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Marine iguanas lay their eggs in sand. In June, when the hatchlings emerge, they're vulnerable. They must join the adults at the edge of the sea, but the journey will be a dangerous one.

This scene from the David Attenborough documentary series Planet Earth 2 has become iconic. I'm sure you've seen it. It's even won a BAFTA for must-see moment. Of course, you can't actually see it in the podcast, but I know you can see it in your mind.

A lonely little baby iguana now running for its life, pursued by racer snakes that are piling out from holes in the nearby rocks. Your natural instinct while watching is either to hide behind your hands or yell at the screen, "Run, iguana, run!"

Anyway, you should definitely go and watch the clip if you haven't already seen it, and producer Kayleigh's going to put it in the show notes, as always. It's what David Attenborough calls a near-miraculous escape. Mercifully, this iguana gets away. But of course, not all of the baby iguanas are so lucky. One study suggested that only 20-30% of hatchling iguanas, though in a different part of the world, survive their first month.

The baby iguanas that don't make it experience life for just a few minutes, and then they're caught, and they're gone. The Bible tells us that God holds the life of every creature in his hand. It's Job chapter 12. What does that mean for the baby marine iguana that lives for just a moment and dies a hideous death before it had a chance to do pretty much anything?

What is the point? Why would God make such a thing? We're talking all things animals in this episode, starting with why God would create a world that seems to embed animal suffering into the fabric of things. And we'll then get to some pretty practical questions too. Do animals go to heaven? Is it okay to keep pets? And should we all actually be vegetarian?

Man, I hope not. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics Master Lectures, a streaming service to satisfy your curiosity and to help you understand the Bible with the world's leading Christian scholars, apart from the couple of courses that I teach there. And you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to get 50% off your first three months subscription with the code undeceptions50.

Each episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture, ethics or literature. That list is getting longer. That's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. And if this hour of undeceiving isn't enough, join the Undeceptions Plus community for just $5 Aussie a month.

You'll get extended interviews with my guests, bonus Q&A sessions, and access to our exclusive Undeceptions Plus Facebook community, where you get to hear more from me, if you really want that, and the team, and get to know other listeners. Head to undeceptions.com forward slash plus for more info. ♪

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Okay, tell me what you had for breakfast, or tell me what wine we're drinking. How about that? Ah, we're having an Alto, a 2018 Alto, Rivera del Duero.

I'm having a drink with Dr. Bethany Soloretta, a research fellow in science and religion at Campion Hall at the University of Oxford.

Bethany's philosophical specialty is suffering, and you might remember we spoke to her in detail about how to reconcile a good God with a world of suffering. That's back in an episode earlier this year titled On Suffering. In this episode, though, we're talking to her again about suffering, but this time the suffering of animals.

Bethany is particularly interested in how we deal with the suffering of animals that we see from the very beginning. That is, before humans come on the scene.

So I was interested in why would God allow such horrible things to happen? And so many people had said so much, but there's actually very little at the time I started looking at evolution, animal suffering and the goodness of God. So for listeners who haven't really thought much about this, this problem of animal suffering and not even thought about the brutality of the evolutionary process,

Can you, with your best skeptical muscles flexed, tell us how real the problem is, this question of millions of years of animal suffering? Yeah. So there have been about 540 million years of complex life. That's about how long predation has been around, for example, where creatures violently take life from each other.

99.8% of species that have ever existed are already extinct. So the biodiversity we see now is a tiny sliver of what has been available. We know that there have been five massive extinction events and many more smaller ones with dramatic effect. And, you know, the majority of creatures that are sentient

feel a whole lot of pain. They suffer, they die, you know, and the death rate is still what it's always been, one for one.

And if you think about how could a good and loving God create such a world, it really, I think, causes questions because animals can't make use of the same, what I think are the strongest arguments for humans either, that this happens to draw people closer to God. So, okay, suffering's bad, but it gives me this great opportunity to draw near to God. Or you can't blame moral free will. Well, it's due to sin.

And so without those two arguments, which I think are the strongest arguments really for why God might allow horrific suffering in humans, what do you do? Why would God allow the suffering of so many millions of animals? Now, I will use animals. And of course, life is much, much broader. Animals are a tiny bit of life on earth. But because...

