The Divine Conspiracy Blog

The link isn’t working on an excellent post at The Corner by Wesley J. Smith entitled Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights, so I will post the whole thing below.

Eating meat is a natural human activity — that is, we are biologically omnivorous. In my view, this makes it entirely moral for human beings to eat meat. How that meat is obtained is important. Human exceptionalism — a concept denied in animal-rights ideology — holds that we have a duty to treat animals humanely. Arguments can certainly be made that factory farms are not humane, although they do provide important human benefits of inexpensive and nutritious food. Many opponents of factory farms don’t have to worry about food prices when feeding their families. Still, there is “humane meat,” advocated by Matthew Scully in Dominion, which is more expensive but is raised on Old McDonald–type farms with humane methods of slaughter.

I consider vegetarianism for moral reasons akin to a vow of chastity by monastics: It eschews a normal human activity for higher moral purposes. That is to be admired. But no monastic would or should say that his vow of chastity makes him morally superior to married married people who have sex. Similarly, vegetarians’ decision to refrain from eating meat does not make them morally superior to people who do eat meat.

In Dominion, Scully does indeed come at his advocacy from an animal-welfare (as opposed to an animal-rights) perspective. But he is barely on the right side of the line because he is indifferent to the human good derived from animal industries and animal use.

He also claims that the ideology doesn’t matter in this debate. That is absolutely wrong. Animal-welfare philosophy supports human exceptionalism; animal-rights philosophy disdains that approach and rejects human exceptionalism as “speciesist.” There is a huge difference between the two. Whether we believe human beings have a unique moral status in the world has tremendous implications for human rights and human flourishing. Indeed, it could be the most important ethical and moral issue of the 21st century.

Elizabeth Gates, the daughter of Henry Louis Gates, describes what she saw at the beer summit.

Twice she mentions the following:

There are more black men in prison than in college and literally thousands of black men are arrested across this country each day.

and:

As my father said on the plane yesterday morning on our way to the White House, “there are approximately 800,000 black men in prison and on July 16, 2009, I simply became one of them.”

As noted in an earlier post it’s not accurate to simply state the figures as to the number of black men in prison and leave it at that. The more important question is why is that the case? Again, you can read Heather Mac Donald for the all-important facts.

The New Yorker wonders if we should hate Judas Iscariot.

Here I linked the Sam Harris op-ed opposing the appointment of Francis Collins on heading the National Institutes of Health. Eric Reitan, a philosophy professor at Oklahoma State University, and author of the book Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers, offers his own reply to Harris.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, atheist writer Sam Harris challenges President Obama’s pick for the next National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins.

His reasons for doing so reveal something important about the “new” atheism, of which Harris is a leading figure. Unlike the atheist academics I knew as I pursued my degrees in philosophy, atheists who were characterized at worst by a kind of quiet intellectual disdain for religion, the new atheists are driven by something more ideological. They see the world as divided between the children of light (the atheists) and the children of darkness (the religious). They do not see any ambiguity about the fundamental nature of reality; they are certain that they have the truth; and, finally they insist those who are still benighted enough to fail to see this truth ought to be marginalized —they should certainly not be allowed to hold positions of power.

In short, the new atheism looks a lot like the kind of religion that progressives such as myself find so disturbing: religion that’s characterized by the cry of heresy, the marginalization of those who disagree with “us,” the sharp in-group/out-group dichotomies based on differences in fundamental worldviews, and the view that “salvation” depends upon the right beliefs.

If, like me, you think that this sort of ideological division based on fundamental worldviews is one of the forces that makes human conflicts intractable and drives cycles of hostility and violence, then Harris shows us that this sort of dangerous ideological thinking is not the sole purview of religion.

And here is an interview with Reitan. I especially like his answer to the first question; What inspired you to write Is God a Delusion? What sparked your interest?

Back in January of 2007, a colleague gave me a photocopied page from a book and asked me to evaluate it as if it were a student paper. The page contained a summary and cursory criticism of the first three of Aquinas’ “Five Ways” (arguments for proving the existence of a transcendent being). As I looked it over, I noticed that the author got Aquinas’ arguments wrong… and then criticized them at precisely those points where he got them wrong.

As it turned out, the page was taken from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. And so I bought the book, and as I was reading it I thought that one could write an entire introduction to the philosophy of religion just by correcting all of Dawkins’ philosophical mistakes.

Christianity Today makes the case for early marriage.

An excellent editorial from The Detroit News on the hypocrisy of the “green gods.”

A colleague sent me an Internet photo of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s home in Bethesda, Md. It’s hysterical. The global warming warrior who urged the nation’s young people to march on Washington for the right to pay a carbon tax doesn’t live in a house. He lives on a campus.

The 11,000-square-foot sprawling complex sits on 7.5 acres and replaced a perfectly fine, smaller home that was torn down to make room for his palace. No need for the kids to march on the Mall. The writer could fit them all into his swimming pool.

And yet Friedman is not the biggest global warming hypocrite. That would be Al Gore. The former vice president began the greenwashing of America, urging its citizens to find harmony with the Earth by living smaller, less ostentatious existences. He meant you, not him. Gore’s 9,000-square-foot, $2 million mansion in Nashville is slightly smaller than Friedman’s. But he makes up for it with a 100-foot houseboat.

Tom Gilson reviews Bradley Monton’s new book Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design.

This looks like fun.

Two days ago I posted a link to the NYT op-ed by atheist Sam Harris opposing the appointment of Francis Collins to the position of director to the National Institutes of Health. Yesterday the Times printed letters in response to the Harris article. I especially like this one by Kenneth Miller, professor of biology at Brown University.

Sam Harris’s article attacking Dr. Francis S. Collins, President Obama’s nominee to be the director of the National Institutes of Health, demonstrates nothing so much as Mr. Harris’s own deeply held prejudices against religion.

Dr. Collins’s sin, despite credentials Mr. Harris calls “impeccable,” is that he is a Christian. Mr. Harris is not alone in holding this view. A leading science blogger, also attacking Dr. Collins, demonstrated his own commitment to reasoned dialogue by calling the scientist a “clown” and a “flaming idjit.” When reason has such defenders, Heaven help us.

The disconnect from reality in such attacks is striking. Dr. Collins’s visionary work on cystic fibrosis set the stage for the Human Genome Project, which he then led to a magnificent conclusion — not just ahead of time and under budget, but as a model for cutting-edge collaborative research.

The suspicion that Dr. Collins’s faith would lead him to suppress research is sharply contradicted by his administration of the genome project and the profound scientific curiosity that has marked his entire career.

Francis Collins is a remarkable scientist and a visionary administrator.

He is exactly the right person to head the N.I.H.

More letters here.

Books & Culture calls a new book, The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, “a splendid collection of essays,” and approaches “the religion-science debate in a fresh, even startling way.”

Rather than considering how religion in general may have nurtured or hampered the rise of science, this book examines the role of biblical exegesis in the formation of the early scientific method. Featuring twelve essays by a variety of American, English, German, and Swedish thinkers—two teach at Catholic universities, the other ten at secular institutions—The Word and the World is organized around the provocative thesis that the new science and biblical interpretation, “far from being implacable enemies . . . seem to have been inextricably intertwined.” The opening essay is by Peter Harrison, whose seminal 1999 book The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science argued that “the Protestant call for a return to literal interpretation provided the intellectual conditions and the hermeneutic mode conducive to the development of science.” By eschewing the elaborate, often abstract modes of allegory common in Roman Catholic discourse, Protestantism fostered a kind of scientific consciousness, one given to reading God’s other book, nature, as attentively as it did the Bible.

Full review here.