The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology

The Inquiry

FOR many years the problem of pain and evil seemed to me to offer an insuperable objection to Christianity. Either God could abolish them but did not, in which case, since He deliberately tolerated the presence in the universe of a state of affairs which was bad, I did not see how He could be good; or He wanted to abolish them but could not, in which case I did not see how He could be all-powerful. The dilemma is as old as St. Augustine, and nobody pretends that there is an easy way of escape.

Moreover, all the attempts to explain pain away, or to mitigate its stark ferocity, or to present it as other than a very great evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, are palpable failures. They are testimonies to the kindness of men’s hearts or perhaps to the queasiness of their consciences, rather than to the sharpness of their wits.

And yet, granting pain to be an evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, I have come to accept the Christian view of pain as not incompat ible w it h t he ( lirist ian concept of the Creator and of the world that He has made. That view I take to be briefly as follows: It was of no interest to God to create a species consisting of virtuous automata, for the “virtue" of automata who can do no other than they do is a courtesy title only; it is analogous to the “virtue of the stone that rolls downhill or of the water that freezes at 32 To what end, it may be asked, should God create such creatures? That He might be praised by them? But automatic praise is a mere succession of noises. That He might love them? But they are essentially unlovable; you cannot love puppets. And so God gave man free will that he might increase in virtue by his own efforts and become, as a free moral being, a worthy object of God’s love. Freedom entails freedom to go wrong: man did, in fact, go wrong, misusing God’s gift and doing evil. Pain is a by-product of evil; and so pain came into the world as a result of man’s misuse of God’s gift of free will.

So much I can understand; so much, indeed, I accept. It is plausible; it is rational; it hangs together.

But now I come to a difficulty, to which I see no solution; indeed, it is in the hope of learning of one that this article is written. This is the difficulty of animal pain, and, more particularly, of the pain of the animal world before man appeared upon the cosmic scene. What account do theologians give of it? The most elaborate and careful account known to me is that of C. S. Lewis.

He begins by making a distinction between sentience and consciousness. When we have the sensations a, b, and c, the fact that we have them and the fact that we know that we have them imply that there is something which stands sufficiently outside them to notice that they occur and that they succeed one another. This is consciousness, the consciousness to which the sensations happen. In other words, the experience of succession, the succession of sensations, demands a self or soul which is other than the sensations which it experiences. (Mr. Lewis invokes the helpful metaphor of the bed of a river along which the stream of sensations flows.) Consciousness, therefore, implies a continuing ego which recognizes the succession of sensations; sentience is their mere succession. Now animals have sentience but not consciousness. Mr. Lewis illustrates as follows: —

This would mean that if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains; but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that “I have had two pains.”Even in the single pain there is no self to say “I am in pain” — for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation — the bed from the Stream — sufficiently to say “I am in pain,” it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience.

(a) I take Mr. Lewis’s point — or, rather, I take it without perceiving its relevance. The question is how to account for the occurrence of pain (i) in a universe which is the creation of an all-good God; (ii) in creatures who are not morally sinful. To be told that the creatures are not really creatures, since they are not conscious in the sense of consciousness defined, does not really help matters. If it be true, as Mr. Lewis says, that the right way to put the matter is not “This animal is feeling pain” but “Pain is taking place in this animal,” pain is nevertheless taking place. Pain is felt even if there is no continuing ego to feel it and to relate it to past and to future pains. Now it is the fact that pain is felt, no matter who or what feels it, or whether any continuing consciousness feels it, in a universe planned by a good God, that demands explanation.

(b) Secondly, the theory of sentience as mere succession of sensations presupposes that there is no continuing consciousness. No continuing consciousness presupposes no memory. It seems to me to be nonsense to say that animals do not remember. The dog who cringes at the sight of the whip by which he has been constantly beaten behaves as if he remembers, and behavior is all that we have to go by. In general, we all act upon the assumption that the horse, the cat, and the dog with which we are acquainted remember very well, remember sometimes better than we do. Now I do not see how it is possible to explain the fact of memory without a continuing consciousness.

Mr. Lewis recognizes this and concedes that the higher animals — apes, elephants, dogs, cats, and so on — have a self which connects experiences; have, in fact, what he calls a soul. But this assumption presents us with a new set of difficulties.

(a) If animals have souls, what is to be done about their immortality? The question, it will be remembered, is elaborately debated in Heaven at the beginning of Anatole France’s Penguin Island after the shortsighted St. Mael has baptized the penguins, but no satisfactory solution is offered.

