¶166 million years ago, an asteroid impacted the earth with the force of around a billion Hiroshima bombs. Some animals are vaporized instantly, but others die from fire raining down from the sky, tsunamis, and the slow death of food sources drying up. This is only one, and not even the worst, of several mass extinction events in Earth's history. Why would a good God cause or even allow such calamities? Why is there so much suffering in nature with predation and disease?
¶2This is the problem of animal suffering, and it's been widely discussed in the literature and in popular media. But a recent paper suggests there isn't one problem of animal suffering, but five. In this film, we'll meet its authors and their colleagues, explore what these five problems are, and show why attempts by theologians to counter them fail. And we'll also explore the case of a rare brain-damaged patient, which enables us to put the claims of certain theologians to the test. >> So, the problem of time uh has to do with the fact that if we accept the findings of you know, paleontology and modern uh or you can you know, natural history, animals must have been suffering for millions of years prior to the advent of humankind.
¶3>> There was pain and suffering on Earth for a very long time before humans came along, and therefore before the fall of man supposedly occurred, because you can't have the fall of man without man. Many believers accept the of evolution and natural history, but they say it doesn't undermine their faith because that was the means that God used to get to us. Um, but the problem is why use such violent methods? It seems that the very fabric of our creation has horrendous suffering woven into it. >> Given that God is perfect, we'd expect him to behave in morally praiseworthy ways and in ways that resemble his goodness.
¶4But, very plausibly, a creation whose very engine is suffering and death and predation and parasitism and animals ripping each other to shreds, that just doesn't seem like what we would expect under a theism. >> You can say what you like that a Christian can can can reconcile natural selection, a belief in natural selection with the view that God exists. There's nothing in principle wrong with doing that, but you have to believe that the method that God chose was one infused, that relies on doesn't just allow, doesn't just involve, but relies upon violence and suffering. >> God, in 1 Samuel 15, commands King Saul to slaughter the Amalekites uh and to basically commit ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Amalekites. And he orders that everybody be slaughtered, including and explicitly mentions infants, children, the king, uh the everybody.
¶5Oh, and animals. This rarely gets discussed. Of course, you can kind of understand people are focused on slaughtering infants and why God would command the slaughter of infants and so on. But, God also commands the slaughtering of animals. >> One of the examples is in Joshua, uh let me get the one 11:6, where he doesn't use this precise language, but it's basically to sever the tendons of horses.
¶6And why do that if there are obviously less violent means of disabling horses if you had to do that? >> God could have tranquilized the animals. He could have had them run away. He could have disabled the chariots. But instead, he chose this horrendous torture.
¶7And let's not forget, he also demanded animal sacrifices. >> God not only commands the slaughtering of animals in various parts of the Bible, God actually slaughters them himself. I would say most notably the great flood in which surely millions of puppies and kittens were drowned. >> The reason for the flood was because of the sins of human beings. And yet, non-human animals, all of them were destroyed in the flood also.
¶8Why should that happen? >> Of course, the story of Noah's Ark didn't actually happen. I don't even think this is supposed to be interpreted as a literal account of history. But even as a metaphor, this literary device of God slaughtering almost every single animal on the entire planet because of the sin of man, that is for the sin of one of those species, punishing the rest of them, seems a little discordant with his supposed benevolence. >> In the story of the Exodus, the first plague is to turn the water into blood and all the fish die.
¶9The last plague is to kill all firstborn, including Egyptian animals. >> And if you think Jesus was all good and all merciful, you might remember the story of legions where many pigs were forced to run off of a cliff and and die because demons, apparently, were instilled in them. >> He could cast out devils just making them disappear into thin air, presumably. Why would he make them go into swine that then drown themselves, which is bad for the pigs and presumably bad for the owner of the pigs as well. So, Augustine goes along with that and says, "Well, see, he's teaching us a lesson that we don't have any obligation to care for animals." Um and because Augustine was one of the church fathers, the early leading early thinker, this has had a disastrous impact on the church's teaching about animals for millennia.
¶10Um Thomas Aquinas, the most influential of the medieval theologians, also explicitly said and quoted Augustine as saying we have no duties to animals. There's nothing you can do to an animal that is a sin against an animal. >> This particular exorcism is sometimes known as the miracle of the swine. I'm not sure it's a miracle for them. Uh it it seems to be based on something like compassion.
