[Campion]

As has been explained many times, nonsense like this doesn't meet the criteria for infallibility.

He's flatly wrong in this case, contradicting St. Thomas Aquinas -- who run tight little rings around him as a theologian -- who explained that animals have animal souls, which are not immortal.

[Dr. Sivana]

He's flatly wrong in this case, contradicting St. Thomas Aquinas -- who run tight little rings around him as a theologian -- who explained that animals have animal souls, which are not immortal.

A response to that would be that if we loved an animal while on earth, that we could have the same animal (with an animal soul) join us in Heaven (particularly after Final Judgment, when we get physical bodies back). So it would be the same animal in a sense, but not in another sense since its existence wasn't continuous.

[kevao]

He's flatly wrong in this case, contradicting St. Thomas Aquinas -- who run tight little rings around him as a theologian -- who explained that animals have animal souls, which are not immortal.

The animals were created before the fall of man, before Death entered into Creation. God never intended for any animal to die.

Will God bring back every animal that ever perished to populate the New Earth? I don't know. (And remember, we will spend eternity on a renewed *physical* Earth, with renewed *physical* bodies, not as blobs of ectoplasm forever strumming harps in some spiritual realm.) It would be a boring Earth indeed without all the Nature that God had originally designed at Creation.

And frankly, though I admit this is pure opinion, if the animals who God never intended to die, were not resurrected to repopulate the New Earth, that would seem to be a victory for Satan. While the Bible is almost completely silent about the destiny of animals, it is emphatically clear that Satan will in no way be victorious.