Arguing the Affirmative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Arguing the Negative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
John’s Opening Statement
As I said before, a religion should be judged based on how it treats the defenseless. The animal kingdom is largely defenseless against the ultimate predators: humans.
While there are a few positive things said about animals in the Bible, over all it is uncaring and oblivious toward the pain and suffering we know that sentient animals experience. These texts need to be explained, not explained away.
After creating the world, God declared it all “good.” Good for whom? Good for what purpose? To humans alone was given the right to “subdue” and have “dominion” over every living thing (Gen. 1:28 RSV). When we look at these Hebrew words, subdue literally means “to trample upon” (see Esther 7:8; Jer. 34:11; Zech. 9:15). The word dominion means to “master” over someone, especially when he or she refuses to be subdued (the same Hebrew word is used to describe ruling over slaves in 1 Kings 9:23 and Isa. 14:2). Together they confer upon mankind a dictatorial and domineering rule over a brutal world as God’s viceroys, imitating a God who could be very cruel when his creatures did not submit to his rule by obeying his every command. This text in Genesis set the standard for the treatment of animals.
When God’s judgment comes down on people, animals suffer along with them for their sins, as in Noah’s flood, the ten Egyptian plagues, wars, and droughts.
Animal sacrifices were a completely unnecessary waste of animal life (see 2 Chron. 7:5). They did nothing to atone for anyone’s sins (see Heb. 10:1–18). Their throats were slit and the blood was drained on the altar where they were subsequently skinned and quartered before being burned.
Conspicuously lacking in the Old Testament prophets are any prophetic denunciations of animal cruelty. In the New Testament the treatment of animals is actually worse. Jesus was not a vegetarian. He neglected animals when describing the two greatest commandments. Jesus commissioned his disciples to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19; see vv. 16–20). No expressed concern for animals here! According to Jesus, at the judgment day nothing is said about being judged for not caring for animals (Matt. 25:31–46). And nothing is said in the final chapter of the book of Revelation that animals will be in the new heavenly Jerusalem either.
There was also a major shift in the eating habits of Christians in the New Testament. Unlike in the Old Testament, all animals were now considered fair game for hunting, herding, raising, and eating (Mark 7:19; Acts 10:9–16). In 1 Corinthians 9:9–10 the apostle Paul said God is not concerned with oxen. If so, he is not concerned with any other animal either.
The only positive thing in the New Testament is that with Jesus’s death Christians eventually no longer sacrificed animals. But this was not something they decided out of care for animals.
My claim is that we do not see much of a concern for animals in the Bible. It truly is anthropocentric to the core. And as such, it’s not indicative at all of what a perfectly good God would reveal to us. If God was truly concerned for the welfare of animals, he would have consistently said, “Thou shalt not mistreat or abuse animals.” Then Western Christianized people could not justify the ill treatment of them down through the centuries.
God simply should not have created predation in the natural world; he should have made us all vegetarians or vegans. The amount of creaturely suffering in this world is atrocious as animals prey on one another to feed themselves, including humans feeding on animals.
There can be little doubt any longer that animals have central nervous systems as do humans and therefore feel pain in much the same way as we do. Andrew Linzey summarizes the evidence in these words:
Animals and humans show a common ancestor, display similar behavior, and have physiological similarities. Because of these triple conditions, these shared characteristics, it is perfectly logical to believe that animals experience many of the same emotions as humans. . . . In fact, the onus should properly be on those people who try to deny that animals have such emotions. They must explain how, in one species, nerves act in one way and how they act completely differently in another.[45]
Arguing against animal experimentation and exploitation, Linzey writes, “Animals can never merit suffering; proper recognition of this consideration makes any infliction of suffering upon them problematic.”[46] Indeed! Again, “Animals can never merit suffering.” Period. It does not make a whit of difference whether human beings or God inflict this suffering upon them. There is no moral justification for it. None.[47]
Randal’s Opening Statement
In his book River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins describes how the digger wasp lays its eggs inside a host, thereby turning its victim into a macabre incubator in which the eggs will eventually hatch and eat their way out of their quivering host. Dawkins observes, “This sounds savagely cruel but . . . nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent.”[48] He’s right—to an extent. You see if there is no creator, then this is simply the way things are. Nature is not cruel. It is merely pitilessly indifferent to the suffering of its creatures, and the sooner we stoically come to terms with that fact the better. Consequently, the extent to which we feel pity or compassion for the creatures who suffer in this world is the extent to which we have failed to embrace the dizzyingly callous implications of an atheistic view of the world.