¶11And the interesting thing is that this appears in the New Testament. Of course, the Old Testament also has ample examples of seeming animal cruelty, but I think it also has ample examples of human cruelty. So, it's not all too surprising to me that you would find God in the Old Testament being cruel towards animals. But this is gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Isn't it interesting that if this is an exercise in compassion, Jesus has more compassion for the demons than he does for the pigs?
¶12>> When theists argue for God's existence, often they'll make use of what's called the moral argument. And the moral argument goes something like, "Hey, there are objective moral values and duties. If that's true, then God exists. So, God exists." How do they motivate that first premise, that there are objective moral values and duties? The main motivation that people offer, such as William Lane Craig, is that it just seems intuitively plausible.
¶13It seems really plausible when you reflect on, for instance, torture that it's wrong and that it would be wrong even if we all thought it was okay. But notice that we can apply the exact same motivation for that premise in the case of God's actions. It just seems intuitively wrong to senselessly kill and brutalize these animals in the way that God is depicted as doing. So, if we can use our moral intuitions to support the moral argument, it seems like we should also be able to use our moral intuitions to assess God's actions. >> There's strong evidence that we are entering into a sixth mass extinction event known as the Anthropocene.
¶14And one of the leading causes of this is the human consumption of meat. Now, if God had forced or commanded us not to eat meat, just as he commanded the Israelites not to eat pork, then this tragedy could be alleviated. >> An all-knowing God uh would have known that meat eaters would inflict a lot of suffering on animals, and presumably also would have known uh that as we had more and more animals, particularly the ruminant cattle and sheep, greenhouse gases would be emitted and uh the climate would change in ways that are harmful to both humans and animals. You know, why does >> bacon have to taste so damn good? >> Of course, theologians have proposed various [music] solutions to the problem of animal suffering.
¶15>> If you go and look at Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he runs down sort of four things that most of the suffering in the world depends upon. And And one of them is nomic regularity. Uh that things seem to happen by general laws instead of particular relations. But then what he says right after that is, "Well, even that would be okay if we had more powers." >> So, we're not talking about Jedi-like powers or anything like that, but rather perhaps the animals could absorb energy from the sun rather than eating each other. And if we have to have predators, perhaps they could have powerful anesthetics in their teeth so their victims don't suffer so much.
¶16Or if we didn't have um the kind of pain processing systems that we have that are prone to dysfunction, um if we had and so chronic pain and so on. If we had rather a system that as Hume proposed, um, regulated our behavior by various degrees of pleasure. So, you know, like a slight diminishment of pleasure instead of I mean, you you can you can imagine these things. >> Michael Murray points out, among other things, that we need pain to motivate our behavior. But, I think what this response overlooks is that it's holding fixed our various behavioral dispositions in the actual world and what they respond to in the actual world, while neglecting that God is the very author of those behavioral dispositions.
¶17And God could have given us a much greater aversion to different sorts of environmental inputs and different sorts of sensory inputs. So, that we are motivated not by pain, but instead by differing amounts of pleasure or instead by other sorts of stimuli. >> Well, Scott can't do things that are logically impossible, but if the argument is that God just had to do this, then if he is an omniscient being, I think the only way that argument runs is if you think it's not just impractical or practically impossible, but logically impossible that God could have created a system that a system of laws governing the natural world that involved even just a bit less suffering than what we see in the universe. I ask, what do we expect to see if we assume that this is being supervised by a benevolent invigilator? I don't think we'd expect to see anything like what we observe in the universe.
¶18>> I mean, if this were a way to prevent suffering and he doesn't think it's worth ruining or violating the laws of nature to do it, somehow violation of the laws of nature must be a terrible thing, horrible thing. >> But, if violations of the laws of nature are such a terrible thing, then why do miracles in the flood and the plagues? God does miracles to harm animals, so why can't he do miracles to help them? >> So the idea behind soul making is that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Various sorts of evils that we undergo, various sorts of suffering and tragedies that occur to us can help build our characters in various ways.
¶19>> To me, the soul-making theodicy is maybe the the least objectionable. >> A Christian philosopher Trenton Dougherty has recently suggested this could be applied to animals if they have souls and they have the opportunity to go to heaven and be transformed into sort of rational talking-like animals such as Narnia. Uh for then they would have the ability to reflect and see that their suffering was necessary part of God's wondrous plan. Um it's hard to see which of these is the least plausible. Uh personally, I'd pick the one that if animals were transformed in this way they would look back and see that the great flood or a mass extinction event would be something they would praise God for for his wondrous design.
