Humans are not mere animals

With her death on Oct. 1, primatologist Jane Goodall leaves a legacy that Christians should not overlook. According to Hallie Golden of the Associated Press, Goodall was “renowned for her groundbreaking, immersive chimpanzee field research in which she documented the primates’ distinct personalities and use of tools,” with most of her work stepping into the limelight in the 1960s. With her findings, Goodall began pushing the claim that humans and animals are much more similar than previously thought.

Notice this statement (quoted in Golden’s AP article) that Goodall made in 1997: “What the chimps have taught me over the years is they’re so like us. They’ve blurred the lines between humans and animals.” In a similar vein, Tricia Escobedo in her CNN article quotes Goodall in context of Goodall’s experience with chimps: “My observations at Gombe (a national forest in Tanzania) would challenge human uniqueness.” Let’s take note—to Goodall, humans are not as unique to animals as previously thought.

Why does this matter? Because Goodall’s conclusion of blurred human uniqueness stands atop a worldview Christians cannot ignore. In a 2021 interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Goodall states that she believes in a higher power, a divine intelligence that is “behind the universe.” However, in a 2010 Guardian interview with Stephen Moss, Goodall says that this “God” really cannot be known. She states, “I was utterly convinced there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.”

In addition to her agnostic beliefs, she also leaned more into a pantheistic worldview. In a John Templeton Foundation interview, she says that God is “the Great Spirit in Whom ‘we live and move and have our being,’” and that when once looking out at nature, she concluded that “(she) and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit of life itself.” So, when you combine her agnostic, pantheistic, and evolutionary worldview, you can understand better how Goodall interprets her observational data on chimps when she says, “Ah! Now we must redefine man ... or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Christians, take note. More Americans are adopting a similar worldview to Goodall, a worldview in which a distant, supreme being (if it exists at all) created the world. According to a 2023-24 Pew Research survey, 33% of Americans believe humans evolved and that “God” had no role in the formation of humanity whatsoever (up from 26% in 2005, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center article), while 47% of Americans believe a higher power was involved through evolutionary processes (up from 18% in 2005) (and this God is not strictly the Christian God, as 63% of Muslims hold to this view). Consequently, like Goodall, more Americans are also blurring the lines between human uniqueness vis-a-vis the animal world.

Why should evangelical Christians be concerned? Because the Scriptures make clear that humans are distinct from animals, and this belief has great implications. Genesis 1:26 and 28 draws this distinction when it says that God made humanity in His image and that humanity will have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. In other words, because humans bear God’s image (the imago Dei), God separates us from the animals for the purpose of having dominion over them.

And this is not a new view, for throughout church history, Christians have consistently maintained that humans are unique from animals because of the imago Dei. From the Augustinian and Thomistic view that people have superior rational faculties compared to animals, or the Barthian view that humans had a unique relationship with each other and with God, or the Holzinger and Hehn view that humans function as royal subduers over animals and creation, Christian theologians have believed that humans are unique to the animal kingdom.

So, when articles like those from the New York Post say that a 2022 survey finds that 81% of pet owners treat their dogs and cats the same way as people, that almost 50% think it’s “cute” and “relatable” that people treat their pets like children, that 25% view their pet as a child, and that a decline in fertility rates is due in part to an increase in dog ownership, Christians should note how apart this is from God’s plan. Therefore, contra Goodall, Christians must keep saying this loud and clear: “Because of the imago Dei, we are not animals, and they are not us.”