They are the ones who tend to have nervous systems that give sensations of pain and they have central nervous systems that can process that as suffering. That's what I'll stick to. There is actually interesting work on plants and whether they suffer in a somewhat slower conscious way, but we don't know that yet.

This is where I want to give a little shout out to my listeners who don't go along with evolution by natural selection. You'll know from plenty of other episodes of Undeceptions that I take the old earth view.

But there are plenty of smart Christians who take a young earth view that isn't compatible with evolution. There's no getting around that this is going to be a tricky episode for that kind of Christian. Bethany just assumes that evolution is a thing. If you don't think that evolution is the way the world has come to be the way it is, then the question of animals suffering before humans appeared just won't be a question for you at all. Will it, Director Mark?

But for those who accept the evolutionary view of the world, the question of animal suffering can be flummoxing. Already our talk together assumes evolution by natural selection. And I know that you know there are parts of the world where that really isn't a given. Here amongst Christians in Oxford and the UK generally, it's not that big a crazy assumption. But why is evolution a given?

I think that it is by far the strongest explanation for the diversity and the design, if I can say that, of life on Earth.

As a biological explanation, it is consilient. It draws together all these different areas of explanation from distribution of species to physiological nearness of species.

that, you know, why do some species look more like other species? Why do chimpanzees look more like us and less than dogs? And why do dogs look so different from worms, etc., etc.? But especially when genetics came out, it just, the evolution is, and common ancestry along the way, is by far the strongest explanation of the things we see in the similarities and dissimilarities of genetics.

So if God is good and loving, how do we account for the enormous amount of animal suffering that's caused by natural disasters, disease and predation? Well, just as with the question of why God allows humans to suffer, there are different ways to go about tackling this problem.

The first is we could say God didn't create the world this way. Sin did. Our human sin even affected the experience of animals. Okay, now you're talking to a good reformed boy here, sitting opposite, and you're not very friendly with John Calvin. Not in this particular instance and what he said, yes. So Calvin wrote that the human defiance of the Creator, sin,

is what brought dire consequences to the physical cosmos, creation, animals, and all that. That's a very widely believed perspective in contemporary Christianity. Why don't you go along with John Calvin, Bethany?

I think if I had been brought up in John Calvin's time, I absolutely would have. I would have had no reason not to. But the fact is, we know now of a much longer Earth history, which says that all those things were around far longer than humans were around. So you have, you know, a 5.3 billion year history of the planet Earth, a 4 billion year history of life,

as I said before, 540 million years of complex life where we're getting multicellular organisms that are swimming around and eating one another. And then you have behaviorally modern humans for only about 50,000 years. So the earliest possible date you could put on that human rebellion in Eden is about 50,000 years.

But we know that T. rexes were eating other creatures and causing them great pain and distress. We know, you know, that dinosaurs had bone cancer. Viruses have always been a problem for as long as life has been around in terms of causing disease, so have bacteria. So I just think chronologically it raises really big problems, you know.

Now there are a few attempts like William Dembski to sort of say, "Oh, well God instituted the effects of the Fall into creation long before." But then that raises its own questions. Like God punished all these creatures for a sin that had not happened yet. And then that also means that God made sin absolutely inevitable.

And that's problematic too. So I just think it's a much simpler option to say that suffering, for whatever reason, came very early, you know, and then humans brought sin into the world, which was a new development.

Am I right in saying that even Augustine didn't go with this Calvin idea that creation is fallen? Yeah, so Augustine would have said, of course animals eat one another. It's part of the divine design that orders their being, that even when they pass into one another, it's part of God's plan. So he only thought that humans were immortal and felt that sin introduced death into the human species, but that...

every other creature would have quite naturally lived and died and passed away. Saint Augustine, an early church father who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, we might have mentioned him once or twice before, was convinced that animals eating other animals is just part of God's good creation. He argues that it's part of the temporal beauty of the world.

In answer to the question of why there are carnivores, Augustine writes,

All things, you see, as long as they continue to be, have their own proper measures, numbers, and destinies. So all things, properly considered, are worthy of acclaim. Nor is it without some contribution in its own way to the temporal beauty of the world that they undergo change by passing from one thing into another. This may escape fools. Those making progress have some glimmering of it. To the perfect it is as clear as daylight.