¶20>> We're here adding an auxiliary hypothesis to theism, namely an afterlife for animals. And usually when you add hypotheses to your core hypothesis in order to better explain data you're lowering the probability of your hypothesis cuz it's now a conjunction of two things. >> Why can't our souls already be made and why must we go through this kind of endlessly complicated and you know, obscure process of developing our souls? Like why did Like how is it really part of the story that a bunch of deer every year gets run over on the highways? Like how is that helping to make their souls?
¶21Or >> God could have created us and animals so that we have a different psychological makeup and different psychological dispositions so that we develop the same or relevantly similar virtues perhaps in the afterlife in response to different circumstances and much less horrific circumstances. >> But in many instances when animals suffer and die, it's not given to them any opportunities to show that their character is improved. I mean, if an animal is dying slowly in a tar pit or perhaps in some quicksand and is in contact with no other animals, then it's hard to see how this horrendous suffering gives animals any opportunities to develop their character. And if you think it does, ask yourself, would you be okay putting your own children through some of the horrors that animals experience in the wild? >> But these children had been allowed to to live, especially in Canaanite culture, they would have been infected with the same poison as the adults, and most of them would have been lost.
¶22So, their deaths would actually mean their salvation, and those children, once in heaven, would be grateful that God had issued such a command to the Israelite armies to wipe them out. So, it seems to me that there isn't anybody that God has wronged. In this case, the adults deserve the punishment. The children are delivered from evil. >> Since when is slaughtering babies okay simply because they go to heaven?
¶23I mean, that's just absurd. >> Even if we were to claim that the genocidal instructions are somehow justified because of the evil of the tribes that are being attacked, which I have to say seems to me to be no justification at all, but even if we were to accept that, then why would uh a benevolent God with compassion for all his creatures instruct the Israelites to slay the cattle of the enemy or to hamstring their horses. Uh it really doesn't make any sense. >> Dr. Craig has neglected to consider the animals.
¶24He talks about the children, he talks about the parents, but he doesn't talk about the fact that it was also the castle, it was also the donkeys, it was also the sheep that was slaughtered uh in this biblical narrative. Now, maybe the same situation just obtains. Maybe they're lucky as well to have their lives taken so early because they get to inherit some kind of compensatory afterlife. Maybe that's true. But if that's the case, then what of soul making?
¶25That one of the reasons evil exists in the world is because somehow it's necessary to give us some kind of development of our soul that we somehow require. In a way that God couldn't have created the universe without them or it would have been worse off place if he'd have done so. Now we're being told that actually it's an immeasurable good to have these lives cut short early, not given the opportunity to have further soul building before they finally die. There seems to be a bit of a conflict there. And indeed, if this is an immeasurable good, then why are we bothering with this veil of tears in the first place?
¶26Why do we need this life on earth if it's such a good thing that when it's ended early by God, you know, everybody just gets scared to heaven immediately. What about the rest of us? >> So some people would claim that animals will be compensated in an afterlife for the suffering that we inflict on them. There are many things to say about that. One is of course traditionally Christians have not even believed that animals do have an afterlife.
¶27But one could also say the suffering that they experience is still a bad thing. And if you have a world created by an all powerful, all knowing, benevolent being, then surely that being would simply allow them to have a life without pain and still have this reward in the afterlife. That would be better than a life with a lot of pain for which you're compensated. But there's a in a way a more fundamental issue which is actually brought up by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Basically, Ivan Karamazov says it's just morally objectionable to use people as means as mere means in even if they're going to be compensated in the end.
¶28So, it's So, if you're a kind of deontologist and you think using people as means is morally objectionable even if the consequences are good or you're you can increase some value, then you can get a feel for this kind of objection. Like, even even if it's true that Ivan Karamazov says that the the mother and the murderer of her child will embrace, you know, in the afterlife and realize, you know, this it's he says I still return my ticket. But, his objection is just to using human beings or in this case in our case animals as mere means to achieve some value. >> Why is being compensated the same thing as being justified? I mean, if God compensates the animals, that doesn't justify him allowing the harm and suffering in the first place.
¶29>> How then would you deal with uh the uh events that occur before human beings were here? >> But, it doesn't look like it fits in very easily. Uh but I but it's it's a part of Christian belief to think that human beings aren't the only free creatures operating in God's world. There are the principalities and powers mentioned in the New Testament. There are Satan and his cohorts.
