Animal Suffering: Christianity's Hardest Problem, Vedanta's Easiest

The concession

A few years back, Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity put out a video defending theism against the problem of evil. Most of it was the standard repertoire. But partway through, talking about animal pain specifically, he stopped defending and simply told the truth: "As I think about this problem, the problem of animal pain, it really causes me, like, I don't really know of a really, really good answer to this."[^1]

I want to give Bertuzzi credit for that. Apologetics is full of people who treat every objection as already answered somewhere, by someone, in a footnote. He looked at the hardest version of the problem of evil and admitted the cupboard was close to bare. When I sat down with Akshay Gupta — Adi Purusha Das, to give him his initiated name, a philosopher of religion who did his PhD at Cambridge on precisely this cluster of problems — to respond to Bertuzzi's video, neither of us wanted to gloat over the admission. We wanted to explain it. Because the admission is not a personal failing of Bertuzzi's. It is structural. Akshay put the diagnosis in one line: "I think it's hard to explain animal suffering without any type of concept of karma or reincarnation. And I think that's why it's such a problem for most theists."[^2]

Bertuzzi appeared in our conversation only through clips of his video, so he wasn't there to answer back; I'll try to engage his position at its strongest as we go.

Before the argument proper, clear away the two standard dodges, because they fail on their own terms. The first, associated with William Lane Craig, is to downgrade animal pain: whatever animals feel, it is supposed to be of a lesser order than human suffering. Even granting that, it explains nothing. Less intense suffering is still suffering, and "why does it exist at all?" is not answered by "there could be more of it." And any discount for intensity gets swallowed by quantity: the number of animals and insects suffering at any moment multiplies the problem far past whatever the discount saved. The second dodge is the Neo-Cartesian one — animals don't really feel pain, they merely behave as though they do. Akshay's response was about as academic as the position deserves: "If you see an animal screaming for its life, it looks pretty bad."[^3]

Watch five minutes of slaughterhouse footage and then try to say the word "merely."

The problem at full strength

If the sceptic's argument were only that individual animals hurt, a Christian might hold the line with appeals to mystery. But the modern form of the argument is much worse than that, and Christians who haven't met it in full should see it stated properly.

Joe Schmid of Majesty of Reason came on my channel to press it — Josh Wulf was in the host's chair that night, with Akshay opposite. Schmid's version follows Paul Draper: compare two hypotheses against the biological record. On the "hypothesis of indifference," the universe is not aimed at anyone's welfare, and hundreds of millions of years of predation, parasitism and starvation are about what you'd expect. On theism — a perfectly good, fully provident creator — that same record is astonishing. And the sting is in where the suffering sits: not as an accident of creation but as its method. "A lot of this suffering is the very means by which God brought about biological diversity. It's the very engine of his creation."[^4]

Natural selection just is differential death. The wolf's speed was purchased by every slow deer that got eaten; the deer's speed by every slow wolf that starved. Run that transaction for aeons across every lineage on Earth and you have the process that produced the peacock, the blue whale, and us. Schmid made the scale vivid: "As we're speaking right now, tons and tons of animals are just ripping each other to shreds, and that's just in one country."[^4]

So the challenge to the Christian is not "explain why a fawn burned in a forest fire." It is: explain why the mechanism of creation itself was a bloodbath, when the creator is supposed to be the God of love. On indifference, the data are unsurprising. On providence, they cry out for explanation. That likelihood gap is evidence, and pretending otherwise convinces nobody who has understood the argument.

Akshay's first response that night was methodological and correct as far as it goes: one data point cannot settle theism against naturalism, and the total evidence — fine-tuning, the origin of life, consciousness — has to go on the scales too. But he did not leave it there, and neither will I, because "we lose on this datum but win on others" is a concession dressed as a rebuttal. The interesting question is whether any theology can raise the likelihood of the actual biological record. I think exactly one can.

The criterion both sides accept

Here is the remarkable thing about that conversation with Schmid: before any theodicy was on the table, the agnostic stated the test that a successful one would have to pass. Channelling Marilyn McCord Adams' work on horrendous evils, he said: "If an animal is going through horrific suffering, the goods that come from that surely ought to accrue to the individual themself."[^5]

Sit with that, because it is the hinge of this whole article. It is not enough that an animal's agony produce goods for somebody — richer ecosystems, opportunities for human compassion, the greater glory of the whole. Adams pressed this against theodicies of human suffering: a person's torment cannot be redeemed by benefits banked to someone else's account. Schmid extends it to the fawn and the field mouse, and he is right to. A good God does not run creation on involuntary sacrifice.