(b) Mr. Lewis suggests that the higher domestic animals achieve immortality as members of a corporate society of which the head is man. It is, apparently, “ The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-goodhomestead” who survive. “If you ask,” he writes, “concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer, ‘ Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life — in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body.’ In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself.”

Whether this is good theology, I do not know, but to our present inquiry it raises two difficulties.

(i) It does not cover the case of the higher animals who do not know man — for example, apes and elephants — but who are yet considered by Mr. Lewis to have souls.

(ii) If one animal may attain good immortal Selfhood in and through a good man, he may attain bad immortal selfhood in and through a bad man. One thinks of the overnourished lapdogs of idle overnourished women. It is a little hard that when, through no fault of their own, animals fall to selfish, self-indulgent, or cruel masters, they should through eternity form part of selfish, self-indulgent, or cruel superpersonal wholes and perhaps be punished for their participation in them.

(c)If the animals have souls and, presumably, freedom, the same sort of explanation must be adopted for pain in animals as is offered for pain in men. Pain, in other words, is one of the evils consequent upon sin. The higher animals, then, are corrupt. The question arises, who corrupted them? There seem to be two possible answers: (1) The Devil; (2) Man.

(1) Mr. Lewis considers this answer. The animals, he says, may originally all have been herbivorous. They became carnivorous — that is to say, they began to prey upon, to tear, and to eat one another because “some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene. . . . If there is such a power, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared.”

I have three comments to make: —

(i) I find the supposition of Satan tempting monkeys frankly incredible. This, I am well aware, is not a logical objection. It is one’s imagination — or is it perhaps one’s common sense? — that revolts against it.

(ii) Although most animals fall victims to the redness of Nature’s “tooth and claw,” many do not. The sheep falls down the ravine, breaks its leg, and starves; hundreds of thousands of migrating birds die every year of hunger; creatures are struck and not killed by lightning, and their scared bodies take long to die. Are these pains due to corruption?

(iii) The case of animals without souls cannot, on Mr. Lewis’s own showing, be brought under the “moral corruption” explanation. Yet consider just one instance of nature’s arrangements. The wasps, Ichneumonidae, sting their caterpillar prey in such a way as to paralyze its nerve centers. They then lay their eggs on the helpless caterpillar. When the grubs hatch from the eggs, they immediately proceed to feed upon the living but helpless flesh of their incubators, the paralyzed but still sentient caterpillars.

It is hard to suppose that the caterpillar feels no pain when slowly consumed; harder still to ascribe the pain to moral corruption; hardest of all to conceive how such an arrangement could have been planned by an all-good and all-wise Creator.

(2) The hypothesis that the animals were corrupted by man does not account for animal pain during the hundreds of millions of years (probably about 900 million) when the earth contained living creatures but did not contain man.

In sum, either animals have souls or they have no souls. If they have none, pain is fell for which there can be no moral responsibility, and for which no misuse of God’s gift of moral freedom can be invoked as an excuse. If they have souls, we can give no plausible account (a) of their immortality —how draw the line between animals with souls and men with souls?— or (b) of their moral corruption, which would enable Christian apologists to place them in respect of their pain under the same heading of explanation as that which is proposed and which I am prepared to accept for man?

It may well be that there is an answer to this problem. I would be grateful to anyone who would tell me what it is.

The Reply

by C. S. LEWIS

THOUGH there is pleasure as well as danger in encountering so sincere and economical a disputant as Dr. Joad, I do so with no little reluctance. Dr. Joad writes not merely as a controversialist who demands, but as an inquirer who really desires, an answer. I come into the matter at all only because my answers have already failed to satisfy him. And it is embarrassing to me, and possibly depressing to him, that he should, in a manner, be sent back to the same shop which has once failed to supply the goods. If it were wholly a question of defending the original goods, I think I would let it alone. But it is not exactly that. I think he has perhaps slightly misunderstood what I was offering for sale.

Dr. Joad is concerned with the ninth chapter of my Problem of Pain. And the first point I want to make is that no one would gather from his article how confessedly speculative that chapter was. This was acknowledged in my preface and repeatedly emphasized in the chapter itself. This, of course, can bring no case to Dr. Joad’s difficulties; unsatisfactory answers do not become satisfactory by being tentative. I mention the character of the chapter to underline the fad that it stands on a rather different level from those which preceded it. And that difference suggests the place which my “guesswork” about Beasts (so I called it at the time and call it still) had in my own thought, and which I would like this whole question to have in Dr. Joad’s thought too.

