> Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. Note t

> Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. Note that the belief that animals do not have a soul is relatively recent in Christianity -- it originated in roughly the 18th or 19th century around the time of the enlightenment. And still, not all Christians or Christian thinkers espouse this view. > This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise. I would argue that instead of taking the cue from recent Christian thought, science owes this view to a strict materialist worldview arising out of 18th century philosophy, which underpins most of its inquiry and rules out non-material hypotheses a priori. Prominent atheist scientists regularly praise materialism as the enabler of successful science. > But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation. Indeed.