Humans incontrovertibly suffer a great deal over the course of their lives, throughout the world, and over a lengthy historical timespan. Humans, however, are not the only species to suffer the agonising experiences the world has to offer. Nonhuman animals— and thereby deaths—outnumber that of humans by trillions, and their lives are defined by the experience and avoidance of suffering. When a human endures the breaking of a bone, the opening of their flesh, or the degradation of their organs, they evidentially feel pain – or at least claim and appear to. Does this experience similarly apply to nonhuman animals? Pain is the phenomenal experience of discomfort, irritation, agony, and other associated unpleasant sensations or negative states. Nonhuman animals have behavioural and physiological responses to nociception, but it is fundamentally—or at least presently—impossible to determine whether there is an associated phenomenal pain accompanying the activation of these nociceptors. It is possible that nonhuman animals lack consciousness. It is possible that all humans other than you lack consciousness, and merely appear to have phenomenological responses to external stimuli, falsely communicating their subjective experience despite the ‘lights being off’ inside. Obviously,
nonhuman animals are unable to use language to communicate the nature of their subjective experience of pain to us, similar to a human baby, a mute human, or other humans unable to use language; we do not assume that this inability negates the possibility of their experience of pain. With advances in genetics, neuroscience, and other related fields, it is increasingly difficult to defend the idea that nonhuman animals do not experience the phenomena of pain and that most, if not all, are not at least primitively sentient. A precautionary principle should be applied to the question of if nonhuman animals can in fact suffer, given the current body of evidence and the naive interpretation of their seemingly phenomenal responses to pain. Considering, then, that nonhuman animals likely experience pain, negative states that they attempt and desire to avoid, and sensations that are not in their interest (e.g. suffering), the abundance of such experiences poses a deep problem for the Christian conception of a loving God. God seemingly desired the outcome of a particular species—homo sapiens—to be selfconscious beings that desire a conscious, reciprocal relationship with God. On these 29 | P a g e
