HumansAndAnimals

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Feb 8, 2014

If human beings are NOT animals, but the result of an act of special creation, why did God choose to give us ALL of the following attributes of animals?

1) materiality (we have an immaterial soul, but we also have a material body)
2) the same body chemistry as a lot of the animals (particularly the large ones)
3) the same need to eat food, drink water, metabolise, breathe, sleep as other large animals.
4) sexual reproduction (like other large animals)
5) new infants appearing as immature and needing to undergo a development period to become adults (given that souls seem to be eternal adults, there was no reason for human bodies to have to grow to adulthood)
6) Pregnancy. Given that he had a free hand, God could have chosen for human infants to be delivered by the proverbial stork.
7) lactation and human infants feeding off their mother's milk. (Like all the mammals)
8) inherited physical characteristics like eye, hair and skin colour, body shape, facial features etc. which can now, often, be shown to be transmitted via DNA. (Like in all the other animal bodies which we've learned to breed.)
9) good evidence for inherited mental characteristics (eg. schizophrenia, tendency towards alcoholism) If the soul is independent of the body, why should these mental characteristics run in families?
10) Vulnerability to disease. It goes with the territory of a body that shares the same biochemistry as the rest of the animal kingdom. God could have chosen something different.
11) Cancers, auto-immune diseases etc. All this complex machinery goes wrong too. Any reason not to have some failsafe's preventing this?
12) An ageing process and natural death. I know the Bible explains death as the result of the Fall, but why did God chose to make it biologically identical to the ageing and dying processes of all the other animals?

(Note. None of these questions mention the E word. They're all characteristics of humans you can observe any day of the week, in repeatable experiments if you like.)

If human beings ARE animals, then all of these features are self-explanatory. We have them because that's what animals are like.

If human beings are the result of a special creation, independent of the animals, then God clearly made dozens of unconstrained decisions about how the human should be, and EVERY time he decided that he'd reuse the same mechanism the he gave to the animals. None of which are necessarily optimal. None of which would seem necessary for something which is basically a vehicle for a soul to walk around in. So WHY did he do it like that?