The Darwinist, the Vegan, and the Christian

Walking to work today I happened to see a car with a “Go Vegan!” bumper sticker right next to a “Darwin fish” sticker. This isn’t particularly surprising, and in my neighborhood there are plenty of cars expressing such progressive sentiments. But after thinking about it a bit, I decided there was a subtle, but significant, inconsistency here.

Now, I’m not interested here in the merits of Darwinism as a theory for explaining evolution. And for the record, I don’t think there’s any inconsistency between Darwinism as an explanatory theory and Christian faith. I think the early chapters of Genesis clearly belong to the genre of what Karl Barth called “saga” – stories that take place outside of observable history, but tell us important truths about God and his relation to the world and to us. Genesis is not a textbook of proto-science. Which is not to say that Darwinism may not be flawed; it has many critics, inside and outside the scientific disciplines, and those criticisms have to be evaluated on their merits. But that’s not a debate I’m particularly interested in.

No, what I’m interested in is “Darwinism” as a worldview, or philosophical outlook – a worldview that excludes God or any transcendent dimension to existence. I assume that anyone who puts a Darwin sticker on their car is doing something more than affirming a particular theory about the origins of life, especially when that sticker is a parody of a popular Christian symbol.

What does this have to do with veganism? Well, quite apart from the fact that Darwinism has, notoriously, not had the most progressive consequences when applied to morality, I wonder if someone who is a philosophical Darwinist/naturalist can consistently believe that humans have a moral obligation not to eat or exploit animals. After all, if the natural world is all there is, what lessons does it have to teach us as far as morality goes? The obvious conclusion would seem to be that conflict, violence, and predation are “natural” and so there’s no reason humans shouldn’t imitate our animal brethren in this respect.

Exhibiting moral concern for animals is in many ways an “unnatural” behavior. We have no obvious interest, individually or as a species, in treating them with compassion or in refusing to harm them. While a thoroughgoing naturalist may be able to rationalize moral conduct between humans as a kind of survival strategy, to extend moral consideration to animals seems, on these premises, to be stretching things beyond credibility.

If nature “red in tooth and claw” is the bottom line, the most fundamental reality, then it’s very hard to see why we have moral obligations to our fellow creatures. To act “with the grain of the universe” will be to act in ways that are fundamentally self-seeking. So, it’s hard to see Darwinism as a fitting complement to progressive views about animals, or other human beings for that matter.

I don’t mean to deny that, in strict logic, it’s possible to be a philosophical Darwinist or naturalist and to hold moral opinions that value all life. It’s just that these opinions won’t be grounded in one’s fundamental views about the world. Morality becomes at best a heroic, but ultimately futile, Camus-esque enterprise of spitting in the face of an absurd and uncaring universe.

By contrast, Christianity teaches that the bottom line of reality is not violence and conflict, but peace. This is one of the lessons of Genesis – again not as a psuedo-scientific account of the origins of life, but as a vision of God’s creation as it was meant to be (and will be). In the Garden humans and animals live together peacefully – even the animals are vegetarian! (cf. Genesis 1:30) Creation is a gift of a good God and is itself fundamentally good (being qua being is good, as Augustine said).

This vision of the peaceable kingdom is ultimately what gives Christian ethics its coherence. Because Christ reigns, Christians can afford to be nonviolent. The Jesus fish goes much better with the “Go Vegan!” sticker.