Edward Feser's reply to Hart's most recent essay has surfaced in The Public Discourse. Feser does attempt to defend himself from the charge that his eschatology differs widely from what the Scriptures teach, and he ends up resorting to some remarkable exegetical maneuvers:
I agree with the premise that all of creation will be redeemed. But it simply doesn’t follow that there will be animals in Heaven. To make such an inference would be, among other things, a fallacy of division. (If your stylist assures you that you are not losing your hair, it doesn’t follow that you won’t lose a single strand.) For all Hart has shown, that all of creation will be redeemed entails only that something of the corporeal and animal worlds will exist in Heaven. That our bodies will be restored to us in the resurrection suffices to guarantee that much.
On Feser's view, so long as all finite reality in existence at the time when God is "all in all" is redeemed, all of creation will be (technically) redeemed. There need be no strong similarity between what is in our world and what will be in the eschaton.
Of course, on this view "all of creation" would be redeemed if in age to come all that exists is a (redeemed) heap of coffee grounds, a tapeworm, and the members of AC/DC. Technically, Angus Young alone would do it.
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