Do Dinosaurs Go To Heaven? Discussion

Faith & Science Conversation
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Obviously no one can give info concerning someone’s fate. We also can’t really say how the afterlife will be. There are a lot of opinions about it. There are a lot of good arguments for universalism, though I land on conditional immortality.

There are a lot of good verses on restoration though.

Romans 8:22-23
New American Standard Bible
22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. 23 And not only that, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our body.

Seems like all of creation is awaiting it just like* us.

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I am a bit uncertain about what to think about conscious ‘souls’ living after our body dies. The hebrew word sometimes translated as ‘soul’ (nefesh) probably means just conscious life in humans and other animals, as told in the creation story. We do not have ‘souls’, we are ‘souls’. This suggests a total blackout between death and resurrection.

On the other hand, there are very many reports suggesting that some form of consciousness may survive after death. This challenges the idea of total blackness between our death and resurrection. Although I think the total blackness hypothesis would be the simplest option, an open mind cannot reject the alternative hypothesis because of the countless reports.

Anyhow, if animals will enter ‘heaven’, they would have to be part of a similar resurrection as humans. The number of animals that have lived during the millions of years is absolutely enormous. The animal resurrection would be a huge event. I do not see any signs of this in the biblical scriptures. These scriptures do not tell everything, so there is always a possibility. A more realistic approach is that we think of ‘heaven’ as a place that fits our personal hopes. Expectations about pets and other animals entering ‘heaven’ only reflect our personal hopes, nothing else. We have to wait until we see what the truth is.

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Yep. That is why I don’t believe in it. I think the belief in rational souls comes from Greek philosophy, the Gnostics, and other religions.

Yes I think that is the proper use of the Biblical term - a synonym for “person” or “life.”

I don’t think non-existence agrees with other passages in the Bible which speak of ghosts/spirits – dead spirits like shadows in need of resurrection. But “blackout” in the sense of a lack of consciousness is possible. I have often suggested that without a resurrection the spirit may experience diminishing consciousness (consequence of being devoured by one’s sins) so that “eternal torment” may not mean eternal conscious torment.

Paul says in 1 Cor 15 “If there is a physical body then there is a spiritual body.” But it doesn’t do anything until we die, “what you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”

Just semantics? Not quite. The difference is that the rational soul of the Gnostics and other religions believing in transmigration and reincarnation is that this is something inserted into bodies to bring them to life, give them a mind, and animate them. That is what I don’t believe in. The spiritual body taught by Paul in 1 Corinthians is something which comes from the physical body. He is quite clear about that. “But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical.”

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Interesting coordination:

Them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.
1 Thessalonians 4:14

Let us not imagine that the soul sleeps in insensibility. “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise,” is the whisper of Christ to every dying saint. They “sleep in Jesus,” but their souls are before the throne of God, praising him day and night in his temple, singing hallelujahs to him who washed them from their sins in his blood. The body sleeps in its lonely bed of earth, beneath the coverlet of grass. But what is this sleep? The idea connected with sleep is “rest,” and that is the thought which the Spirit of God would convey to us. Sleep makes each night a Sabbath for the day. Sleep shuts fast the door of the soul, and bids all intruders tarry for a while, that the life within may enter its summer garden of ease. The toil-worn believer quietly sleeps, as does the weary child when it slumbers on its mother’s breast. Oh! happy they who die in the Lord; they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them. Their quiet repose shall never be broken until God shall rouse them to give them their full reward. Guarded by angel watchers, curtained by eternal mysteries, they sleep on, the inheritors of glory, till the fulness of time shall bring the fulness of redemption. What an awaking shall be theirs! They were laid in their last resting place, weary and worn, but such they shall not rise. They went to their rest with the furrowed brow, and the wasted features, but they wake up in beauty and glory. The shrivelled seed, so destitute of form and comeliness, rises from the dust a beauteous flower. The winter of the grave gives way to the spring of redemption and the summer of glory. Blessed is death, since it, through the divine power, disrobes us of this work-day garment, to clothe us with the wedding garment of incorruption. Blessed are those who “sleep in Jesus.”
C.H. Spurgeon

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The idea of a spiritual body that comes out of us when we die is interesting. Does it ‘live’ or exist in us while we live this live? Could it be what the past generations of christians were thinking when they spoke about an eternal ‘soul’? What is the relationship between the spiritual body and consciousness?