The first eight chapters of my book attempted to meet the prima-facie case against theism based on human pain. They were the fruit of a slow change of mind not at all unlike that which Dr. Joad himself has undergone and to which, when it had been completed, he at once bore honorable and (I expect) cosily witness. The process of his thought differed at many points (very likely for the better) from the process of mine. But we came out, more or less, at the same place. The position of which he says in his article “So much I understand: so much, indeed, I accept” is very close to that which I reached in the first eight chapters of my Problem.

So far, so good. Having “got over” the problem of human pain, Dr. Joad and I both find ourselves faced with the problem of animal pain. We do not at once part company even then. We both (if I read him correctly) turn with distaste from “the easy speeches that comfort cruel men,” from theologians who do not seem to see that there is a real problem, who are content to say that animals are, after all, only animals. To us, pain without guilt or moral fruit, however low and contemptible the sufferer may be, is a very serious matter.

I now ask Dr. Joad to observe rather closely what I do at this point, for I doubt if it is exactly what he thinks. I do not advance a doctrine of animal sentience as proved and thence conclude “Therefore beasts are not sacrificed without recompense, and therefore God is just.” If he will look carefully at my ninth chapter he will see that it can be divided into two very unequal parts: Part One consisting of the first paragraph, and Part Two of all the rest. They might be summarized as follows: —

“Part One. The data which God has given us enable us in some degree to understand human pain. We lack such data about beasts. We know neither what they are nor why they are. All that we can say for certain is that if God is good (and I think we have grounds for saying that He is) then the appearance of divine cruelty in the animal world must be a false appearance. What the reality behind the false appearance may be we can only guess.

“Part Two. And here are some of my own guesses.”

Now it matters far more whether Dr. Joad agrees with Part One than whether he approves any of the speculations in Part Two. But I will first deal, so far as I can, with his critique of the speculations.

(1) Conceding (positionis causa) my distinction between sentience and consciousness, Dr. Joad thinks it irrelevant. “Pain is felt,”he writes, “even if there is no continuing ego to feel it and to relate it to past and future pain,” and “it is the fact that pain is felt, no matter who or what feels it . . . that demands explanation.”I agree that in one sense it does not (for the present purpose) matter “who or what “ feels it. That is, it does not matter how humble, or helpless, or small, or how removed from our spontaneous sympathies, the sufferer is. But it surely does matter how far the sufferer is capable of what we can recognize as misery, how far the genuinely pitiable is consistent with its mode of existence. It will hardly be denied that the more coherently conscious the subject is, the more pity and indignation its pains deserve. And this seems to me to imply that the less coherently conscious, the less they deserve. I still think il possible for there to be a pain so instantaneous (through the absence of all perception of succession) that its “unvalued,” if I may coin the word, is indistinguishable from zero. A correspondent has instanced shooting pains in our own experience on those occasions when they are unaccompanied by fear. They may be intense: but they are gone as we recognize their intensity. In my own case I do not find anything in them which demands pity; they are, rather, comical. One tends to laugh. A series of such pains is, no doubt, terrible; but then the contention is that the series could not exist for sentience without consciousness.

(2) I do not think that behavior “as if from memory" proves memory in the conscious sense. A nonhuman observer might suppose that if we blink our eyes at the approach of an object we are “remembering" pains received on previous occasions. But no memories, in the full sense, are involved. (It is, of course, true that the behavior of the organism is modified by past experiences, and we may thus by metonymy say that the nerves remember what the mind forgets; but that is not what Dr. Joad and I are talking of.) If we are to suppose memory in all cases where behavior adapts itself to a probable recurrence of past events, shall we not have to assume in some insects an inherited memory of their parents’ complex breeding habits? And are we prepared to believe this?

(3) Of course my suggested theory of the tame animals’ resurrection “in" its human (and therefore, indirectly, divine) context does not cover wild animals or ill-treated tame ones. I had made the point myself, and added “it is intended omy as an illustration . . . of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection.”I went on to make an alternative suggestion, observing, I hope, the same principles. My chief purpose at this stage was at once to liberate imagination and to confirm a due agnosticism about the meaning and destiny of brutes. I had begun by saying that if our previous assertion of divine goodness was sound, we might be sure that in some way or other “all would be well, and all manner of thing would be well.” I wanted to reinforce this by indicating how little we knew and, therefore, how many things one might keep in mind as possibilities.

