Religion & Law

Sacred Cows

By John Pieret

Okay, this is just silly but, on a day when I'm a bit under the weather, presenting it for your delectation is one way to fill up the blog:

And I would like to suggest that vegetarians who refuse to eat meat for moral reasons - apparently the most common reason - speak to us in an interesting way about the controversy between evolution and intelligent design. ...

In my view, a vegetarian who chooses to not eat animals for moral reasons - such as those quoted in The Star-Ledger story, or among the long-ago famous -- does so because of a specific world view.

The vegetarian assumes that there is no God-given difference between humans and animals. According to his philosophic viewpoint, human beings are just smarter animals.

Interestingly, that was the view of Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man (1871), cited in "Darwin and Human Kinship with Non-Human Animals" by the Humanist Vegetarian Group, Darwin writes:

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attractions, curiosity, intuitions, reason etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition in the lower animals."

Of course, animals do have some limited measure of emotions and will. The evolutionist says that dogs have emotions because dogs, somewhere along the line, found it advantageous to survival to acquire emotions. That ability is just further evolved in humans, they say.

By contrast, evangelicals believe that the Bible teaches that humans are made in the image of God, that they carry that divine spark, with reasoning, emotions, conscience, etc.

Evangelicals believe that humans have emotions because God has emotions, and that God stamped that "image" on humans.

And, although the Bible is silent on this, perhaps God gave dogs a limited measure of emotions just to make man's best friend a better companion.

But for the philosophically consistent vegetarian, who declines meat for moral reasons, as for the evolutionist, there is no more image of God in his human neighbor than in his dog.

And so, in a real way, if evolution is true (it's not, but if it were), the vegetarian would be the most reality-based and philosophically consistent thinker among us. (Bold in original)

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on January 30, 2009 (boomark / email).