A Thinking Reed

Category: Science and Religion

  • Some thoughts on Christianity and evolution

    This is a bit late for the Darwin 200th birthday bash, but I thought it might be worth jotting down some thoughts on Christianity and evolution. This post could serve as a kind of summary of things I’ve been thinking and reading about over the last few years, though naturally they’re all subject to revision:

    1. The argument over “literal” vs. “non-literal” readings of Genesis 1-3 is, in my view, a total red herring. It just seems clear from the text itself that what we’re dealing with there is myth or “saga” (to use Karl Barth’s term). That doesn’t mean that the stories don’t contain memories of some historical events, but their main point is to illustrate key truths about God’s relationship to creation and to humankind.

    2. “Young earth creationism” is an intellectually bankrupt position and not worth taking seriously. Not only does it require rejecting virtually all modern biology, but also geology and astrophysics. A “young earth” is simply not tenable given current knowledge about the physical world. Moreover, as noted above, nothing in the Bible compels us to posit a young earth.

    3. “Intelligent design” has always struck me as completely beside the point. Once you grant that life evolved through a gradual process, it seems unnecessary–or at least premature–to assert that God tinkered with the process at various observable points. Better to think that God superintends the entire evolutionary process.

    4. A common response to evolution among mainline Christians–at least in my experience–is to accept it, but to keep the scientific and religious outlooks in hermetically sealed compartments. Apart from rejecting “literal” readings of Genesis, evolution has too often been prevented affect theology’s content.

    5. Specifically, there are several particular areas where evolution poses a challenge to traditional Christian beliefs that are still taken for granted, even among people who reject creationism.

    5a. The problem of evil: traditionally (though not unanimously) Christians often held that death and suffering only entered the world when human beings sinned. Thus God could be relieved from any responsibility for the world’s suffering. But modern biology tells us that death and suffering not only pre-dated human beings, they are inextricable parts of the evolutionary process itself. Without them, life wouldn’t have been able to develop. This would seem to require a re-thinking of God’s relation to these processes.

    5b. Humans as part of creation:     Christian theology has usually emphasized humanity’s transcendence over nature, focusing on our reason or free will or some other capacity that sets us decisively apart from the rest of the animal kingdom (though the Bible itself has a more balanced and “earthy” view). But we now know not only that we emerged from animal life, but that many of the differences we once thought were unique to humankind have been shown to be present to some degree in other animals, including reason and morality. This challenges the anthropocentrism of much traditional theology, but opens the possibility of a truly theocentric theology, which only seems proper.

    5c. Original sin: Just as evolutionary theory denies that suffering entered the world with humanity, it also denies that humans lived in a paradisiacal state of innocence prior to a historic “fall.” And if there was no historic fall, then it’s difficult to know what to make of the teaching that, because of Adam’s transgression, humanity was cursed with death and incurred an inherited guilt, with the implication that each one of us would be properly damned were it not for Christ’s atoning death. This isn’t to deny that human beings are “turned in on themselves,” to borrow Luther’s phrase. But this should probably be seen as a legacy of our evolutionary heritage and/or cultural transmission.

    5d: Atonement:     The abandonment of a “forensic” account of original guilt would also seem to require re-thinking the atonement as a sacrifice for human sin required to balance the books with God. We might say instead that, in the Incarnation, God pledges God’s love to creation by identifying with it, including with the suffering victims of the evolutionary process, and re-creates human nature in Jesus, making possible our participation in a new humanity lived in restored relationship with God, each other, and the rest of creation.

    5e. Eschatology: if humans are embedded in the physical world in a much more profound way than we previously imagined, we can begin to recover aspects of the Christian tradition which hold out hope for a redemption of all creation.

    6. Some Christians have tried to avoid some of the apparent implications of evolution by positing a “cosmic fall”: sin and suffering entered the world through the actions of supra-human intelligences (the devil or his minions), and this accounts for the evil we see in the world. I think this is untenable for a variety of reasons, preeminently because it implies that the world isn’t really God’s creation, since it developed from a primal state of affairs that was corrupted at a fundamental level. This view skates too close to gnosticism and is contrary to the balance of the biblical witness.

    7. Other Christians have gone to the opposite extreme and embraced a kind of nature mysticism. They view the natural world almost as ultimate reality itself, thinking that whatever happens in nature is right and embracing a kind of ethical Darwinism. The error here is to treat nature not just as God’s good creation, but as a finished product. Instead, we should see nature as “in process” and “groaning in travail,” destined for a redemption where suffering and evil will be banished and all God’s creatures will be given the opportunity to flourish. Nature by itself doesn’t provide the standard for morality, though the study of nature can provide us with knowledge about what’s good for us and for other creatures.

