Do All Good Dogs Go To Heaven?

On Huffington Post, Pythia Peay interviewed Ptolemy Tompkins, author of a new book, The Divine Life of Animals: One Man’s Quest to Discover Whether the Souls of Animals Live On. With a title like that, you know I’m going to have to write about it.

I love animals. I have two dogs and two cats. I’m a vegetarian (okay, I’m a pescetarian, a mushy fish-eating compromise). Like any animal lover I have a tendency to anthropomorphize my furry friends. This is not entirely unjustified. Animal behaviorists have confirmed that animals display emotional attachments, loyalties and altruism.

From what I can glean from the this interview, scientific research was not among the author’s resources. From the interview:

In our modern culture, where people are skittish about talking about whether humans have souls, you can’t just immediately jump to the animal soul. So I saw myself as having to go back through history and see when the idea of the soul began. I wanted to address why we sense that the soul is real, but feel out of touch with what it really is.

…[P]eople used to have a much more specific idea of the soul. But we live in an age of metaphysical timidity: people don’t want to ask serious questions about the soul and the afterlife because they’re afraid that they’re being naive — and all this goes triply for asking about your dead dog. But if an animal or someone I know dies, where is that specific personality that I knew? Did it melt back into some kind of larger consciousness? Does it still exist in another dimension? These are completely valid existential questions.

People used to have much more specific ideas about all kinds of nonsense. They had really specific ideas that humans were specially created by a deity, that demons and angels were real, and that hell and heaven were actual places.

Our problem is not that there is too much “metaphysical timidity,” it’s that there isn’t enough. Metaphysics is fiction. Modern people continue to have all kinds of metaphysical ideas, whether products of their own imaginations or inherited through mythologies. What we really have is scientific timidity.

It’s not having a “soul” that connects us, it’s that every single living thing on earth is a carbon-based cellular life form based on the same DNA-based code. This is not only provable, it is poetically powerful.