Now watch what this criterion does to the animal case in particular. Akshay opened our other conversation — the one dedicated wholly to this problem, occasioned by a paper he had just published on it — with the sharpened form: "Animal suffering is more tricky because it's harder to see what benefits can arise from animal suffering in particular."[^6]

The standard justifications for human suffering come in two shapes: suffering improves you (soul-making, virtue, the deepened character of the survivor), or suffering is compensated to you (heaven swallows every tear). For animals, on standard Christian anthropology, both shapes fail at once. Soul-making presupposes a subject who can learn — reflect on pain, draw the lesson, grow. A zebra being eaten alive is not acquiring patience. And compensation presupposes continuity — the same individual persisting into a state where the good can be received. Most of the tradition denies animals that continuity altogether; Aquinas' animals simply end.

A creature that cannot learn from its pain and does not survive its death can be neither improved nor compensated by anything that happens to it. That is not a gap awaiting a cleverer apologist. It is a structural exclusion: the two mechanisms Christianity uses to redeem suffering both require features it denies to animals.

Why the Christian workarounds fail

Bertuzzi, to his credit again, feels this, which is why his tentative proposal reaches for continuity: perhaps at the eschaton God grants animals rational faculties, and the deer, now able to understand its life, endorses the suffering it went through — a kind of theosis for animals.

Akshay took the proposal seriously and it came apart in his hands.[^7]

First, the ultimatum problem. If the resurrected deer can endorse its suffering, it can also refuse to. What then? Either God overrides the refusal — in which case the endorsement was theatre — or the animal is now estranged from God over suffering it never chose, which imports the problem of hell into the one doctrine that was supposed to relieve pressure. Asking a creature to retroactively sign off on agony it was given no say in is not obviously a mercy.

Second, and worse: distribution. Nothing in the proposal explains why the pampered puppy sleeping on a duvet in Remuera and the animal skinned alive in a fur farm drew such different tickets. Eschatological endorsement, even if it worked, would redeem the suffering after the fact; it would not explain why it fell where it fell. The allocation remains exactly what it looks like: arbitrary. And an omnipotent God does not get to shrug at arbitrariness.

There is a subtler failure here too, and Akshay's question exposes it. Suppose the Christian grants animals an afterlife but no memory or continuity with the life in which they suffered. "If it's sort of like a blank slate — you were an animal in one life and then you go to the afterlife but you have no recollection, no continuity — then it's kind of like, well, what was the suffering for?"[^8]

A blank-slate afterlife is compensation paid to a stranger. The creature that receives the bliss has no connection, causal or psychological, to the creature that bled. The suffering itself did no work; God simply appended happiness to a history of pain, when he could as easily have appended it to a history without the pain. Notice what has happened: the Christian who grants animals an afterlife has already conceded the Hindu premise that the animal is a persisting soul with a future beyond this body. What he still lacks is a mechanism by which the suffering itself does the animal any good. He has bought the continuity and left the engine out.

And behind all of these sits the last resort: sceptical theism, the appeal to goods beyond our ken. Akshay's objection to it is theological before it is philosophical: a God who wants to be known would not run his creation on reasons permanently opaque to the creatures in it, and a principled "we can't see the reasons" corrodes morality — if this suffering may serve unknown goods, why are you relieving it? My own objection is about method. Mystery is a permissible last resort only after the candidate explanations are exhausted. It is intellectually lazy to reach for it while a live theodicy is sitting on the table unexamined. So let's examine it.

The missing mechanism: the subtle body

Vedantic anthropology says a living being is three things layered together. Outermost is the gross physical body — the one biology studies, which dies. Within it is the sukshma-sarira, the subtle body: mind, intelligence and ego, a persisting psychological vehicle. Innermost is the atma, the soul proper, the conscious self. At death the gross body drops away; the subtle body travels with the soul into the next embodiment.

One more term and the machinery is complete. Every experience leaves a samskara — an impression — on the subtle body. Samskaras are not memories in the episodic sense; they are dispositions, grooves worn into the psyche, and they carry across lives.

Now run the zebra through it. The zebra cannot reflect on its pain; no one claims it can. But the pain still marks its subtle body. And when that soul, lives later, is embodied as a human being — with the cognitive equipment to feel the weight of what it carries — the impression surfaces as something recognisable: a heightened sensitivity to the pain of others, and a certain instinctive scepticism about the promises of the flesh. As Akshay put it: "When we experience pain for ourselves, it can make us more empathic and sensitive to the pain of others."[^9]

The analogy he used is the right one: early childhood. You remember almost nothing from before age three, yet those years shape your adult temperament profoundly. Formation without recollection is not an exotic postulate; it is how every human psyche already works. The doctrine extends a familiar mechanism across the death boundary, on a vehicle built to carry it.