¶30Satan mentioned in the book of Job for in the Job story, for example. Um it may be that uh that as C. S. Lewis suggests in his space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and so on, it may be that um other creatures, other free creatures have had a substantial hand in the whole development of life on Earth. >> Why should animals suffer from Satan's fall?
¶31I mean, that seems to make no sense at all. >> If Satan is responsible for the suffering associated with mass extinctions and evolution, then that makes Satan the author of our creation because these processes were integral in how we got here. Does this really want to say that? >> Moreover, good designers build redundancy into their systems. They anticipate things going wrong and ensure that it isn't catastrophic.
¶32So, for example, in skydiving, if our main canopy fails, as happened to my friend Dave here, we can simply cut it away and deploy a reserve. That's good design. But if the world is so fragile that the actions of one or a few can create such havoc, that looks like bad design. >> Alvin Plantinga likes his evolutionary argument against naturalism where, you know, we have we have no reason to think that naturalism would equip us with reliable cognitive faculties. But if Satan is really running amok and his minions are really running amok and messing with the evolutionary messing with the evolutionary process, which was responsible for our cognitive faculties, I mean, it seems like we would also have no reason under that sort of view to expect that our cognitive faculties would be reliably latching onto the truth if Satan has such a large influence over the character of uh created reality.
¶33>> One of the most popular responses to the problem of evil generally is known as skeptical theism. It's this view that although there may be some reason for allowing the suffering of human beings and other animals, we just can't know what that reason is. This is the justification seemingly implied in the book of Job, for example, when Job asks God, demands an answer, "Why am I suffering?" God's response is essentially to say, "Well, who the hell are you to think that you would be able to even begin to understand?" >> Skeptical theism says that we should be skeptical of our ability to see the world with a sort of God's eye view. For example, there could be hidden goods for every apparent bad. The problem is that the reverse is also true.
¶34There could be hidden bads for every apparent good. So, we wouldn't be able to say whether God's actions or inactions are good or not. And it's hard to believe that theists are going to say that they won't praise God for his apparently good actions. >> Another difficulty for skeptical theism that theists themselves have pointed out, and in fact a number of skeptical theists have accepted and embraced, is that skeptical theism may be incredibly damaging to natural theology. That is the project of giving arguments for God's existence.
¶35Usually proponents of the fine-tuning argument say things like, "Well, it would be a great good if there were embodied conscious moral creatures, and so God would have reason to actualize a world containing them." But with skeptical theism in hand, just because that's a great good, for all we know, it's connected to very, very horrific instances of suffering. Or uh for all we know, God has reasons for not actualizing a world containing such creatures. So, you're casting If we take skeptical theism in hand, you cast out on these judgments about what God has reason to do, which in turn are going to significantly hamper the natural theological case for God's existence. >> If I'm walking down the street with my friend and somebody comes and steals his wallet out of his back pocket, I could think to myself, "Well, maybe there was some good reason for him doing that. You know, maybe he needed to feed his family or something." Even then, that wouldn't be enough to say that I I can be confident that is the case.
¶36But, you know, there could be an explanation that I'm just unaware of and can't be aware of. But, the more violence, the more suffering, the more brutality involved, the plausibility of this explanation seems to diminish in correlation with this. For example, if somebody steals my friend's wallet and stabs him, then I think that the idea that there is some good justification or motivating reason for this becomes a little more dubious. Supposing that he steals his wallet and then stabs him and then kills his family and indeed kills the family's pet dog by, you know, slashing the back of its legs open, I'd begin to think that the the idea that there's some kind of good explanation is just like it's far too complicated for you to even begin to understand. It just looks a little suspicious to me.
¶37>> Some skeptical theists theists then say that the occurrence of suffering, the occurrence of evil in this world is no evidence at all of there not being a god because the explanation for this evil, although we can't understand it, is that God's has some reason, we don't know what they are, for allowing this evil and suffering to occur. So it has it should have no effect on our belief that there is no god. How about if everything in the world were good? So there's no suffering. Take out all the suffering in the world.
¶38Take out all the evil in the world. Everyone is happy. Everything is great. Everyone you want to make them blissful, make them blissful. So if our world were like that, which it isn't, why wouldn't that be a reason for thinking that God does exist?
¶39>> But we don't live in that world and so that fact is evidence against God's existence. Skeptical theists become skeptical when they need to to sort of defend their position and then help themselves to a whole lot of knowledge about God when it helps them or when it sort of supports their position or things that are actually fundamental to their whole position. Like they couldn't think of themselves as Judeo-Christian theists if they didn't think that God was good. So, well, how do they get get that knowledge? >> Moreover, skeptical theism says that we don't know God's motives for allowing suffering.
