Think About It

I’m no expert on food production, but I don’t think anyone needs to be to realize the rationality behind vegetarianism. This is a very complex issue, so I don’t mean to suggest that we’ve reached some sort of simple final conclusion. I will continue to reevaluate the issue. Here are a few basic facts that led me to my decision.

• In America, the animals we eat are fed with non-meat food (soy, corn and grain) that we could eat.
• For obvious reasons there are serious inefficiencies with meat compared to non-meat foods. This means that feeding humans with meat requires more of this soy, corn and grain than if humans were fed without meat.
• Therefore eating non-meat foods has a lower impact on global food prices than meat.
• The negative environmental impact of eating non-meat food (deforestation, transportation, water usage and pollution, and more) is a fraction of the environmental impact of eating meat.
• Additionally, producing meat introduces negative environmental effects such as methane and nitrous oxide production that are sperate from the effects of non-meat food used to raise animals .
• The only large-scale technique (factory farming) that reduces (but does not nearly eliminate) these inefficiencies introduces many serious problems for the animals themselves, the human workers, and humans as a whole.
• Much meat production is extremely disrespectful of animal life.

If these are accepted then the case is laid out for eliminating or at least reducing the typical consumption of meat (and even animal products such as dairy and eggs by the way).

I want to point out that I’m very surprised that institutions such as the Catholic Church have failed to publicly analyze meat-based diets more often. If it is correct that reducing meat consumption would make feeding the poor easier and reduce human environmental impact, then why aren’t well-meaning organizations jumping all over this?

To me it’s a win-win-win-win-win-lose. The only thing I have to lose is the satisfaction of my meat-tooth, but what I gain is a lifestyle that is easier on my conscience in nearly countless ways. I’ve been a vegetarian for nearly a year now, I haven’t gotten sick any more frequently, I’ve ran two mini-marathons, and even managed to put on about 10 lbs (as much as I’ve done in any year of my life so far). I’m not doing so bad.

Vegetarianism is often seen as judgmental. I’ve definitely had more than one person give me a ‘So what exactly are you saying is so wrong with the way I eat?’ look when they found out that I’m a vegetarian. I’m not telling anyone what to do, and I realize that there are many gray areas such as hunting, or resource-intensive non-meat foods, or animals who are raised by grazing on land that cannot be used for any other purpose. Basically, I’m asking you to think about it.

Not Even Wrong

Before I start, we must deal with the idea that atheism intends to 'disprove' the God hypothesis. To be clear, I have not set out in any way to disprove God. No reputable atheist has. However, this does not mean that we cannot look at the God hypothesis in terms of probability, even if such a hypothesis fails to make predictions. The culture of science has a term for unfalsifiable claims: not even wrong. These strong words are applied to any God hypothesis.

And then we must deal with the popular notion that the God hypothesis is out of the reach of science or reason or logic. Any definition of God demonstrates a claim to an at least partial understanding of God. It is a contradiction in terms to suggest that ‘God is indefinable or beyond human reason’, not to mention very nearly credo quia absurdum: ‘I believe because it is absurd.’

Furthermore, there has been an all but absolute tendency in the history of man's belief in gods to attach moral commandments to belief. It may be less clear, but believing in anything beyond the Deist god-metaphor has implications. If belief in God didn't encourage many of my fellow citizens to regulate marriage by His standards, or justify (to the jihadists) the destruction of 3,000 innocent human lives not to mention two large buildings, or cause any number of countless, sometimes imperceptible but always present interruptions in my life and, more importantly, the lives of nearly every child, then perhaps I would let this go. There is no doubt that belief in God has caused men to do both good and bad and, whatever our views on that balance are, I don't think it needs to be pointed out that all of these causations result from a claim to, at least partially, understand God and His divine Will. Any view that ‘Trying to explain God in human terms is a mistake and a fallacy in itself.’ flies in the face of every preacher, every theologian, and every churchgoer that I have ever heard of from any religion. Nobody ever said ‘Well, we'll never really understand God in human terms, but you should stay abstinent until He blesses your marriage.’ Basically, what I mean to say is that as some person can claim a definition of God, I am just as able to make a claim about the nature of that definition. There are no ‘off-limits’ arguments for God.

Now, the most tired examples of God’s conflict with science are the Big Bang, Evolution, and Natural Selection theories. I will offer my best inadequate simplification of each. The fact that the universe originated with the Big Bang means that unless we define God metaphorically, something I am no longer inclined to doing, He most certainly was not present at the birth of the universe. The fact that life today has been developed from some very simple origin by evolution means that we must do some very damaging contortions of logic to make room for God at the beginning of life on Earth. The fact that evolution operates by natural selection means that, even if you don't see the second point, God is most certainly not ‘designing’ anything, no matter how intelligent He appears to be.

