A Hypothetical Afterlife For Animals

As a human, it is usually easiest to contemplate the logical possibility of an afterlife (yes, with or without a new body, an afterlife does not contradict logical axioms) for oneself or other people, given the enormous differences between people and non-human animals.  Someone might occasionally wonder about whether a pet or some dying animal they observe will have any sort of continued conscious existence after biological death, but for the most part, contemplation about the afterlife seems to focus very predominantly on humans.  We are humans, after all.

Still, an ant, a deer, a cow, and an eagle could all have afterlives even if humans do not in the sense that this is logically possible.  Nothing about this contradicts reason.  Just became one creature has an afterlife does not mean another one has to, and humans might be the creature that does not receive one.  However, since people are more a direct part of human life than other beings, this kind of truth is less familiar to many--it is not that animals have an afterlife but not people, but that all of this is entirely possible.

The author of Ecclesiastes, although they later say that a state of unconsciousness and total mental inactivity awaits every person in Sheol before resurrection (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10), admits that they do not know if human spirits rise upward after death and animal spirits descend into the ground (3:21).  Death awaits both humans and other living things of this world (3:19-20), including the many beast that God created.  Physically, the bodies of both decay into the ground from which God fashioned the first humans in either case.  What verifiable advantage do people have over animals in this regard, the writer asks?

Yes, the Bible itself acknowledges many metaphysical or epistemological truths that one can know without any textual promoting, from pure reason.  It in no way refuses to grapple with existential matters far outside of what evangelicals and many secular people are comfortable with.  There could very well be animal life in the Biblical heaven, whether continuations of specific animals from Earth or separate/new creations, but if Christianity is not true in spite of the evidence, it is not as if an animal afterlife is impossible.  Lack of acknowledgement has nothing to do with the ultimate truth one way or another.