Cold noses at the pearly gates?

There's some nice, or at least interesting, points made about theology in the first part of this article. Much reliant on Aquinas, but then Aquinas seems to have some good points to make about the relationship between soul and body. There's an over cavalier dismissal of the scriptural stuff which may not be as contradictory as she thinks, just initially confusing because stretched across a number of genres and needing theological elucidation. Intriguingly too, the quote from Aquinas is potentially over-literally construed; it may not be correct to interpret Aquinas to be spejking literally and in any case if we did then we have to think in terms of Resurrection and not just 'souls' (though at least this is defined holistically but not, I think, consistently considered that way: I rather suspect that Aquinas' souls would include most living beings not just some as indicated below).

The article leaves us with a little nest of questions: Cold noses at the pearly gates? | Heather McDougall | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Finally, even if Christians believe animals have souls (and I think there are grounds for saying that at least some of them do) then there remains the scientific challenge. Boundaries between species have become increasingly blurred through genetic engineering, and we can imagine a higher primate being given extra human genes. Would this creature have a human soul or an animal soul? At what point would it get a human soul? Even if we don't believe in souls, maybe we shouldn't consider the treatment of animals, ourselves, and bio-science, as ethically neutral."
I think that those are important questions, though I'm concerned that the supposition behind it seems to have too easily seemingly slipped into talk of souls and eternal life without hanging onto the issue of how anything might be related to eternity and where is consideration of Resurrection in this? I think these are very good questions: the kind of thing I'd love to see students tackle because it'd winkle out critical thinking about the issues behind the question as well as the application to plausible future dilemmas.

I tnhink the real issue comes down to 'what is the nature of the relationship between God and animals? And related to this is the question of the status of the non-human creation and all of that in relation to Resurrection (and some of the issues around this could be put crudely: Whill bacteria be ressurrected? And if so, which ones? Virii?) I suspect that this is partly what the language of 'souls' as used in this article is meant to capture.