In the creation story, when Adam and (other) animals were given life, the expression used was the same, “living ‘soul’ (nefesh)”. If humans have a spiritual body, do animals have it?
I doubt it simply because the number of animals that have lived is so huge. There would not be enough of space in the ‘heaven’ if all animals would have a spiritual body and would resurrect. In addition, the ‘heaven’ of predators and parasites would be the hell of herbivores and other prey animals.

And what about our distant ancestors, more or less primitive primates? Assuming that humans have evolved from more ‘primitive’ species, would we meet these ancestors in the ‘heaven’?

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The quote from Spurgeon shows why he has been called the ‘Prince of Preachers’. Beautiful preaching.

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Right guys! And do you also think people will have to toil in the fields in heaven in order to produce food? Will we even NEED food? Right now there’s technology that makes it possible to produce actual meat, in the lab. You can DNA test it and would be identical to a chicken :chicken:…or whatever else you were copying. So if we have this technology in this life and in this world, do you doubt for a second we’ll be just able to magic out meat for the lions?

So there’s limited space in heaven? Lol
I hope I have this right, but I think that the amount of people alive now is greater than the amount of all the people that ever lived. Something like that. And also we could apparently fit the world’s entire population…in France! (The French would probably object lol)
The point I’m making is we’ll need less space in heaven than you think :slightly_smiling_face:
And I don’t believe ALL animals will go to heaven. I think it will be only creatures who were either self aware, like us, or their presence would somehow be useful to people. I just can’t see any point at all in resurrecting a fly or some mollusc.

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It will be interesting to see what will really happen. Everything we can say now is either pure speculation or incomplete interpretation of what we can read from the scriptures.

‘Heaven’ can be as large as needed. I was just thinking of the number of dinosaurs, elephants and other megafauna that have lived during the millions of years. It must be a much larger number than the number of people living on the globe now. I am too lazy to calculate a realistic number or how much space these would need. It is certain that Noah could not build a large enough ark for these, probably even the heavenly Jerusalem described by John would not be large enough :wink:

The animals might of course live somewhere else - no mastodonts or T. rex inside the gates, please.

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If Love is competent, then all that suffer are healed.

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“Nor am I greatly moved by jocular inquiries such as, ‘Where will you put all the mosquitoes?’ – a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

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Do dinosaurs go to heaven hmm does anyone know where the valley of the dried bones is ? does anyone know what jesus reffered to ?

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Well here is a pretty good explanation of the valley of dried bones:

It is not a place but a vision. Not sure what you are referring to with Jesus, could you elaborate?

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The best current estimate for number of members of Homo sapiens sapiens over the last 200-300,000 years is ~100,000,000,000.

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So correct me if i am wrong here however was it not JESUS who had visions ? in fact i think it does in fact refer to Joseph as interpreting dreams in prisons ? now was this before jesus was born or after and was this the same joesph that later got with Mary and became jesus stepdaddy so if jesus was a Gift from god than would he not bear some of his dad’s qualities and attributes or gifts i would think so

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i was thinking about this topic more today as i was looking at my own flesh and was thinking to myself if i were a dinosaur and could talk would i see my skin that covers my bones as flesh if i were a donkey in a zoo would i ask the zookepper if the fur that covered my bones was indeed fur just some more stuff to think about

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This is an interesting question about animals and heaven.

I also cannot imagine heaven without the dogs I have owned or taken care of. And for loved human beings, words cannot express my hope for them to be there.