    In a sense, I think some very conservative Christians have sound instincts in rejecting evolution, since it does pose challenges to certain traditional formulations of the faith and requires a significant re-thinking of what is essential and what isn’t in Christian belief. But if rejection isn’t an option, as it’s not for me, it’s not enough to treat science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” as Stephen Jay Gould suggested. Religion makes truth claims, and Christianity in particular makes claims about God’s relation to and involvement with the world. Consequently, as our knowledge of the world changes, our understanding of how God relates to it may have to change too.

  • More on God and temporality

    In his Gifford Lectures, published as The Faith of a Physicist, John Polkinghorne considers the relation of God to time, calling it one of the “most puzzling, and most pressing, of general questions about God” (p. 59):

    It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot be subject to fluctuation if he is worthy of being called divine. Emphasis on this alone would lead us to a static picture of God, but could that be true if the nature of love is relatedness and that to which God relates, namely his creation, is itself subject to radical change? (p. 59)

    Polkinghorne considers the traditional response that all moments of time are eternally present to God and this explains how God can be related to each of them. This response, Polkinghorne says, is motivated by a belief that saying God is affected by time would imply change in God and would, under a particular understanding of divine perfection, jeopardize the divine excellence. However, Polkinghorne replies that we can coherently develop a “dynamic” idea of perfection “which resides, not in the absence of change, but in perfect appropriateness in relation to each successive moment. It is the perfection of music rather than the perfection of a statue” (p. 59).

    Another argument sometimes offered for taking an eternal, “static” view of God is that, only if creation is “eternally present” to God can God exercise providential care for creation:

    Only if in his eternity he knows simultaneously that tomorrow I shall pray for a particular outcome and that today my friend is making a decision relevant to that outcome, can he really be a God capable of responding to prayer in influencing that decision. […] Only a God who sees all that was, and is, and is to come, “at once,” is able to produce the best for his creation. (p. 60)

    Polkinghorne responds that this rests on a false picture both of God’s providential care and of time. First, he denies that God is the all-determining force that seems implied by some traditional views of God. Instead, he approvingly cites Arthur Peacocke’s phrase that God is an “Improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity” who is capable of responding to any contingent event that occurs. Second, Polkinghorne wonders if the “block universe” (as William James called it) is even a coherent understanding of time. It seems to presuppose a deterministic “Laplacian” view of time and causality, but this is neither the world humans experience nor, Polkinghorne contends, the view revealed by modern science.

    If temporality is genuine feature of the world, rather than just appearance, Polkinghorne suggests, God’s knowing temporal events “in eternity” would not be knowing them as they really are. This would imply a deficit in God’s knowledge, which would mean that God is not omniscient. The processes of reality are a real aspect of the created order, and knowing them truly means knowing them as processes. If God is unrelated to time, it seems, God’s knowledge of us and our world would be like our knowledge of historical figures, not the relatedness we have to existing flesh-and-blood people.

    Polkinghorne concludes: “I am pesuaded that in addition to God’s eternal nature we shall have to take seriously that he has a relation to time which makes him immanent within it, as well as eternally transcendent of it” (p. 61). This is similar to the position I tentatively endorsed in the last post. To me, the most compelling consideration is that, if God is truly related to the creation and to the creatures in it, there must be some aspect of God that is temporal, or involved in time.

    I realize there’s always a great deal of speculation any time you start talking about God’s nature, so I’m not claiming to have reached any definitive conclusion here. Here’s a post I wrote a while back discussing Keith Ward’s incorporation of certain “Hegelian” insights into his theology. Here’s an interesting lecture from Wolfhart Pannenberg. Here’s an article from philosopher William Lane Craig.

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008):

    Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power

    “Empire of dysfunction”

    Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice

    Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4

    Jay McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans

    “Creation and omnipotence: a process perspective”
    “More thoughts on omnipotence and creation”

    Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation

    Index of posts here.

    John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World

    Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

    Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation

    “Initial thoughts on Gutierrez’s Theology of Liberation”

    S.F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals

    “What kind of equality?”