¶40But then we could say we don't know God's motives for giving us holy text. I mean, maybe he's given us the Bible as a sort of moral test. Uh he's put in vile things like the genocide of the Canaanites for people to condemn it. Those that do, like Richard Dawkins, have passed God's moral test and go to heaven. And those that condone it, like William Lane Craig, maybe end up in hell.
¶41>> Sometimes people respond by saying that we've got lots of these other theistic arguments for God's existence. The fine-tuning argument, arguments from consciousness, et cetera. And so we know, because those arguments work, we know that there has to be some sort of explanation for animal suffering. The problem with that though is that we could equally run the argument in the opposite direction. We could just as well say, "Oh, we've got this really good argument from animal suffering, and so we know that those arguments have to fall flat somewhere.
¶42Those theistic arguments, there's got to be some sort of good atheistic explanation available, and those arguments have to fail." >> The five problems that we've isolated that really pertain to Judeo-Christian theism, they're all easily explicable on a on a on the hypothesis that God or the gods or the cause of the universe, however you want to think about it, um isn't morally indifferent. It's a very parsimonious explanation. >> For the theistic explanations that we've looked at, they don't seem to be able to solve all five issues of what we're calling the expanded problem of animal suffering. So, for example, if you buy into a nomic regularity, you know, maybe you might say that could address the problem of time and the problem of creation, but it doesn't seem to be able to address the problem of divine commands and divine actions because, you know, these are actually caused by God's interventions in nature. If you buy into Alvin Plantinga's uh pre-Adamic fall, then how would that explain God's commands to kill the animals in the Canaanite slaughter?
¶43And if you if you think of the victims of that, why did they need more soul-making than those animals that don't experience this sort of violence? And you know, in many cases, God actually gives us his reasons for for killing animals. So, for example, in the flood, you know, it's for the sins of man. In the plagues, it's to show off God's power. So, skeptical theism is going to struggle here, too.
¶44>> When it comes to problems like God's commands and God's actions that are mentioned in the Bible, on the hypothesis that that God actually doesn't exist, and we have an alternative story about the emergence of human religions, well, those kind of Bronze Age ideas in the Old Testament, you know, they're not that different from the Bronze Age ideas in the Odyssey and the Iliad and and and other, you know, texts from that period. It's a very par- The naturalistic explanation is a very parsimonious one. Whereas, the Christian one, you have to sort of develop epicycles for each point. >> One doesn't even have to be a naturalist to endorse this argument. It's really an argument against the all-powerful, all-good God of the Bible.
¶45>> There is, however, one argument that could diffuse many, perhaps even all of the five problems of animal suffering. And that is neo-Cartesianism. The view that animals don't suffer in a morally relevant way. It's a view entertained by many well-known Christian philosophers, perhaps most surprisingly by the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S.
¶46Lewis. But as we'll see, new evidence speaks decisively against it. >> So, in The Problem of pain, C.S. Lewis says, "The Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know, beasts are incapable of either sin or virtue.
¶47Therefore, they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it." From the doctrine that God is good, we may confidently deduce that the appearance of reckless divine cruelty in the animal kingdom is an illusion. >> Of course, we can reverse Lewis's argument. If animal pain is not an illusion, then if God is all powerful, he can't be all good. So, there's a lot riding on the nature of animal pain. Given how convenient neo-Cartesianism is to Christianity, it's not surprising that modern Christian philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, Michael Murray, and William Lane Craig have tried to put it on a more solid scientific footing.
¶48>> Now, let me say one other thing, however, that is a result of recent scientific discoveries that shed remarkable light on the problem of animal suffering. In his book, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, published by Oxford University Press, Michael Murray explains that there is really a threefold hierarchy of pain awareness. On the most fundamental level, there is simply the reaction to stimuli such as an amoeba exhibits when you poke it with a needle. It doesn't really feel pain. There's a second level of pain awareness, which sentient animals have, which is an experience of pain.
¶49And animals like horses, uh dogs, and cats would experience this second level pain awareness. But they do not experience a third-level pain awareness, which is the awareness of second-order pain. That is, the awareness that one is itself uh himself in pain. For that sort of uh pain awareness requires self-awareness. And this is centered in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, a section of the brain that is missing in all animals except for the higher primates and human beings.
