Classifying Humans as Animals

I’ve thought it interesting and a little frustrating that Christians so easily accept the classification of humans in the animal kingdom. Of course, we do share with the animals the fact that we are created from the dust and are therefore of the earth. But doesn’t the fact that we are made in the image of God and therefore distinguished from the animals carry more weight? Perhaps this sounds too religious to Christians who live in the constant, scathing objections of unbelievers.

The Teacher of Ecclesiastes highlights two radically opposed perspectives: life under the sun and life under God’s authority. Life under the sun is life without reference to God or the spiritual realm or the afterlife. From this perspective, meaning itself is meaningless. Why strive for more knowledge? Does it somehow benefit you in the end, or only make you more miserable? He follows this type of reasoning in several different directions, each time finding that nothing carries meaning—not pleasures, not wisdom, not wealth, not our labors.

In contrast to this he finds that life under God’s authority does offer meaning. Under God, we can be confident that those who oppress the poor will be brought to justice in the end. Under God, the very dust from which we were made has meaning ready and willing to be comprehended by humanity.

Knowing The Teacher’s purpose makes the following under-the-sun statements interesting: “I also thought, ‘As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?’”

So when The Teacher expresses his a-theist perspective, he makes the argument that man and animal are not really that different after all, that in fact man really is just an animal, that both are from the dust and will return to the dust. From this perspective, of course man should be classified in the animal kingdom.

Is Lycaon's Feast a Mockery of Augustus?

The basic logic is as follows:
a. Jove is equivalent to Augustus.
b. Jove is a doofus.
c. Therefore, Augustus is a doofus.

When the first two parts are demonstrated, the third follows. The first is established early on in Metamorphoses (Book I) and then reiterated at the end in Book XV. Interpreters have identified the immorality of Jove as a mockery of Augustus, who was well known for his empire-wide moral reform.

Early in the story of Lycaon’s feast, Ovid says (in Martin’s translation), “…and if I were permitted to speak freely, I would not hesitate to call this enclave the Palatine of heaven’s ruling class.” (I.240-242) He then proceeds to describe awesome Jove/Augustus, who worries that the human disease will spread. Again the comparison is made between the omnipotents: “It was as when that band of traitors raged to annihilate the name of Rome by shedding the blood of Caesar’s heir; stunned by the frightful prospect of utter ruin, the human race throughout the world, as one, began to shudder; nor was the piety of your own subjects, Augustus, any less agreeable to you than that of Jove’s had been to him.” (I.279-286)

So Jove comes down in human form to get a closer look, and sure enough, Lycaon offers him cooked human flesh for dinner, and plans on murdering the great god himself. This justifies the almost complete annihilation of the world by flood.

Perhaps this is bait laid out early on, a trap set for readers sympathetic to Augustus, or even for Augustus himself.

The story is meant to rationalize the harsh punishments that followed disobedience to Augustus’ reform. Such punishments are understandable, the story teaches, given the abundance and extremities of evil. Later, when Jove is shown to be immoral himself, the point of the Lycaon story becomes a tu quoque argument—Jove himself is immoral, so isn’t it hypocritical of him to punish the world for immorality? Why not wipe him off the face of the earth?

Ovid, Christianity, and Physicalism on the Whether the World is Getting Better or Worse

Ovid poses four ages: gold, silver, bronze, and iron. To him the ages are successively, morally worse. In the golden age there is no need for laws because people are universally kind to one another; therefore there is no fear of punishment. There are no warships and there is no warfare. There is not even a need to plow the earth, because she yields her fruit freely and without coercion. Spring is the only season, and in it the milk flows, the wheat is abundant, there are streams of nectar, and honey drips from the trees. In the silver age, Jove rules the world. There are four seasons now, and people are forced to live in caves and crude shelters. The earth is abused (it is plowed and grain is sown and the earth is forced to give of its fruit). The bronze age is crueler and there is savage warfare, but it is not yet “corrupt.” It is in the age of iron that evil bursts forth, modesty and faithfulness are thrown to the wind, truth is discarded, and in their place we find fraud, guile, deceit, violence, and shameful lust to get more and more of everything. Trees are slaughtered to build ships, and the land itself is divided (private property is introduced). The earth is forced now to yield more than just food as men mine its depths for precious metals. Family strife runs rampant and evil is everywhere. Ovid is eager to associate his own day with the worst of the ages.

The Bible says that the original creation was good. At the Fall, sin entered the world; since then the world has gotten worse, morally. This does not imply that the Christian would deny the advance of technology or the progress of academic disciplines, etc. But the moral decay of the world has affected more than just humanity, and the creation itself groans in eager expectation of redemption.

Physicalist science does not pay central attention to morality as it judges the advancement of the world, partly no doubt because of the belief that morality cannot exist above the physical universe; morality to the physicalist, like humanity itself, can only be self-originating, self-creating. But center place in the judgment of advancement to the physicalist is the development of the sciences. These two things together—a diminished concern for the moral and a highlighted focus on the development of science—are why the fact that there are nuclear or chemical weapons proves to the physicalist that things are better than they used to be, even when those weapons are used to kill more people at one moment than would have ever been possible in the history of the world. So the Christian and the physicalist can look at the same facts and arrive at the opposite answer to the question of whether the world is getting better or worse. Some seem to think that pointing to the latest technology (and the past 200 years of technological development) is all that is necessary to prove their point; others point out that the technology has only given greater more deadly weapons for violent people (that is, all of us) to use.