That's the newest member of the Undeceptions team, Alistair Belling, our researcher and writer, and of course, house drummer. He goes on to say that animals even provide a visible lesson to humans about all sorts of things, including how to guard one's body from dangers. Animals are a picture of God's organisation of the cosmos for Augustine. But he isn't sure why some other animals exist.

I, however, must confess that I have not the slightest idea why mice and frogs were created, and flies and worms, yet I can still see that they are all beautiful in their own specific kind. This is classic Augustine. He was adamant about some grounding principles, and was quite relaxed about not knowing some of the other details.

So he didn't think that the whole creation was vegetarian before the fall, for example. So that's not actually a common reading until the Reformation. Is Calvin the source of the idea or are there some other thinker shortly before him? From what I remember, there is a minority along the way who did read it the way that Calvin read it, but it was always a minority voice. But people like Calvin and Luther,

Here's what John Calvin says in his commentary on the Book of Romans. Director Mark makes a great John Calvin.

It is appropriate then for us to consider what a dreadful curse we have deserved, since all created things, both on earth and in the invisible heavens, which are in themselves blameless, undergo punishment for our sins. For it has come about that they are liable to corruption, not through their own fault. Thus the condemnation of mankind is imprinted on the heavens, and on the earth, and on all creatures."

The whole of nature, non-human organisms included, is thwarted from attaining its ends because of the effects of the fall and the subsequent curse, argues Calvin. There are a few Bible verses often picked out to support this line of argument. I put these in turn to Bethany, starting with Genesis 3, verse 17. Here's producer Kayleigh. To Adam he said...

Doesn't the Bible say the ground was cursed? Yes, it does. It talks about the ground being cursed in Genesis 3, but that curse is actually raised in Genesis 8 after the flood. God says, "I will no longer curse the earth."

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart, "'Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood, and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.'"

And there's some disagreement on how that should be read. But what I find interesting is those two words used for curse and ground, eretz and arar for curse, are never actually used in conjunction again after that.

So after chapter 8, and there's a whole story I could tell about how Noah is named Noah as the one who will relieve us from the toil of the ground. Well, what toil? The toil that was laid down in Genesis 3. And so then God smells his sacrifice, says, I'll no longer curse the ground. And what happens? Noah plants a vineyard and it's so fruitful he manages to get magnificently drunk and

And so there's a sense of it being a new creation after the flood. And although there are bits of the land that are occasionally mentioned as cursed, you know, in Deuteronomy, if you do this, the land will be cursed, it's always a temporary local thing. There's no sense, for example, in the Psalms, that the whole earth is cursed, right? The earth is the Lord's and everything in it. This is God's creation. It's very good.

And so I don't think it's reasonable to read that part in Genesis 3 as a once for all time. You're not even convinced that the creation at the beginning, whatever that means, was perfect. I learned when I first became a Christian at 16 that the creation was perfect until the fall. Yeah, so did I.

you sort of say, well, there's an imperfection built into the fabric of all things from the beginning. - Yeah, I mean, I hesitate at both perfection and imperfection because those aren't biblical words. So I think if a Hebrew writer was trying to convey the notion of perfection, they would use shalom, the idea of God's sort of perfect peace.

Instead, what's used in Genesis 1 is tov me'od, very good. Good, good, good, good, good. So the idea that it's very good

means more in a Hebrew sense that it's functional, that it's fit for purpose. But even in the initial mandate, God leaves humans something to do, right? It's multiply, fill the earth. If it were perfect, you would think that it would be unchanging, that it simply wouldn't have any place to go, right? And we think of that sort of, now, I mean, this has been critiqued, but we generally think more of a sense of static perfection when we start thinking of heaven,

Yeah, but in Genesis 1 there's no sense that this is the end. Colin Gunton says, you know, creation is a project, it has somewhere to go. And that sense of dynamicism, that sense of change, I think, opens the way to saying we can actually accept an evolutionary narrative. Not saying Genesis 1 does.

I don't think the authors knew anything about evolution or that they were secretly inserting it, but I think we don't have to say that it was created in its final form. Otherwise, what would humans have done?

This is worth pondering, whatever your view. The Bible doesn't say the world was perfect in Genesis 1. It says it was good. And the Apostle Paul in the New Testament continues to call it good, even though Paul writes long after the fall, long after there is plenty of pain in the world. In 1 Timothy 4.4, he says, Everything God created is good.

is good. That's pretty emphatic. So calling things good mustn't be the same as calling them perfect. Okay, what about this verse from Romans 8?

Creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, it was the choice of the one who subjected it, but in the hope that the creation itself will be set free from slavery to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of God's children. We know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labour pains up until now. This passage is often interpreted as meaning the fall of man brought also the fall of creation.

Yeah, I don't buy that. But what is the subjugation to frustration? What's that referring to? Well, when it's using frustration in the Greek, it's actually the same word that's used in Ecclesiastes. Now, in Ecclesiastes, that word is often translated as meaningless, but I think Havel, it's much better translated as sort of fleeting.

That there's a sense of things passing away, which stands against our longing for the eternal. So there is a frustration in that, and we feel it all the time. And so I don't see it as a sense of...

utter despair or meaninglessness, but a sense that we're all caught up in a life where we're being called towards heaven, we're called towards the eternal, but we are in the transient, you know, and we feel that in the death of loved ones. Just as Paul says, you know, Christians shouldn't grieve like others.

as those who have no hope, but we still grieve and we still ought to grieve. So there's that sort of tension and I think he's drawing that out. I should clarify, this is not to say you don't believe that humans are fallen. Oh yeah, oh, humans are definitely fallen, yeah. And so I mean, I talk absolutely about the- Bethany Solerator doesn't believe in the fall. Ah, yes, I love it when that happens. But you do. Absolutely, absolutely.

As I said earlier, the young earth creationist has no problem with any of this. The world was perfect and animals didn't suffer before the sin of humanity. That's when everything fell into disarray and pain.

But for anyone who finds evolution convincing, the starting point has to be that God did make the world this way, with death and predation in the animal kingdom, and that this was nonetheless somehow, in some way, good. Perhaps it displays the interdependent organization of the universe, as Augustine said.

Or maybe it's not right to think of animals suffering in the same way as we think of humans suffering. Why is animal suffering through the evolutionary process morally problematic? I mean, are caterpillars really fretting about what they go through?

Yeah, well, and again, that's kind of why I try and say animals and at other points I'll say sentient animals, because I think that a lot of the deaths that happens is not problematic. So I think that, you know, Darwin had a real problem with the Ichneumonidae wasps inserting their larvae into caterpillars who would then grow up and die.

and eat their way out of caterpillars. And they've actually found that they target the least vital organs first. So the poor caterpillar lives as long as caterpillarly possible to provide a fresh meal for the young wasp. So he was pretty horrified by that and saw that as a real argument. But I sort of think...

Darwin really had a problem with this. In 1860, he wrote to botanist Asa Gray these words, I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ignominy die with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. But I sort of think, well, as far as we can tell,

caterpillars don't have this sort of ability to feel pain, but not necessarily to understand suffering or that they are the ones who are suffering. So something like the argument that C.S. Lewis makes in The Problem of Pain probably applies to caterpillars. Doesn't apply to cats and dogs and birds and, you know, so many other creatures. Polar bears. Polar bears, yeah.

In his book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis calls the problem of animal suffering appalling, particularly because the Christian explanation of human pain can't be extended to animal pain. So far as we know, Lewis writes, beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue. Therefore, they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it.

Lewis argues that many animals who appear to be suffering may not be suffering at all, simply because they have no capacity to experience it as suffering, no capacity to distinguish a sensation as experience. He calls it sentience without consciousness.

But even Lewis says that while this might apply to the lower forms of animals, Darwin's caterpillars perhaps, as we move up the scale of ability, it's not so clear. He adds, It is certainly difficult to suppose that the apes, the elephant and the higher domestic animals have not in some degree a self or soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary individuality.

Of course, any suggestion that animals may not really suffer can become deeply problematic when it's used as justification to dismiss animal welfare completely. So what do we do with all of this? Bethany has some thoughts.

And I think that, again, when we look through the majority of the Bible, what we find is even the really rough parts of creation being attributed to God. So whether that's in the Psalms, whether that's in Job. This was my next question. I'm really interested in this. So can you expound? Because I find this one of the most compelling, disturbing, and yet comforting questions.

insights in your book. Thank you. So even in Job, like... Yeah. I mean, God takes chapters saying, hey, Job, have you seen my creation? Have you seen how I'm the one creating the blizzards? Have you seen that I'm the one creating the great storms? Have you seen that I'm the one who created the great Leviathan of the deep, who so terrifies you and causes chaos and destruction?