Perhaps thinking of heaven in a different way from “somewhere we go when our bodies die” can be helpful. Perhaps we should think more of heaven as coming to earth and redeeming it. Bible scholar N.T. Wright has something to say about this in his book “Surprised by Hope”, chapter 6, section “The marriage of heaven and earth” which I quote here:

We thus arrive at the last and perhaps the greatest image of new creation, of cosmic renewal, in the whole Bible. This scene, set out in Revelation 21-22, is not well enough known or pondered (perhaps because, in order to earn the right to read it, one should really read the rest of the Revelation of St. John first, which proves too daunting for many). This time the image is that of marriage. The New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.

We notice right away how drastically different this is from all those would-be Christian scenarios in which the end of the story is the Christian going off to heaven as a soul, naked and unadorned, to meet its maker in fear and trembling. As in Philippians 3, it is not we who go to heaven, it is heaven that comes to earth; indeed, it is the church itself, the heavenly Jerusalem, that comes down to earth. This is the ultimate rejection of all types of Gnosticism, of every worldview that sees the final goal as the separation of the world from God, of the physical from the spiritual, of earth from heaven. It is the final answer to the Lord’s prayer, that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as in heaven. It is what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 1:10, that God’s design, and promise, was to sum up all things in Christ, things both in heaven and on earth. It is the final fulfillment, in richly symbolic imagery, of the promise of Genesis I, that the creation of male and female would together reflect God’s image in the world. And it is the final accomplishment of God’s great design, to defeat and abolish death forever - which can only mean the rescue of creation from its present plight of decay.

Heaven and earth, it seems, are not after all poles apart, needing to be separated forever when all the children of heaven have been rescued from this wicked earth. Nor are they simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism. No, they are different, radically different, but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female. And when they finally come together, that will be cause for rejoicing in the same way that a wedding is: a creational sign that God’s project is going forward; that opposite poles within creation are made for union, not competition; that love and not hate have the last word in the universe; that fruitfulness and not sterility is God’s will for creation.

It’s not necessarily that I’m a universalist - it seems that Satan and his angels will be utterly destroyed - but I can imagine that heaven could contain redeemed versions of all of God’s good creatures. For an infinite God, there shouldn’t be an issue with space for a finite number of creatures :slightly_smiling_face:. And perhaps we will only need Jesus to sustain us, or we will only need flora as food. Isaiah 65:25 says “The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox…” As for mosquitoes, I can imagine an extension to this principle as the human co-habiting with the mosquito :slightly_smiling_face:. And no, I don’t know how a Tyrannosaurus Rex is going to eat vegetation with those teeth :slightly_smiling_face:.

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Frankly I don’t think the spiritual body is in any way a part of the space-time structure of the physical universe. Jesus appearance in a spiritual body to his apostles is a miraculous exception and even He did not do so very long. The spiritual body is not made of the stuff of the earth but of heaven and that is where it belongs.

I don’t think so.

Genesis 2:7 says " the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."

But I do not think this means God was a necromancer creating a magical golem. I think it means God created man from the stuff of the earth according to its natural law (including evolution) and then He spoke to them giving them the inspiration that gave birth to the human mind.

They have a physical body, therefore they have a spiritual body. However… I think the majority of the choices and learning are as a species rather than as individuals. Though, I think there are exceptions such as when they interact with humans and acquire human characteristics.

I believe in an infinite God, who therefore has ample room for an infinite number of intelligent species from an infinite number of planets from an infinite number of universes. I don’t know that any other such species, planets, or universes exist. But I see no problem with this.

The physical universe is staggeringly vast and it is but a tiny womb compared what is beyond.

The resurrected spiritual body is imperishable because it has no part in the laws of nature of this physical universe.

I am certain of it. Like with the dinosaurs, people have invested considerable love and interest in them. How then could it be heavenly if you would diminish our existence by excluding them?

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What if in the New Heaven and New Earth all life forms, that have ever lived, are resurrected and we get to continue to partner with God in the flourishing of creation by geoforming dormient planets to be ecosystems for long extinct animal species. That sounds a lot more interesting to me than just chilling in a city with streets of gold!

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Here is the original discussion of this article, in case anyone wants it for reference!

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