, not natural processes, must be the causal agent behind all three origins of life: physical, soulish, and spiritual. For more physical evidence and reasons for our conclusion we recommend our books, Origins of Life¹⁴ and Who Was Adam?,¹⁵ which explain our creation model on the origins of physical life and spiritual life. I am currently writing a book on the origin of soulish life.