John Dekker's Day

5:40PM - Do animals have souls?

And a third of the created things in the sea which have souls died... (Revelation 8:9; my translation)

To what does this verse refer? What sort of living things in the sea have souls? Mermaids, perhaps?

No, that's just my dodgy translation. The word that I translated as "soul" is ψυχη (psyche), and it can mean soul, but can also mean "life" – and "living creatures" is a more accurate translation in this verse.

This is, of course, part of the answer to the question as to whether animals have souls. Laura replied to my post Do clones have souls? and pointed out that animals are called "living souls" in Genesis 2:19. Yet the word used there – נפשׁ (nephesh) – has a similar semantic range to ψυχη, and the phrase could equally be translated as "living beings".

The point is, animals also have life and breath. Yet that doesn't mean they have "souls" in either the theological sense, or in common English. Rather, the human soul in Scripture is shown to be unique. For example, the method of Adam's creation is different to that of the animals – God "blew into his nostrils the breath of life" (Genesis 2:7). Also, there are times when the translation "soul" is clearly appropriate – in Revelation 6:9, the "souls of those who had been slain for the Word of God" are crying out. These are disembodied but active beings – and nowhere in the Bible are animals described in those terms.

Hence, with apologies to all you cat-lovers out there, it isn't appropriate to say that animals have souls.