    James Alison, On Being Liked

    “An end to sacrifices”

    John Gray, Straw Dogs

    “John Gray contra humanism”

    Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

    “Against the globalized food chain”
    “Pollan on the ethics of meat eating”
    “More on Pollan and vegetarianism”

  • Keith Ward at the National Cathedral

    It was a gorgeous fall day here in DC, and we decided to enjoy it and take an outing to the Washington National Cathedral this morning for their Sunday forum. The guest, as it happens, was British theologian/philosopher Keith Ward, whose work I admire and have written about frequently here at ATR.

    The format was a Q&A with the dean of the Cathedral about the relation between science and religion. Not much of it would have been new to anyone familiar with Ward’s books, especially Pascal’s Fire and his more recent one, The Big Questions in Science and Religion, but it was neat to see him discussing these issues in person. He came across as wise and engaging, but in a witty, self-effacing British way. Topics that were discussed included the so-called anthropic argument (the notion that the laws of nature are “fine-tuned” for the emergence of life), the relationship between religion and evolution, and the nature of the soul.

    We stayed for the 11:15 Mass, at which Ward also preached. He preached on the lectionary reading from First Thessalonians about the Parousia and how we might understand it, given that we have in many ways a radically different worldview from St. Paul’s. Paul, it seems, expected the literal end of the world within his generation, at least at the time that he wrote First Thessalonians, something which obviously didn’t come to pass. So, do we simply throw out Paul’s views about the Second Coming and the Parousia?

    Ward proposed that the deeper meaning of the passage is that each moment of our lives stands under the judgment of God, but because of Jesus’ work on the cross we are granted the possibility of forgiveness and unending life with–and in–God. In particular, Ward connected the image of Jesus coming on the clouds with the concept, important in the Old Testament, of the shekhinah, the cloud of the divine glory. Jesus, in his glorification, has been united to the divine life and through him we can be united to that life too.

    What this life with God will look like is open to speculation, but Ward suggested that it would be a “re-embodiment” of our selves in a dimension of existence suffused with the divine presence. In other words, we shouldn’t expect Jesus to physically return to earth, but that all sentient life will be transfigured and caught up into the divine life in a world beyond this one. (To my delight he was clear that he thought redemption would extend to sentient members of the animal kingdom.)

    I’ll admit that I don’t have well-formed or settled views about the Second Coming or the afterlife, but Ward’s position definitely appeals to me. He’s trying, it seems to me, to steer a course between an implausible biblical literalism on the one hand (e.g. the apocalypticism of Left Behind) and a reductionist liberalism that would reinterpret all talk of resurrection as symbolic of psychological or political change on the other. No doubt there’s a spectrum of positions one might take between those extremes, but is was definitely one of the more philosophically stimulating sermons I’ve heard in a while. (The rest of the service was pretty great too, with some gorgeous Anglican chant and hymns from the 1982 hymnal that I haven’t sung since we were in Boston.)

  • More thoughts on omnipotence and creation

    In the previous post I talked about Jay McDaniel’s proposal for a revised account of divine omnipotence and creation based on the suggestion of a primordial chaos that coexists with God, a chaos out of which God creates the world and which limits the divine ability to shape creation.

    I agree with McDaniel about the need to re-think some traditional notions of divine omnipotence, and that the Old Testament is ambiguous in affirming creation ex nihilo, but I’m not persuaded to go all the way with him. First, for Christians at least, the prologue to John’s Gospel and other New Testament passages do seem to affirm creation ex nihilo, and this should carry significant weight.

    Second, the idea of a primordial chaos co-existent with God throughout all time seems ill-justified. Is it more parsimonious to posit two uncreated realities than one? McDaniel suggests that there may have been a series of universes, contracting and expanding, as suggested by some astrophysicists, and that the chaos of energy events is the remnants of the previous cosmos, but why should there be any cosmos at all? This is the question at the base of the cosmological argument: why is there anything rather than nothing?

    Christians should only let themselves be pushed to such a drastically revisionist stance if there are no better alternatives available. And I think there are better ways of dealing with the problem of theodicy available. One is, instead of positing a primordial chaos that limits God’s ability to shape creation, to think in terms of the possibilities that exist in the divine mind. This sea of possibility, if you will, is not an actually existing “stuff” alongside God, but is comprised by the concepts of all the possible worlds that could self-consistently exist.

    To create, God can only choose to actualize a world that is, in fact, possible. And, as we saw in the discussion of Southgate’s book, there are reasons for thinking that complex life as we know it is only possible by means of a process that also involves suffering and frustration. So, what limits God is not the recalcitrance of some primordial stuff, but the very logical structure of reality, as expressed by the divine mind.

