I have a possible solution to this one. Souls are analog. They exist on a continuum from “no soul at all” all the way up to “James Brown”.
Thus a chair probably doesn’t have a soul. The afterlife may be completely devoid of chairs. Trees I’m not so sure about; I feel guilty about pruning trees, so I suspect they have tree-souls. Embryos - humans, cats, dogs - develop a soul the same way they develop brains or livers.
My reasoning is that an entity’s soul must in some way be related to its physical form. It’s daft to say a monkey doesn’t have a soul but a human does: why not, aside from “God said so” (I don’t think he did, or if he did, it’s not written down anywhere). It’d be equally daft to say a human embryo has a soul by a monkey embryo doesn’t, because they’re virtually identical at that point.
You can take that for what it’s worth. It’s completely unfalsifiable.
The cause and effect relationship there sounds dubious.
There’s a Leonard Cohen song about that. Also some Hindu/Buddhist philosophy that I don’t fully recall. Some Christians take the concept more literally (as a matter of dogma), i.e. if you lose a limb in this life you lose it forever.
You can try asking a Muslim about that (if we haven’t scared all of them away).
As far as the beasts go, C.S. Lewis held that animals that were closely associated with humans, like Shep the faithful sheep dog, somehow acquired individual souls by osmosis and would live on, while lesser animals like pigs, cows, etc., as well as wild animals, would be just snuffed out. Exceptions would be made for animals that represented heraldic symbols, like lions for courage and magnificence (no reference to how they actually lived, just traditionally held ideas about them).
I wish you guys would try and get to a definitive theory on this …some of us have less time left to figure this out . I’m already counting out my money for the ferryman …
Sorry…