Animals do not believe in a god

I'm not sure they can properly be said to hold beliefs of any kind, in fact.

Seeing as our communication with them is limited, I can't see how we can verify such claims about their thoughts.

What Rorek said.

If they believed in God, they'd probably set up little animal shrines or something.

God? Probably not. An afterlife? It's hard to say, but elephants and gorillas both seem to revere the dead as if they believe in one.

I do not think we can prove they do not so I disagree.

What Rorek said... we have only tried seriously to establish contact with 2 species of animal other than humans: apes (which we're pretty sure have inferior intelligence to us) and cetaceans, specifically dolphins (which we assume to have inferior intelligence to us).

Neither effort has gone very far but what we do know is that they're different experiences make the whole concept of cultural gap almost ridiculously large. So I'm not sure we could know how they might think about a diety.

I'm still not sure on this one. Thank you all for commenting.

I have agreed with the claim for the time-being, given that there is no proof yet that animals DO believe in a god.

What about plants? Do they believe in a god?

its my understanding that humans have the largest brains and maybe that has something to do with it?

A dog's brain is too small to be able to comprehend such as thing as god.

Wait but on second thoughts... Maybe we humans are their gods/godesses. Yes that seems about right....

I'm with Rorek on this one.

Actually humans don't have the largest brains. That distinction, I believe, belongs to the blue whale.

Because animals are realists.

(@claim) Yes, they do. I know, because I speak to them. LOL!

"Maybe we humans are their gods/godesses. Yes that seems about right..." er, CTSASH.. i mean, CAFO. I thinkt hat sounds liek crystal-ridden malarkey, personally.

Wait, I completely forgot, I'm now having to disagree on this claim. There is atleast ONE type of animal that believes in God. Humans. Humans are animals, guys, don't forget that.

Flower, read the description.

Meh, I'm voting on the claim, not the description.

but "animals" is often used colloquially to mean "non-human animals" -- it's an ambiguity in the language, which lacks any other word for the concept. so the description is (IMO) the right place to clear that up.

pedantry is all well and good, but langauge has to be understood to mean what it means to most people most of the time.

Oh please. The difference in legibility between

"Animals do not believe in a god."
and
"Non-human animals do not believe in a god."

is negligible, but the difference in meaning is vast.

The claimant even knew this was a likely misunderstanding(as evidenced by the description), but was too lazy to fix his cliam.

'strue. But the number of people whose first-blush reading of "animals" includes humans is probably fairly small.

I had a moment of stupidity and completly forgot about the discription, the last time I read the claim must have been atleast 9 months ago, I seem to remember it was one of my first comments on Jyte.

I think that its discription is just as Valid as the actual claim... sometimes its impossible not to cclarify without it.

Hey, did I say that humans have the largest brains... thats alittle naive of me, but I looked it up, and I must have meant the Brain in relation to the body mass ratio which is called the Encephalization Quotient. Apparently, Humans have the highest EQ, followed by dolphins...