Set this against the criterion from earlier and the fit is exact. The goods of the animal's suffering — empathy, dispassion, the slow reorientation of a soul — accrue to the very soul that suffered, because the subtle body that was marked is the one that persists. Not to the ecosystem, not to human observers, not to a blank-slate successor in heaven. To it. When Schmid heard the account, he recognised precisely this feature — the goods flow to the sufferer — as what distinguishes it, and reserved his fire for other fronts, which I'll meet below. In the earlier conversation, Akshay had framed the whole material world this way: "It's a place of reformation so that the soul can learn lessons and attune itself back to God."[^10]

Not a torture chamber and not a paradise gone wrong: a reformatory, in which every sentence is calibrated and nothing is wasted.

And now revisit Schmid's engine of creation, because this is where the reincarnationist answer does something no rival can. On Christian assumptions, the hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering that built the biosphere happened to creatures with no futures — a charnel house with no beneficiaries, conducted by omnipotence. On the Vedantic picture, every creature in that record was a soul in transit, and what each one underwent left its mark on a subtle body that is still travelling. Deep time stops being an embarrassment. The fossil record is not the receipt for creation's collateral damage; it is a ledger of souls on their way through, none of whose suffering fell outside the reformatory's purpose. The evolutionary problem of evil is an argument against theologies in which animals are dead ends. It has no purchase on a theology in which nothing that suffers is a dead end.

But can a pig be you?

The strongest philosophical counterattack targets the load-bearing claim: that the human who inherits the goods is the same individual as the animal that suffered. In the episode with Akshay we reacted to a discussion between Michael Huemer and Graham Oppy, and Oppy pressed the objection in its cleanest form: if personal identity rides on qualitative resemblance, cross-species reincarnation fails, because your dog is nothing like you — genetically, psychologically, anatomically.[^11]

Schmid ran the same worry from the inside, imagining waking up as a pig: "It sounds like I've ceased to exist and given way to some other thing which has experiences that is in the pig."[^12]

The answer has two levels, and the objection mistakes which level identity lives on. On the Vedantic account, person X is person Y just in case they share the same soul. Full stop. Being a Cambridge PhD student, having rational faculties, speaking English — these are accidental features of a particular embodiment, no more constitutive of you than your current haircut. Even the subtle body is ultimately a covering. Akshay defends what philosophers call the simple view: sameness of soul, not resemblance, is what identity consists in — though he notes that even a psychological-continuity theorist can accommodate reincarnation, since the subtle body carries psychological structure across the gap.[^13]

But there's an empirical argument here as well. Ask what actually explains the cognitive gulf between the dog and the philosopher, and the honest answer is: the bodies. In the very clips we were reacting to, Huemer — no theist — conceded the point: the dog lacks speech because it lacks the brain structures for speech, not because it houses some lesser grade of soul. I put the principle this way: "Why not just leave the spiritual for the things which can't be explained physically? And then any differences which we can explain based on physical things, why not assume those are caused by the physical?"[^14]

The case for the soul rests on what physics can't reach — the sheer first-person fact of experience. That fact is as present in a pig as in a professor; what differs between them is neurology, and neurology is the gross body's affair. So the Vedantic claim is not that a pig secretly reasons like Schmid. It's that the same subject of experience — the same inner light — can look out through a pig's equipment or a philosopher's, and the equipment explains every difference the objection points to. Schmid waking as a pig would not have ceased to exist. He would have lost his instruments, not himself.

To the residual complaint — but what's the mechanism of transmigration? — I gave the answer I still stand by: "The fact that we don't know how gravity works isn't an argument against gravity. It gives us explanatory power and we all know it works."[^15]

Newton had no mechanism for action at a distance and physics did not wait for one. Doctrines earn their keep by explanatory power; mechanisms come later or not at all.

It was Huemer, again no friend of theism, who noticed what falls out of all this ethically: "You know, if you can be reincarnated as animals, maybe you should think more carefully about how you treat animals."[^16]

A theology on which animals are ensouled fellow travellers grounds their moral status without strain. A theology on which they are soulless furniture has always had to argue itself into kindness.