¶50And therefore, even though animals are in pain, they aren't aware of it. They don't have this third-order pain awareness. They are not aware of pain and therefore they do not suffer as human beings do. Now, this is a tremendous comfort to those of us who are animal lovers like myself or to pet owners. Even though your dog or your cat may be in pain, it really isn't aware of being in pain and therefore it doesn't suffer as you would when you are in pain.
¶51>> It It's not like a an objective neutral assessment of the evidence that Lewis and Craig are putting forward. Uh it's clearly something that they need to argue to maintain their core beliefs. And given that, of course, given that the the evidence is all against them in terms of animals suffering. And in fact, the reference to pet owners that uh Craig makes is quite amusing because I don't think anybody who lives with a dog or cat and sees them miserable as inevitably they will be on some occasions, um is going to believe that uh they don't suffer or that their suffering is somehow of a completely trivial kind that doesn't matter. I think everybody who cares about domestic animals, companion animals, is going to know that they can suffer.
¶52>> Every test that's been devised for self-awareness has been passed by a non-primate. So, either Craig has to say that these non-primates are self-aware or he has to say that the tests are invalid. But if that's true, then he's got no basis for declaring other animals not self-aware. >> There are different kinds of self-awareness. So, there's a notion of pre-reflective self-awareness that's a kind of rudimentary and pre-conceptual.
¶53A lot of philosophers think that's characteristic of consciousness. Animals could have that without requiring a concept of themselves or any kind of more sophisticated introspective self-awareness or any kind of autobiographical self-awareness. >> The the three-level hierarchy is not a language that most pain researchers use when we when we talk about pain processing. >> What pain researchers do focus on is whether animals have something called affect. Affective neuroscience is the study of emotions.
¶54>> What we mean by affective reaction to the experience of pain is the fact that is deeply unpleasant, that it is bothersome, that it actually can make you anxious, can lead you to panic. >> So many years ago, we responded to Craig's claims and pointed out that it is simply not true that only higher primates have a prefrontal cortex. You can see here the most cited textbook on the subject and it shows the prefrontal cortex of other mammals. However, since that film came out, a remarkable patient who lost his prefrontal cortex and other key cortical regions had not only his self-awareness tested, but also his pain perception, enabling us to directly probe the claims of certain theologians. >> Patient R um suffered from a herpes encephalitis infection >> which destroyed extensively many parts of his brain on both side including the prefrontal cortex, but also the anterior cingulate cortex and the insular cortex.
¶55>> Left him with pretty um pretty severe anterograde amnesia. >> This is a patient that was very interesting for research because many of the brain region that had been deemed associated with self-consciousness, emotion, feeling were destroyed in this patient. And we worked with him studying him extensively with many classical tests and novel test to probe his abilities. In all respects, he was absolutely normal. >> When you talk to patient R, he's you know, that you couldn't be able to tell unless you went away and then came back 5 minutes later and had to be re-introduced again that there was anything too unusual going on.
¶56>> Carissa Philippi, the lead author of the paper, also did extensive follow-up interviews with patient R. And she asked him directly things like, you know, are you aware of yourself? >> [laughter] >> Which she found to be like kind of a preposterous question. He said something like, "Well, of course I am. >> [laughter] >> I'm here talking to you." >> The claim that you would need the prefrontal cortex to have self-awareness was obviously given the damage of patient R and the fact that he had a totally preserved self-awareness in many respects >> [snorts] >> completely debunked by our results.
¶57>> Patient R's case made headlines around the world. It provided overwhelming evidence that you don't need a prefrontal cortex for self-awareness. But following that, Rudrauf and colleagues did another study which was even more profound. >> Also, we did several protocols including with what is called a cold pressor. It's just water uh, a bucket in a somewhat sophisticated bucket that is at 0° but there there is a flow that is induced by some device inside the buckets that prevent the water to freeze.
¶58And when you put your arm in this bucket, it's actually really painful though it's absolutely innocuous. It's not dangerous at all and you want to remove your arms as fast as possible and so we ask him that of course he could remove his arm whenever he wanted to but we asked him to keep it as long as possible in the bucket and we had him also rate with the other hand the intensity of his pain experience and the affective reaction that he had to this pain on different scale and all these reactions including vocalization, facial expression that we analyze rigorously with standard protocol, psychophysiological responses, heart rate that increase, skin conductance, etc. etc. And of course this subjective experience of pain on both the intensity and the affective dimension were absolutely normal and if actually they were even little stronger on the affective side than what we had observed with comparison participant. >> Patient R is hyperpathic to pain, which means he's unusually sensitive to it.