But of course we do care. And moreover we should care. We recognize intuitively that this is not the way things ought to be. We recognize that the suffering of creatures is of moral significance, and we chafe against the present order in which animals are subjected to untold miseries. However things got to be this way (the traditional realm of doctrines of the fall), we know they are not to remain this way. Unfortunately, atheism offers a barren wasteland for those intuitions. On an atheistic view there is simply no sense in protesting that this is not the way things ought to be. To cultivate genuine compassion for the suffering of animals within a consistently atheistic worldview is akin to cultivating rain-forest orchids in the driest desert. It can’t be done.
The only way to ground the care and compassion we feel for creatures and their suffering objectively (as opposed to a mere subjective sentiment) is to point to a providential Creator. Within a Christian framework that means recognizing that creaturely suffering is part of a greater redemptive story that encompasses those very creatures. And that is precisely the perspective of the writers of Scripture. A number of biblical passages describe God’s intentions to heal a broken world. One of the most striking is Romans 8:21, where Paul writes that “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” So what does this notion of creation being liberated from bondage mean? In the next two verses Paul explains the hope of creation’s liberation in analogous terms to the Christian’s hope in the resurrection of the body:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom. 8:22–23)
Just as we humans long for our incorruptible resurrection body when we shall be liberated from the effects of sin, so creation also longs to be liberated from the bondage of suffering, predation, death, and carnivory at that time when it takes on its own perfected, incorruptible form.
This is a good word not simply for creation on the whole but for the individual suffering creatures that populate it. In other words, as surely as we can hope for a resurrected creation (Isa. 65:17; 2 Pet. 3:13), so we can hope for resurrected creatures within that creation.[49] This amazing vision was immortalized in Isaiah’s unforgettable description of the messianic age:
The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
Infants will play near the hole of the cobra’s den;
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. (Isa. 11:6–8)
So ultimately we have two rather stark choices before us. On the one hand, we can agree with the dreary view of Richard Dawkins that the suffering of animals is without moral significance. In this view such suffering is simply an inconsequential byproduct as sentient creatures are ground up in the clanking gears of a blind and meaningless process while nature cycles on endlessly toward its eventual oblivion. On the other hand, we could accept that the suffering of creation, however egregious, is part of the greater story of redemptive history—a story that brings hope, a story that invites us to work together for the liberation of all creatures as we anticipate the day when the world is at last healed and all creation sings.
John’s Rebuttal
The problem of animal suffering is this: If God is all powerful and perfectly benevolent, then why is there so much massive and ubiquitous suffering in the animal world? It’s an internal problem for Randal’s own religious beliefs. Yet he uses the all too familiar you too informal fallacy to skirt answering it, hoping instead for the future, even though animals have been suffering for millions of years. Is that the best God can offer them?
There is little we can do to stop a cat from toying with and then killing mice. That’s just what predators like cats do. As Dawkins says, nature is indifferent toward suffering. But we are human beings, and as such we do care for animals. We care for our ecosystem. We’ve evolved to care for such things, and we should, especially since the future of our kith and kin on planet earth is at stake. We recoil in horror when we hear of extreme abuse of dogs or cats precisely because we are humane beings. Morality evolves, and it finally caught up to judge what we see in God’s Bible as barbaric. It’s been long overdue.
Randal’s Rebuttal
John avers that the Hebrew words for subdue (kabash) and master (radah) in the Genesis 1:28 creation mandate “confer upon mankind a dictatorial and domineering rule over a brutal world.” Alas, this is a classic case of getting out of a text what you want to find. In other words, John reads into these words the very worst of human sovereigns rather than the best. But the text suggests otherwise, for our ruling of creation is meant to replenish (male’) the earth, not oppress it. And this can only occur when the sovereign’s rule is one of nurturing care rather than callous indifference.
John’s charge reeks of the irony of somebody who has not yet come to terms with his own worldview. After all, what mandate does he think a purposeless struggle for survival confers upon human beings? If any worldview lacks any objective ground for compassion to other sentient beings, it is atheism. To be blunt, if nature really is “pitilessly indifferent,” then why shouldn’t we be as well?
John’s Closing Statement
Randal’s God created a horrific and unnecessary predatory relationship among his creatures, and he authorized the oppression of animals. Randal needs to explain why he cares when his God clearly doesn’t. Just look into the eyes of your dog or cat and tell me we need a God to care. We care because all sentient animals are an intimate part of the structure of our lives.
Randal’s Closing Statement
John claims that I commit the you too fallacy. This is confused. I don’t think John has to explain why God allows animal suffering. But he does have to explain why we should care about it. John’s only answer is that “we are human beings, and as such we do care for animals” (emphasis added). But this is merely a psychological description. John can’t explain why we ought to care. By contrast, a Christian theist objectively grounds those compassions in a compassionate God who is working to restore his broken world.