The Big Bang Theory describes the origin of everything we know in our universe (and presumably everything we don’t as well) from an "extremely dense, hot state" at a finite time. A note on astrophysics: relative terms such as 'extremely' should never be taken lightly. The theory was based first on explanation (Einstein's General Relativity was used by Alexander Friedman to offer an alternative to Einstein's Static view of things) and then observation (for example of red shift from Edwin Hubble-who incidentally taught Spanish, Physics, and Mathematics at New Albany High School). Finally, the theory’s extravagant predictions would turn out to be right on with our best estimations of the universe. The theory does not (cannot, will not) explain the origin of the starting point, but for this argument we don't need to know about that. At the beginning, all of the energy that would over the next 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years come together to form yourself, my dear reader, did exist, but neither you nor I can be said to have existed at the birth of everything. And so God cannot have. We do not need to understand the Big Bang thoroughly (though, I do encourage it, and will be working toward it for some time) to be able to note that no Creator could have been about smashing antiqarks with quarks during the first 10^-11 second of time. There is a lot that remains to be explained about the origins of our universe, but suggesting that something omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and most of all unfalsifiable--in short purely, supernaturally perfect--is responsible for these gaps in our understanding will almost certainly lead to further heliocentric-type embarrassments as these gaps are filled.

Each life form deviates very finely but very routinely from the recipe of that life form's parents and not instead from a perfect or standard model (as Aristotle suggested and as most believed before the Theory of Evolution). Something has non-randomly chosen which of the many random deviations live on. If we follow the regression (x is the child of y is the child of…) through Earth’s long history we observe a weak trend in complexity. Few species—not individuals—become less complex, some stay the same, and some still find a way to become more complex. Based on this, looking back we see a very long, crooked arrow pointing toward some origination. Like the Big Bang, the explanation behind the starting point is an interesting topic that we can reserve for another argument. The important thing is the trend from a very simple starting point. This trend is Natural Selection’s fault, but for argument’s sake lets consider the other possibility: ‘Intelligent Design’. The problem with ‘Intelligent Design’ is that it proposes the height of complexity—to poke at the God that was perpetually presented to me in the Apostle’s Creed, a God who not only created all, but also begets humanish progeny, causes parthenogenesis in humans, raises life from the dead, forgives and presumably hears our sins, judges based on whatever standards, and finally admits us to either eternal ecstasy or torment—to have been present before anything evolved. Yes, this is simply a discontinuity in the 'complexity of life versus time' graph, but it also leaves behind more, bigger questions than it takes care of. Without Intelligent Design, the process by which life has come about on Earth has clearly and satisfactorily been explained and this elegant explanation has been tested and supported. With Intelligent Design, not only do we lose the vast explanatory and, more importantly, predictive power of Natural Selection, but we are also back to the start. With ‘Intelligent Design’ we might have explained away the development of life on Earth, but now we must answer the questions of ‘Who is this God, and where did he come from?’ before we can predict anything. The great Friar Ockham would not approve.

Natural Selection is what has determined the changing frequency of old and newly mutated genes throughout the history of life on Earth, and thereby designed the multitudes of life of Earth. What do we mean by Natural Selection designing things? Well, the deviations within a species that I mentioned earlier can contain beneficial or detrimental changes as well as entirely neutral changes. How well a particular animal’s phenotype deals with the many factors it encounters throughout its life is what determines the probability that the corresponding gene will be passed on, and therefore eventually determines the frequencies of every gene in a species’ gene pool. This means that any serious changes must take place over thousands of tedious, generally imperceptible steps. That is why our eyes are upside-down and backwards, and why the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes the scenic route to the neck (look at a Giraffe’s). Unless an 'Intelligent Designer '(or the devil himself) were somehow attempting to fool us by making everything appear as if Natural Selection were the designer, this is our only explanation.