    Further, rather than restricting divine power to the ability to “lure” by presenting possibilities (a notion of dubious coherence when applied to inorganic matter), it might make more sense to see God as intentionally choosing to limit the divine power in order to allow creatures a certain autonomy. This “kenotic” understanding of divine power emphasizes that God wants and chooses to allow creatures to live and develop according to their own divinely-given natures. In restricting the divine power to that of persuasion, the process understanding doesn’t seem to do justice to the biblical and Christian picture of God, which is that of, among other things, a sovereign creator.

  • Creation and omnipotence: a process perspective

    As a follow-up of sorts to my reading of Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation, I picked up Jay McDaniel’s Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life, which Southgate refers to a number of times in his book.

    McDaniel is a process theologian who has also been influenced by feminist theology, as well as Zen Buddhism. His goal is to develop–as the subtitle suggests–a “biocentric” theology and ethic for what he calls a “postpatriarchal” Christianity.

    Like Southgate, one of the issues that concerns McDaniel is the problem of animal suffering. However, McDaniel goes further in revising the concept of God than Southgate would. Along with several other process theologians, McDaniel questions the traditional notion of creation ex nihilo (or creation out of nothing).

    Instead McDaniel suggests that, alongside God, there existed at the time of creation a “primordial chaos” out of which God forms patterns of order and complexity, ultimately giving rise to the world as we know it. The chaos has its own internal principle of energy and spontaneity, which also sets limits to what God can do in creating the world.

    …for [process theologians], God did not create the world out of nothing. Rather he–or, better, she–created the world out of a chaos of energy events present at the beginning of our cosmic epoch. […] At that stage the chaos was within her as part of her body, and while it was devoid of order and novelty, it was nevertheless possessive of its own ability to actualize possibilities, its own creativity. By availing the chaos of possibilities for order and novelty, god gave birth to the universe within herself, and the birth process continues. (p. 36)*

    Thus the world should be seen as at least partly independent of God and outside of strict divine control. Indeed, God’s power is conceived by McDaniel not as determining events unilaterally but as presenting possibilities that are creatively actualized (or not) by finite beings. Drawing on quantum theory he contends that, even at the subatomic level, “pulses of energy” may go in more than one possible direction and are not strictly predictable or determined. And as matter becomes more complex, and eventually gives rise to living beings, this principle of creativity and unpredictability becomes ever more pronounced.

    This explains, according to McDaniel, why the creation proceeds along paths that seem inimical to the will of an all-loving God. God can creatively respond to what happens in creation and try to “lure” it along more life-giving paths, but cannot strictly determine what happens. Hence creation tends toward ever more complex forms of life, but also contains a great deal of apparently pointless suffering.

    McDaniel argues that, even though it departs from tradition, his approach is justified because it takes God’s love, rather than power, as its starting point. While much traditional theology has understood God’s power as the ability to unilaterally determine events, many have had trouble reconciling this kind of power with the love that Christians attribute to God. If God is love, does it make sense to attribute a unilateral determining power to him, or do our notions of power need to be re-thought in light of the kind of self-giving love we see in Jesus?

    More thoughts on this in the next post…
    —————————————————————–
    *McDaniel writes, “I use the feminine pronoun purposefully, though I do not mean to imply that masculine language cannot also be helpful. Within contemporary Christian communities, different images can and should be used to indicate the all-loving God of Christian faith, female as well as male” (p. 36).

  • Groaning of Creation: Index of posts

    Thought it might be helpful to have links to all my posts on Christopher Southgate’s book on animal theodicy, The Groaning of Creation, in one place.

    1. Intro
    2. The only way?
    3. God so loved the world
    4. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
    5. Heaven can wait
    6. Priests of creation
    7. The (vegetarian) restaurant at the end of the universe
    8. The ethics of the Ark
    9. Concluding thoughts

  • The Groaning of Creation 9: Concluding thoughts

    As a wrap-up to this series, I thought I’d offer some concluding thoughts on Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation.

    Just to briefly review: the problem of animal theodicy as Southgate sees it is that the evolutionary process seems to grind so many sentient creatures under its wheels and to doom so many species to extinction (something like 98 percent of the species that have ever existed are extinct). Given what appears to be a vast and pointless waste of life, can we believe that this process is intended by a good creator?

    As we’ve seen, Southgate’s response has three main components:

  • The evolutionary process, or something very much like it, was the only way (or at least the best way) for God to bring a variety of finite selves into existence, given the constraints imposed by a law-like universe.
  • God is present to, and participates in, the suffering of every creature; this reaches its turning point in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus where God identifies by “deep incarnation” with all creaturely life and inaugurates an age of redeemed existence.
  • Those animals who were denied any chance at a flourishing life will, we can coherently hope, be given a chance for a redeemed and fulfilled existence in some kind of postmortem state, and extinct species will be represented as well.

