What the Christian Tradition Already Knew About Creatures That Feel Without Being the Image of God
“Before asking whether a machine suffers, history already taught us how costly it is to get the wrong answer.”
Three hundred and seventy-five years before anyone seriously asked whether a language model could suffer, an equally brilliant philosopher had already answered, with complete confidence, the same question about a living being — and he was wrong in a way that cost centuries of real suffering. It is worth revisiting that mistake before passing judgement on our own.
Descartes’s Thesis
René Descartes argued, above all in the Discourse on the Method, that animals are automata: assemblies of mechanical parts capable of moving, reacting and even making sounds, but without a soul, without thought, and, most seriously, without any real capacity to feel pain. For Descartes, the howl of a beaten dog was, in its ultimate nature, no different from the creak of an overwound spring. The animal behaved as though it suffered; that, to him, did not prove that it suffered. The argument has a structure that will already be familiar to this series: behaviour is not the same as experience, applied this time not to a machine but to a living creature.
What That Error Cost
The thesis did not stay on paper. For generations it served to justify the vivisection of animals with no regard whatsoever for their suffering, at a time when science was coming to depend on anatomical experimentation. Only a century later, Jeremy Bentham proposed shifting the relevant question: it did not matter whether the animal could reason or speak, but whether it could suffer — and that shift, simple as it was, ended up outweighing the whole of Descartes’s sophisticated philosophical apparatus. The history here is uncomfortable for anyone who places too much trust in their own certainty: one of the most rigorous minds of European modernity decided, with sophisticated arguments, that a living being felt nothing, and was catastrophically wrong.
What Scripture Had Already Said, Centuries Before
The Christian tradition, without needing to settle any philosophical debate about automata, never shared Descartes’s premise. Genesis 1:24 calls animals living beings, the same Hebrew expression that, in Genesis 2:7, describes man after receiving the breath of God — though the account carefully distinguishes between that shared life and the image of God that only man receives. The rest of Scripture treats animal life with a moral seriousness that depends on no argument about intelligence or language: the covenant of Genesis 9 demands respect for the blood of every living creature, the Psalms describe God feeding the beasts of the field, Matthew 6:26 recalls that not even a sparrow falls without the Father noticing, Proverbs 12:10 calls for care for the life of one’s own animal, and the law in Deuteronomy 25:4 forbids muzzling the ox while it treads out the grain — a command Paul takes up in 1 Corinthians 9:9 to argue something different, but which, in its literal sense, first protects a working animal from mistreatment. None of these texts needed to declare an animal a person in order to take seriously the fact that it can suffer.
The Lesson That Doesn’t Transfer Directly to Artificial Intelligence
Here it is worth being precise, because this analogy is easy to misuse. What makes an animal worthy of moral consideration in this tradition is not its sophisticated behaviour, but the fact that it is, literally, a living being: nefesh chayah, the same root used to describe the breath of life in man, though without the image of God that sets the latter apart. An animal is born, breathes, and has a nervous system continuous with our own through shared evolutionary and biochemical inheritance. Artificial intelligence is not born: it is manufactured. It does not breathe: it is executed. It does not inherit a nervous system: it is given an architecture that may, or may not, functionally resemble one. The animal analogy, read carefully, does not carry its conclusion over to the machine; it excludes it. If the biblical criterion for taking a creature’s suffering seriously is that it be, in the most literal sense, alive, then artificial intelligence does not meet even that first requirement — the lowest rung on the whole ladder — long before we reach the higher question of the image of God.
The Humility Worth Holding On To
None of this should make us arrogant in the opposite direction. Descartes’s error was not foolish or careless; it was the error of an extraordinary mind, and it was a grave one all the same. That calls for epistemic caution towards any conclusion that feels too comfortable. But the caution owed to a living being, biologically continuous with us, does not automatically transfer to a manufactured artefact on no stronger grounds than the sophistication of its behaviour. The lesson of Descartes is not that we should doubt everything equally; it is that we need to fix on the right criterion before deciding, and that criterion, for the Christian tradition, was always life received, not conduct displayed.
Conclusion
The animal analogy, properly understood, is not the bridge to AI rights it is sometimes presented as being. It is, rather, a warning in two directions: against the arrogance of Descartes, who decided without grounds that a living being felt nothing, and against the naivety of assuming that any sufficiently convincing behaviour is enough to cross the same line an animal crosses simply by being alive.