¶59That's the exact opposite of what we would expect if Murray and Craig's thesis was true. But it does raise an important question. Where does the brain generate pain? So we don't have a a single location. We can't point and say this area is only involved in pain processing.
¶60But but it's part of a much larger system, so there's other structures that are are not damaged that have to be have to be processing of these signals. The data is clear. He experiences negative affect. Uh that's clear. His perceptual experience has to be due to other brain areas or or structures processing these signals.
¶61>> As the cortex doesn't seem necessary for affect, it seems to me that we need to be looking to more evolutionary ancient regions of the brain known as subcortical regions. >> So, some of the brain areas that would be involved uh in processing of these signals to provide patient R with his perceptual experience of pain uh would would have to be subcortical brain structures. >> We have ample evidence that basic emotional states are generated from subcortical regions of the brain. For example, children born with hydrocephalus, that's a condition where they basically don't have a cortex, still have emotional states. Patient B, another patient who had key cortical regions knocked out, had an emotional life intact afterwards.
¶62But perhaps the most intriguing comes from the father of affective neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp. He mapped seven subcortical regions of the brain to basic emotional states found in humans and animals. >> So, Jaak Panksepp's work is very important in this connection because it show it seems to show that well, a number of things. Um the experience of emotion might be primarily subcortical in its nature rather than requiring prefrontal and you know, more cortical areas. Sort of the basic experience because you can stimulate it directly in humans and also in animals like rats, you get exactly the same sort of reaction, the sort of direct brain stimulation of certain areas.
¶63Um, and if you give, for example, the rats control over the stimulation, they won't stimulate they won't sort of, you know, hit the lever uh to stimulate negative things that we would think of as negatively valenced emotions. They will avoid that. And for positively valenced ones, they'll keep hitting it uh it at the expense of eating food and other sort of essential things. They can even, you know, drop dead from do from doing this. What this seems to show is that emotions are generated at the the subcortical level, which pushes against the idea that this is all prefrontal or cortical in general.
¶64>> One thing he said then, if that's the case, these type of structure are represented almost everywhere in the animal kingdom. >> As the neocortesian Bob and Suffering is the experience of pain and of negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, sorrow, and guilt. The experience of pain is also an emotion. Therefore, the two-pronged question posed above, suffering and pain, can be reduced to a single question. Are animals capable of experiencing negative emotions?
¶65So, I think that's right, but I think the work of Panksepp and others shows that animals do experience negative emotions. And if it's subcortically driven, then it's likely widespread throughout the animal kingdom, not focused on a few higher primates. Now, maybe you want to say that we can't look inside the mind of another animal, so we should be agnostic about whether they can suffer. But I can't look inside your mind, but if I saw you apparently suffering, I would hope I would not be indifferent to it. And in the case of children, their prefrontal cortex is still developing.
¶66It continues to develop into early adulthood, but that doesn't mean I'm going to downplay their suffering. >> I had the pleasure of talking to Richard Swinburne for my podcast, one of the most eminent and well-respected philosophers in Christian thought, and I asked him about animal suffering, and he made reference to this idea that having certain cortical regions in your brain is crucial to this question of whether or not animals can suffer and whether or not it matters if they do. >> Mammals, I'm inclined to think, feel. Those are the only ones I think one can be confident about. Um yes, they feel, but I don't think they feel as much as us.
¶67And um uh of course, I I may be mistaken about that, but um uh they don't have quite quite as they don't have the same uh receptors in the brain because they don't have quite the same part of uh the anterior the prefrontal prefrontal cortex as we do, and um uh even when it's somewhat similar to ours, um they they don't have as much of it as we do. I mean, our our nearest relative, the chimpanzee, only has a brain, including the part relevant for that, uh a third of our size, the size of our brains. So, yes, they feel, but I don't see any reason to suppose they feel as much as we do. >> There are animals that have much bigger brain than us. Uh there there are humans that have fairly extensive brain damage, including complete destruction of those region, and they still uh have self-awareness that is uh completely preserved.
¶68So, that's an argument that is highly problematic from a scientific standpoint. >> And they still have feelings. There's really just no evidence that a larger prefrontal cortex or anterior cingulate cortex has any connection to the level of pain or feelings that you have. Now, some people might have thought this because it's true that the anterior cingulate cortex does light up during emotional pain. >> You know, I've attended lots of scientific conferences and talks and neuroscience related work and you attend these conferences and one thing you realize is that the brain areas such as the cingulate cortex, not only does it light up in the pain studies, but it lights up in virtually every poster you look at.