    • The question is: has Southgate made his case? Has he justified God’s ways (with animals) to man?

    Southgate is appropriately modest about what he has shown and admits in several places that he’s speculating, so let me just offer some questions about things that might need to be pursued further. (Hey! Possible topics for future posts!)

  • Divine action: Southgate holds that God is deeply involved in the evolutionary process (see the post on his trinitarian theology of creation). But he doesn’t really specify the nature and extent of God’s involvement and how it relates to a scientific or purely naturalistic understanding of the process. If God can shape and guide the process, at least to some extent, then why can’t God reduce the amount of pointless suffering and frustration? Not to fault Southgate for not offering a complete theory of divine action, but the extent to which God can or does intervene in creation seems like an important question.
  • Possibility and omnipotence: Southgate commends the “only way” argument as a plausible assumption. That is, it’s reasonable to think that a loving God would only choose this means of creating life if there was no other way to do so with less suffering. But are there stronger reasons for thinking that it really is the only way? Answering this question would seem to require more developed thinking about what philosophers call “modality” (i.e. the nature of possibility and impossibility) as well as the nature of God’s omnipotence.
  • Redemption and eschatology: As I mentioned in my last post, Southgate has a strongly eschatological reading of history; he thinks that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated a new age in history in which creation is moving toward a reconciliation of all things in Christ. How does this sit with the fact that life on earth will eventually become extinct? Should we expect that God will miraculously intervene before that happens? Or will the forms of beauty and goodness we create now will be “taken up” into the divine life in some trans-historical fashion?
  • Animal selves and animal immortality: One of the biggest challenges for believers in animal immortality is that it’s unclear whether animals have the kinds of “selves” about which it makes sense to say that they can survive death. Even if we grant, as most modern theologians are wont to do, that human selves (or souls) have no natural immortality but are entirely dependent on God for their continued existence, the problem with animal selves/souls is a distinct problem. That’s because it’s uncertain whether many animals have a unified self connecting their experiences and therefore whether there’s any “self” that even could persist beyond the death of the body. Does this threaten to undercut animal immortality as a strategy for theodicy?

    • Overall, I think Southgate’s study points in the right direction for thinking about animal theodicy; this is more a matter of filling out the details in a convincing way. This general perspective allows us to see the evolutionary process as the creative intention of a good God and as in need of redemption.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 8: The ethics of the Ark

    Throughout this series we’ve seen two intertwining themes. First, death and suffering are necessary parts of the process–perhaps the only possible process–by which finite selves are brought into existence. Second, however, this process involves the (seemingly) permanent thwarting of many of those selves as well as the disappearance of entire ways of being (species). And humanity, in partnership with God’s redemptive purposes, has an obligation where possible to alleviate these side-effects of the evolutionary process.

    In the last post we saw how Southgate applies this insight to our practices of raising animals for food. Any system–like our current factory farming system–that permanently frustrates the abilities of billions of sentient creatures to live lives according to their kind perpetuates (and indeed exacerbates to a tremendous degree) the natural ills of creaturely frustration and suffering. As participants in God’s healing of creation, we should work to reform or abolish such systems.

    Next Southgate turns to the ethics of extinction, considering what role human beings have in preventing the disappearance of entire species. Most non controversially he contends that we are obliged to prevent the extinction of species threatened by human activity (anthropogenic extinction). But he goes beyond this with a confessedly “bold” proposal: “a sign of our liberty as children of God starting to set free the whole creation would be that human beings, through a blend of prudential wisdom and scientific ingenuity, cut the rate of natural extinction” (pp. 124-5, emphasis in the original).

    This intriguing suggestion is based on a heavily eschatological reading of natural history:

    […] the Resurrection of Christ inaugurates a new era of redemption, in which all creation is to be renewed. Extending this thought, I hold that the phase of evolution in which new possibilities are explored via competition and extinction is coming to an end, and it is to be superseded by the final phase in which new possibilities of reconciliation and self-transcendence among already existing species will be explored. The hymn in Colossians 1 stresses that this transformation is first and foremost the work of Christ. However, the enigmatic passage from Romans 8 that has informed this study implies that human beings have a key role in this phase; the labor pains of creation await our coming to live in freedom. And a sign of that freedom would be that we seek to prevent any species presently companioned by the Spirit from disappearing from the network of possibilities within creation. (p. 127)

    In practice this requires an extremely ambitious project of conserving what E.O. Wilson calls the “hotspots” of biodiversity and the “frontier zones” of existing wilderness; a vast transfer of resources from rich nations to poor ones, enabling the latter to preserve the biodiversity where they live while escaping grinding poverty; and a determined scientific investigation to catalogue existing species in order to understand how best to preserve them.

