Question

I have a young daughter (4 years old), we are Jewish, and we sent her to school in the Synagogue, and she asked us at the evening meal, "Daddy, why do we eat the animals?"

Answer

If my four year old daughter said to me, "Why do we eat the animals?"  I probably would have said, "Because, they taste good!"  And then leave it at that, because somebody said to me, "If somebody asks you what time it is--don't take your watch apart."

Let me give you an answer from a Scripture, and the answer is a very simple one, I believe.  I believe that God, and this is indicated to us both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, created the animals for the purpose of food.  In other words, that is their created intent.  In the Old Testament, God outlined very clearly--and again you are back to the authority of Scripture, and I appreciate your coming to ask the question--I really do, but we believe that you have got to have a standard.  In other words, if all you do is try to dream up logical opinion about things, you are going to have people who differ and you are not going to know where the right answers are.  So you accept a standard, and to us the standard is the Word of God--we didn't invent it, we have had it passed down to us, and when the Word of God says something--we believe that it is true.

The Scripture says, for example in 1 Timothy, "All things are to be received with thanksgiving."  It says that some will come along and say, "don't eat this" and "don't eat that," but Scripture says, "all things are to be received with thanksgiving."  Now, in Acts, chapter 10, there was a group of Jewish people who came to a Gentile and Peter was in that group, he had been raised kosher--he had never eaten anything that wasn't kosher--he was threatened by the thought of eating something that wasn't kosher.  The Lord was making a transition, and so the Lord gave him a vision of a sheet coming down and every kind of animal was in that sheet, and Peter said in his vision, "I can't eat those things, I've never eaten anything unclean."  And the Lord said to him, "What I have called clean, don't you call unclean."  In other words, the Lord said, "It's all now to be eaten and received with thanksgiving."  So the best answer to the question is, that Scripture says that God has given us those things for food to be enjoyed from Him. 

Now, as far as an animal having a soul or a spirit--in a sense as you use the terms--an animal has a soul, if by soul you mean an internal sort of consciousness, not a self-consciousness.  In other words, an animal doesn't know that it is an animal.  It doesn't know that it is a dog, it doesn't know its name--it has conditioned reflex.  It is an outer and an inner creature, in other words, there a physical part and there is an immaterial response part within an animal that you could call a soul.  An animal is neither self-conscious, that is, an animal doesn't know its an animal, or know its name, or understand itself, and neither is it God-conscious.  It cannot know God.  It doesn't know that it's alive it is just alive.  It has the ability to be trained for certain impulses, like Pavlov proved, but, an animal has no God-consciousness.  An animal has no self-consciousness, it has no sense of morality, no shame. 

The bottom line is, if you just look at the Scripture, that an animal is made by God, animals were created by God for a purpose, and one of the purposes was food.  Now, further, animals were not only created for food for people, but frankly, animals were created for food for animals.  The whole system of the animal kingdom is a self-consuming system--everybody has a predator, everybody has an enemy in that system. 

The system is such that man is made in the image of God, and that means that man is self-conscious, man is God-conscious and that is beyond any animal.  It is very distinctly in the created pattern--God created everything that He created, then He created man in His own image--with conscious, with a sense of right and wrong, with morality, with self-consciousness, God-consciousness, the ability to build relationships, a sense of shame, etc.  And that is why man is a sacred being, whereas an animal is a part of the whole system of the world which depends for survival upon the consumption of that system.

The only answer that you need to give your daughter is "That's the way God designed the world to work!"  And that is the ultimate answer.  I have said that to my kids a thousand times.  I don't know anything more than to say that, "That's the way God designed it to be."  So enjoy your "Big MAC."