¶69It's lit It lights up. And so so we're not talking about a center for pain processing. We're talking about a system that is more broadly involved in modulating our behavior. >> One reason used to justify the neocortical position is that certain operations to disconnect cortical regions did offer pain relief. But that was only in the short term.
¶70>> So we thought at one time, well, to get rid of pain, just eliminate the signals going into the spinal cord. Pain goes away. Well, that doesn't work. Well, I'll do that. Do a cordotomy.
¶71Cut the tracks from going up the spinal cord up to the up to the brain stem. Cut those tracks. Get rid of the pain. Well, the pain comes back. Go up to the brain.
¶72Lesion out the brain area. Get rid of the pain. Pain comes back. >> By the standard definition of the prefrontal cortex, all mammals have it. And even if they don't or for those other animals that don't, um it's still the case that evolution could create the same function but with a different structure.
¶73So, for example, in the bird brain, there's a structure called the nidopallium caudolaterale, and this is so similar to the mammalian prefrontal cortex that it's known as the avian prefrontal cortex. >> Just because an organism lacks a certain structure doesn't mean that it doesn't have some other structure that performs an an analogous function. Right? So, humans swim like this. >> [laughter] >> But you could wouldn't say with your arms and legs.
¶74It would be kind of crazy to conclude that like an octopus can't swim because it doesn't have human arms and legs. >> So, anyone who makes the claim that an animal doesn't experience pain because they lack a brain structure that might be present in humans, uh I believe is uh is wrong. >> A key motivation for linking the prefrontal cortex with pain affect is the case of lobotomy patients who had their prefrontal cortex disconnected, and the claim is that after the surgery, they said their pain was still present, but it didn't bother them. >> It seems contradictory to say on the one hand that self-awareness requires the prefrontal cortex and that in lobotomy patients prefrontal cortex is no longer operational, and at the same time that they report on their pain affect or the diminishment of their pain affect. Um if the prefrontal cortex were necessary, then they shouldn't for for self-awareness, then they shouldn't be able to report on it, but they can.
¶75>> The idea that lobotomy patients don't or did not feel pain is actually a misinterpretation of uh the literature on that topic. What happened with lobotomy, uh is that it would indeed blunt chronic pain, in particular the associated with in some patients with chronic pain, but it did not at all reduce acute pain. And actually, many patients after lobotomy were still experiencing very intense acute pain. They may have not been as much anxious as before, but they were still in pain and suffering from it. And actually, that's the recommendation for lobotomy was eventually to only apply it for patients with very strong anxiety to begin with.
¶76>> With what we know of the underlying neuro systems, our current understanding of underlying neurobiology of the pain system, the way that the the the homology of functional neuro anatomical structures, there is no reason not to believe that other animals feel pain. >> Neocorticalism is clearly false. Animals do experience pain and suffering. But what's interesting about it is that it shows us a way that the world could have been. God could have made it such that animals don't really experience morally significant suffering.
¶77And it's not hard to imagine what apologists would be saying if we lived in such a world, because some apologists believe we do live in such a world. For example, this is what William Lane Craig wrote on his website. >> God has shielded almost the entire animal kingdom throughout its history from an awareness of being in pain. For those of us who are pet owners and lovers of animals, this is a tremendous comfort and a cause of praise to God for his goodness and wondrous, even ingenious, care of creation. >> Interestingly, this quote from William Lane Craig has been removed from his website, but we can still see it via the Wayback Machine.
¶78To our knowledge, he hasn't retracted his position, but perhaps simply hidden it after criticism. For if animals do suffer, then we can reverse Craig's argument. Rather than praise God for his ingenious care of creation, we can question God for his lack of such care. Or we can take it as evidence that there is no all-powerful, all-good God shielding animals from terrible suffering. If no such God exists, then we have a parsimonious explanation for all five of the expanded problems of animal suffering.
¶79It should not be surprising that there's been animals suffering for hundreds of millions of years, that the engine of creation is so violent, that there's cruelty towards animals commanded by and committed by the God of the Bible, or that humans' desire for meat is contributing to an ecological catastrophe, the likes of which the Earth has rarely seen. All of this can be simply explained if we reject the existence of the supposedly perfectly good, all-powerful God of the Bible.