The cost, honestly priced

Schmid's deepest objection is not about pigs. It is about priors, and I want to state it at full strength because it is the best thing a sceptic can say against this article.

A theodicy, he argued, has to clear two bars, not one. It must make the data likely — grant that karma and reincarnation do that for animal suffering. But it must also itself be likely given theism, and bare theism — the mere hypothesis of an all-good, all-powerful creator — does not predict karma, samskaras, or transmigrating subtle bodies. Bolting a low-prior auxiliary hypothesis onto theism to absorb bad data incurs its own probability cost; you have saved the theory by taxing it. And even granting the karmic framework, Schmid pressed, the data could have looked very different — six thousand years of suffering under a young earth, say — so the aeons-long engine of creation stays surprising after the theodicy has done its work.[^5]

Here is my answer, and it is not a dodge: nobody defends bare theism. Bertuzzi does not; his Christianity carries the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement and the resurrection — none of which bare theism predicts either. Every living religious tradition is bare theism plus a rich body of specific revealed claims, and every one of those packages pays a complexity cost up front. The question that actually decides anything is how the packages perform once the bill is paid. And on the datum this article is about, the packages are not close. Christianity's auxiliary hypotheses, for all their cost, leave animal suffering exactly where Bertuzzi found it: unanswered, conceded, a standing likelihood penalty against the whole system. The Vaishnava package pays its cost and buys the answer — the one mechanism on the table by which the goods of an animal's suffering reach the animal.

Akshay's methodological point sharpens this. He is sceptical that Bayesian prior-juggling is the right frame at all — the priors themselves are notoriously beyond principled assignment — and prefers inference to the best explanation: causal adequacy, coherence, freedom from defeaters. On that frame the argument becomes a straightforward comparison of explanations, and I am content to let it be exactly that. Nor is the karmic framework an ad hoc patch invented for this debate; it is millennia older than the evolutionary problem of evil, and the independent evidence bearing on reincarnation — the past-life memory research programme among the rest — is argued elsewhere on this site, where it can be weighed properly rather than gestured at.

So the ledger stands like this. Both sides agree on where the problem bites hardest: Bertuzzi says on camera that he knows no really good Christian answer to animal pain. Both sides agree on the shape any answer must take: Schmid himself says the goods of an animal's horrific suffering ought to accrue to the animal. One theology on offer has a mechanism that fits that shape — a soul that persists, a subtle body that carries the marks, a future birth in which the marks become empathy and detachment and, eventually, the turn back toward God. The sceptic may still decline the whole package; that is his right, and the rest of the case for it is argued elsewhere. But he can no longer say that the screaming animal refutes theism as such. It refutes theologies in which the animal is a dead end. The animal was never a dead end.

[^1]: A Response to @CapturingChristianity's Solution to the Problem of Evil (with Adi Purusha Das), 00:01:08 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnG9ktMfQwQ&t=68s [^2]: A Response to @CapturingChristianity's Solution to the Problem of Evil (with Adi Purusha Das), 00:03:20 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnG9ktMfQwQ&t=200s [^3]: A Response to @CapturingChristianity's Solution to the Problem of Evil (with Adi Purusha Das), 00:04:44 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnG9ktMfQwQ&t=284s [^4]: The Problem of Evil — @MajestyofReason & Adi Purusha (with Joe Schmid), 00:02:12 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhIQw8K3MI&t=132s [^5]: The Problem of Evil — @MajestyofReason & Adi Purusha (with Joe Schmid), 00:25:13 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhIQw8K3MI&t=1513s [^6]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:01:01 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=61s [^7]: A Response to @CapturingChristianity's Solution to the Problem of Evil (with Adi Purusha Das), 00:19:00 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnG9ktMfQwQ&t=1140s [^8]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:36:48 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=2208s [^9]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:27:05 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=1625s [^10]: The Problem of Evil — @MajestyofReason & Adi Purusha (with Adi Purusha Das), 00:10:55 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhIQw8K3MI&t=655s [^11]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:06:04 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=364s [^12]: The Problem of Evil — @MajestyofReason & Adi Purusha (with Joe Schmid), 00:30:00 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhIQw8K3MI&t=1800s [^13]: The Problem of Evil — @MajestyofReason & Adi Purusha (with Adi Purusha Das), 00:33:18 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhIQw8K3MI&t=1998s [^14]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:11:08 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=668s [^15]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:44:30 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=2670s [^16]: Reincarnation and the Problem of Animal Suffering — With Akshay Gupta, 00:05:58 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzt1QB9xzso&t=358s