Sure, anybody could say ‘God is beyond our physical quantification and existed beyond matter or life at the beginning of time of the universe or life on earth,’ or ‘God does not personally chose which genes thrive and which are discarded, but the system that he created, the environment in which everything lives, does and so God designs everything most indirectly.’ And, yes, this would be strictly possible. However, the human ability to conceive of possible explanations for anything does not make those explanations any more probable. In fact, what we do know of the universe and life around us makes God much more improbable. What makes anyone think that God is reading my mind? What has led anyone to believe that God is not only supernatural, but so perfectly supernatural to have been able to exist for all time and defy logic in many varied ways? Even more important, what makes anyone (there are a lot of them) think that God is in any way interested in human affairs? As if a perfect creator could do no better. I trust I do not need to reiterate the ‘burden of proof’ argument, or any of its cute, farcical examples. I can spend the rest of my days chipping away at every single varied definition of God, demonstrating that each is either (and every single one falls into one of these three categories) impossible, grossly improbable, or a superfluous metaphor for something we already know or are working hard to understand. But I don’t need to. The Gods that are offered, when strictly within the realm of possibility, all have one thing in common: they are not even wrong.

Atheism Is Not Radical

‘Atheism is not radical as you may believe,’ atheists have long been preaching. It is surprising to find this echoed, though not explicitly, by R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Dr. Mohler is president of the Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and “is considered a leader among American Evangelicals by Time and Christianity Today magazines.” His recent book Atheism Remix: A Christian Confronts the New Atheists is a quick survey of the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others, and the responses to them. As an atheist, I was impressed by how accurately the views of each of these New Atheists were reproduced. Dr. Mohler made no attempt to cheapen the discussion with oversimplification or pettiness.

His talk at the University of Louisville’s Red Barn digressed very little from the contents of Atheist Remix. The arguments of the New Atheists were accurately if incompletely (it was a 30 minute discussion) represented. Dr. Mohler represented a deep understanding of the topics that I have not generally seen in theologians. I must confess, that his description of the selfish gene theory was accurate enough to send chills down my spine (the same chills I am getting right now, thinking about how writing this, somehow, is inextricably the result of my very selfish genes).

For myself, and anyone familiar to the debate, though, much of Dr. Mohler’s book was boring with the exception of the novelty of a fair tone. Unlike most jewelry, the gems are the last things you might see in Atheist Remix, but they are there. In both the talk and the discussion, Dr. Mohler waited until he had completely introduced the context before revealing his take on the debate. The unscrupulous probably missed it entirely. There is one issue, and one issue only on which Dr. Mohler disagrees with the New Atheists.

‘If I did not believe the Bible was the word of God, then I would be writing right alongside the New Atheists.” Perhaps the only difference between Dr. Mohler and Richard Dawkins is that the former understands the bible as truth. Okay, that’s still a big difference, right?

Well, not so fast. There are two very important points on which Dr. Mohler and his opponents agree passionately. First, that this issue is worth the scale of the debate they wish to, and are, escalating it toward. And second that there should be much, much less fence-sitting. In the debate among Christians, as Dr. Mohler suggests in the final lines of Atheist Remix:

“The New Atheists are right about one thing—It’s atheism or biblical theism. There is nothing in between.”

Dr. Mohler suggests that liberal Christianity (Christians who don’t believe the bible is the Word of God but instead is up to interpretation; or those who don’t believe in a personal God, a supernatural God—as Dawkins singled out) is sometimes not very different from Atheism.

Whether you know it or not, if you worship a God who “set up the laws and constraints of the universe, fine-tuned them with exquisite precision and foreknowledge, detonated what we would now call the hot big bang, retired and was never seen again,” as I did for years before stepping into atheism, you are worshiping a Deist God as Richard Dawkins very accurately described. Belief in a God who doesn’t answer prayers, or judge, or make use of divine revelation, or place his only begotten son on earth, in human form, to die, literally, is effectively irrelevant. A God who is not supernatural is not God. According to Dr. Mohler: “The only God that matters is a supernatural God—a personal God—who will judge.”

This surely does not mean that Dr. Mohler considers liberal Christians to be atheists. I doubt many of the New Atheists do either. But the point is that in the big picture the many believers who, like myself a couple years ago, have stripped away from God his most extreme and troublesome characteristics are not that far off atheism. According to my best interpretation of Dr. Mohler, liberal Christians are fence-sitting just the same as labeled ‘agnostics’ and even some, as he clearly states, are effectively atheists.

My suspicion is that these ‘fence-sitters’ are a very large chunk of even the church-going Christians. I don’t mean to say that these folks are, will be, or even should be atheists. But it seems like even Dr. Mohler is placing them significantly closer to atheism than the ‘fence-sitters’ would realize. To the New Atheists and Dr. Mohler they are up for grabs; if this were an election they would be independents.

If this group could be convinced that the real debate is, as Dr. Mohler and the New Atheists believe, really a debate between Biblical Theism and Atheism, then is Atheism so radical?