    My biggest worry here has to do with Southgate’s apparent optimism about what large-scale human management of the natural world can accomplish. Preserving species threatened by anthropogenic extinction makes perfect sense to me, as does preserving existing wilderness areas to the greatest extent possible. But can we rely on the comprehensiveness of our understanding and the purity of our intentions to micro-manage competition between species in the wild?

    This may stem from a difference in theological opinion: I’m less confident than Southgate seems that we can unambiguously enact the possibilities for transformed ways of living made available by the death and resurrection of Jesus. We remain, in other words, simul justus et peccator, and I think our persistent fallibility and self-serving tendencies need to be taken into account when considering such ambitious schemes. That said, it’s clear we have a mandate to reduce our impact on the natural world to make room for the species that we threaten to crowd out. It may be that we can do far more good this way than by trying to bring to an end a fundamental process of natural selection.

    I’ve probably got one, maybe two, more posts before I wrap up this series.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 7: The (vegetarian) restaurant at the end of the universe

    We saw in the previous post that Southgate thinks humans should play an active role in “healing” the creation by ameliorating some of the negative effects of the evolutionary process. And we’ve also seen that chief among those effects, in his view, are the problem of animal suffering and the problem of extinction.

    Turning to matters of practice, he discusses our relationship with the animals we raise for food and the question of what our response should be to the extinction of species. In this post I’ll discuss the first issue, leaving the discussion of extinction for the next one.

    With respect to food animals, Southgate considers Andrew Linzey’s proposal for what Southgate calls “eschatological vegetarianism.” In Linzey’s view, animals have God-given rights (he calls them “theos-rights”) to live lives according to their kind. Further, he argues that vegetarianism is a way of living in anticipation of God’s peaceable kingdom where there will be no more killing or exploitation between species.

    Southgate reads Linzey as saying that predation is inherently evil and due to the fall of creation, but I’m not sure this is entirely fair. Linzey does flirt with the idea of the cosmic fall, but he allows that the story of the fall may be an imaginative picture that gives us hints of what a redeemed creation will look like, but does not necessarily depict an actual historical state of affairs. (See, for example, the discussion in chapter 3 of his Animal Gospel where he talks in terms of an “unfinished” creation; Linzey seems rather close to Southgate’s own position here.)

    That said, Soutgate agrees with Linzey that the biblical vision of a redeemed creation also condemns many of our current practices toward animals, in farming, science, and industry:

    […] the great proportion of current killing of animals is not reverent but casual, the final act in a relationship with confined animals who know no freedom to be themselves, or healthy relationships either with each other or their human owners. And “owners” is the key word here, because much of this problem stems from the reduction of animal nature to a mere commodity, which in its rearing and killing alike must be processed as cheaply as possible into products. (p. 118)

    However, Southgate thinks that some forms of farming–of the pastoral, free-range variety–can create a flourishing life for animals and genuine community between animals and humans. If we were to stop breeding these animals for food, he contends, this valuable form of community would disappear. He’s therefore unwilling to categorically deny that killing of animals for food can sometimes be done reverently.

    Nevertheless, he recognizes that vegetarianism might still be a sign of kenosis, a self-limiting for the sake of the other. In particular, he says, Christians might feel called to abstain from meat that has been “sacrificed” to the idols of mechanized efficiency and profit that our factory farming system serves, and to avoid animal flesh that wasn’t humanely raised and slaughtered (which would be nearly all of it).

    Southgate’s and Linzey’s positions actually seem rather close here. Both oppose the practices of factory farming and would see free-range alternatives as vastly superior. Moreover, Linzey acknowledges that there are people living today who have to eat meat to survive. Where they may differ is in evaluating the goods of pastoral farming–the form of community it makes possible–and whether that good justifies rearing animals for slaughter when doing so isn’t required for human survival and flourishing. It’s also far from clear whether a large-scale shift to humane animal husbandry could meet current (and future) demand, especially in the context of the current environmental situation, in which case vegetarianism might be embraced by some as a special vocation, even if not a duty.

    Index of posts in this series is here.