(4) If Dr. Joad thinks I pictured Satan “tempting monkeys,” I am myself to blame for using the word “encouraged.” I apologize for the ambiguity. In fact, I had not supposed that “temptation ” (that is, solicitation of the will) was the only mode in which the Devil could corrupt or impair. It is probably not the only mode in which he can impair even human beings; when Our Lord spoke of the deformed woman as one “bound by Satan,” I presume He did not mean that she had been tempted into deformity. Moral corruption is not the only kind of corruption. But the word corruption was perhaps ill-chosen and invited misunderstanding. Distortion would have been safer.

(5) My correspondent writes: “That even the severest injuries in most invertebrate animals are almost if not quite painless is the view of most biologists. Loeb collected much evidence to show that animals without cerebral hemispheres were indistinguishable from plants in every psychological respect. The instance readily occurs of the caterpillars which serenely go on eating though their interiors are being devoured by the larvae of some ichneumon fly. The Vivisection Act does not apply to invertebrates; which indicates the views of those who framed it.”

(6) Though Dr. Joad does not raise the point, I cannot forbear adding some most interesting suggestions about animal fear from the same correspondent. He points out that human fear contains two elements: (a) the physical sensations, due to the secretions, etc.; (b) the mental images of what will happen if one loses hold, or if the bomb falls here, or if the train leaves the rails. Now (a), in itself, is so far from being an unmixed grief, that when we can get it without (b), or with unbelieved (b), or even with subdued (b), vast numbers of people like it: hence switchbacks, water-shoots, fast motoring, mountain climbing.

But all this is nothing to a reader who does not accept Part One in my ninth chapter. No man in his senses is going to start building up a theodicy with speculations about the minds of beasts as his foundation. Such speculations are in place only, as I said, to open the imagination to possibilities and to deepen and confirm our inevitable agnosticism about the reality, and only after the ways of God to Man have ceased to seem unjustifiable. We do not know the answer: these speculations were guesses at what it might possibly be. What really matters is the argument that there must be an answer: the argument that if, in our own lives, where alone (if at all) we know Him, we come to recognize the pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, then, in other realms where we cannot know Him (connaitre), though we may know (savoir) some few things about Him — then, despite appearances to the contrary, He cannot be a power of darkness. For there were appearances to the contrary in our own realm too; yet, for Dr. Joad as for me, they have somehow been got over.

I know that there are moments when the incessant continuity and desperate helplessness of what at least seems to be animal suffering makes every argument for theism sound hollow, and when (in particular) the insect world appears to be Hell itself visibly in operation around us. Then the old indignation, the old pity arises. But how strangely ambivalent this experience is: I need not expound the ambivalence at much length, for I think I have done so elsewhere and I am sure that Dr. Joad has long discerned it for himself. If I regard this pity and indignation simply as subjective experiences of my own with no validity beyond their strength at the moment (which next moment will change), I can hardly use them as standards whereby to arraign the creation. On the contrary, they become strong as arguments against God just in so far as I take them to be transcendent illuminations to which creation must conform or be condemned. They are arguments against God only if they are themselves the voice of God. The more Shelleyan, the more Promethean my revolt, the more surely it claims a divine sanction. That the mere contingent Joad or Lewis, born in an era of secure and liberal civilization and imbibing from it certain humanitarian sentiments, should happen to be offended by suffering— what is that to the purpose? How will one base an argument for or against God on such an historical accident ?

No. Not in so far as we feel these things, but in so far as we claim to be right in feeling them, in so far as we are sure that these standards have an empire de jure over all possible worlds, so far, and so far only, do they become a ground for disbelief — and at the same moment, for belief. God within us steals back at the moment of our condemning the apparent God without. Thus in Tennyson’s poem the man who had become convinced that the God of his inherited creed was evil exclaimed: “If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to nought.” For if there is no “Great God” behind the curse, who curses? Only a puppet of the little apparent “God.” His very curse is poisoned at the root: it is just the same sort of event as the very cruelties he is condemning, part of the meaningless tragedy.

From this I see only two exits: either that there is a Great God, and also a “God of this world,” a prince of the powers of the air, whom the Great God does curse, and sometimes curse through us; or else that the operations of the Great God are not what they seem to me to be.