My mother acquired two kittens last October. She has been petless for eighteen years. I myself have not had a pet in twenty years. Her kittens sparked memories of my cute childhood contemplations of metaphysics. I think nearly every child has thought: our pets must see us as gods. I know I said as much on more than one occasion. Now some decades later, I realize that there is a profoundly deeper truth to be examined, and its discovery begins with an improved articulation: these adorable inferior animals of such limited cognition must think us humans to be gods due to our superior abilities that pets can never attain. This more precise and expanded articulation serves a needful purpose in showing our dysfunctional definitions and descriptions of God.
Both phrasings flow from a fundamental error of logic. An animal cannot conceive beyond its cognitive capacity. In other words, an animal cannot perceive humans as anything other than a superior animal. Pets do not recognize human vocalizations as speech—our syllables are just random variations akin to birdsong. Pets cannot identify emotions that they do not possess. Animals know fear, but can an animal understand hate or love? Cats purr for their owners to express contentment and safety, but cats can easily re-home elsewhere and purr for someone else. Dogs protect their masters because protecting the master protects food and shelter. Dogs can easily re-home elsewhere and will equally protect those humans. It isn’t love the way humans experience love. Animal cannot understand the abstract dimensions of discipline and training. Any success obtains through operant conditioning that is no more advanced than would be used on a human toddler or preschooler.
A cat or dog would be incapable of differentiating the superiority of humans from apes. Owing to their opposable thumbs and glenohumeral joints, humans and apes can grasp and manipulate objects. Both can hold, caress, and tickle cats and dogs. The only difference between human and ape is cognition, but cats and dogs can neither perceive nor understand the differentiating cognition because the animal mind cannot fathom an intellect which exceeds its own cognitive boundaries. The cat or dog cannot perceive that humans operate on any higher plane. To our pets, humans and apes are simply more capable at certain tasks. Any further distinction is lost.
As a hypothetical, if cat and dog brains could count only to ten, then the cat and dog brain would have no capacity to understand eleven, algebra, or infinity. Moreover, without the cognitive capacity to understand these things, they also cannot imagine such things. And because they cannot imagine the inconceivable, no uniquely human capability can even register to them. They have no appreciation of the full complexity of human minds because their minds are too limited to understand the full superiority of our minds.
Cats and dogs cannot comprehend placing food in containers when the floor is perfectly suited for eating. For that matter, our pets probably cannot fathom why humans do not transport objects with our mouths. Assuming that these animal brains have the capacity to marvel, our pets would marvel only that we walk on two limbs. Cats and dogs understand other mammalian quadrupeds, be they sheep, goats, squirrels, ponies, or cows. Our ambulation is illogical. If cats and dogs understood bipedal locomotion, they would not collide with our feet. They do not comprehend our lesser agility nor appreciate the blind spot around our feet. To cats and dogs, our upright movement is a superzoonic feat. They marvel not at our intellect that they cannot imagine, but rather at our observable movements which they cannot understand.
The animal has no concept of any other living entity beyond its equal—humans are just more capable animals. Animals cannot recognize the dimensions that distinguish us from them. So it is that animals zoomorphize humans, which is to say, the animal downgrades us to animal concepts because animal concepts are all the highest concepts which the animal understands. Humans are just other animals who often do things unlike all other animals. On the other hand, humans anthropomorphize animals by thinking that our pets have the capacity for emotions which only humans can experience. Our pets do not love us or admire us or even respect us. Those are human attributes that we assign to our animals for a host of reasons.
Just as animals zoomorphize humans, humans anthropomorphize God. We conceive, construct, and discuss God as if God possessed and expressed the human attributes which we understand—emotion, location, physicality, etc. What if human love is not an emotion at all but only a miniscule facet of a greater emotion possessed by God? We cannot understand the fullness of an emotion which we cannot experience. So we assume that God experiences love the way we experience love. To say “God is love” is to ascribe what humans experience as love without considering whether the emotion is uniquely human nor whether God experiences and expresses something altogether different. If God is greater than humans, how could God be limited to the human dimensions of love? Should not God experience something greater that we cannot describe because it exceeds our imagination? We imagine God as being more powerful and more knowing, but we act as though our inferior consciousness can precisely and appropriately articulate the fullness of an existence that we cannot imagine, much less reduce to inferior words. We downgrade God through human concepts (and usually as parent/child). God loves, God disciplines, God provides. God angers. God forgives. We do not consider the essences that we cannot imagine, and we ascribe to God the observable facets that we cannot explain.
Perhaps this explains why many demand a God that thinks like a human and then deny the existence of God because a god who thinks like a human is no god at all. The human who reductively anthropomorphizes God will never believe in God. Such being the case, I find it incredible that the Abrahamic faiths survive. Unless we admit and profess the existence of “unknown unknowns,” will the Abrahamic faiths survive?
Of course, there’s Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”