And I'm the one who feeds the vultures where their babies are covered in blood from eating the...

carcasses of creatures they've caught. Same in Psalm 104, is it? Where the lions seek their prey from God. And you have God providing for the ravenous beasts as well as for the more peaceable ones. And so I think it's a lot more coherent with Scripture to say

the Bible presents a carnivorous creation as God's creation. Yes, I mean, here is the point where your argument is mind-bending because you're not so much trying to say, oh no, here's three reasons why that's not so bad or why we can defend God in the light of the badness. You're saying, well, actually, there's a goodness of God in predation and parasitism and so on.

So I want you to really help me here because I have a lot of skeptical listeners to Undeceptions. Instantly they'll be thinking, okay, at least this accords with science. Yeah. But does it accord with Christianity? I thought Christianity was into that God of love and goodness and so on. So how do you see the evolutionary process with all its predation as good?

I think that it has to do with the nature of God's love when it comes right down to it. So the heart of my argument is that love is not primarily interested in avoiding suffering, in avoiding death, but in seeing redemption and fullness of being in and through those things.

I'm not saying that every aspect of creation perfectly reveals or reflects God's character. So I think parasitism is a good example of animals basically cheating.

But what I think is revealed in the evolutionary process is God so loved creatures that God let them be themselves. Let them have freedom of agency. Now, in some creatures, the worm, that may be very small agency. You know, do I tunnel left or tunnel right? It's not a very important choice. You know, with the...

ancestor of a tiger, at some point some creature thought, "That fluffy thing looks like something I might be able to eat." And it made a decision that forever changed that chain of descendants. And of course the most freedom, moral free will, is inscribed in humans.

And so I think for much the same reasons as God allows moral free will in humans, I'm going to say God allows freedom of agency to creatures who then get to figure out their own ways of living in the world. And that does, I think, end up with consequences that

God is not necessarily a fan of. So I don't think that God is a fan of every strategy of survival that's out there, but they are there because God's love allows creatures that tremendously risky freedom.

Some theologians have argued that the world is the way it is because it's the only way to have the type of intricate and interesting creation God had in mind. We take the world that God has given us as a sort of package deal. Without things like earthquakes, for example, the world would be lifeless.

Professor Christopher Southgate from the University of Exeter is one of the scholars that's offered this explanation for evolutionary suffering. It was the subject of his 2022 Boyle Lecture for the International Society for Science and Religion. I have been one of the thinkers who have postulated what has come to be known as the only way argument. Essentially, it goes like this, that there is no reason to suppose that there was any way open to God

by which God could have created a world with this richness of beauty, complexity, ingenuity and intricate independence of creatures, with a better balance between values and the disvalues of struggle, competition and suffering.

So yes, creaturely suffering is intrinsic to the world God has made. Yes, it has been instrumental in realizing God's purposes. But there was no better, less suffering-filled way available to God. But Bethany's not social.

I think that this isn't necessarily the only way that existence can happen, but what I've tried to argue is that this may be the only way to produce the individuals who people have in, whether animal or non-animal. So imagine if you have all the possible varieties in your mind of genetic

rearrangement, you'd have no way to sort of pick out an individual, right? My body is made up of the whole history of life from the first cell till now, and 10 billion chances per day have shaped what I am and who I am. So I think what this earth does is solve the problem of

particularity. Why am I me? And I don't know that God could have just arrived at me because God would have arrived at every other version of me that wasn't me as well. So unless God made a heaven that had every possible, you know, thing, and then who am I in that? Then there's another thought, a strange thought.

A thought I find intriguing. God did make the world this way, suffering and all, but suffering and death bring about new life. The whole of nature, in other words, looks like Jesus' life and death on the cross. The whole of creation is cruciform. Robert Farrar Capon talks about how the cross, far from being cruciform,

an aberrant occurrence in creation is actually revealing what creation has meant all along. So he talks really movingly about how that in every animal who dies as sort of a sacrifice to the life of others, we see a mini cross of Christ. That in every victim of evolution's

process, we see unveiled the idea that death leads to new life, just as we see it epitomized in the cross, where Jesus dies and gives life to all of creation, not just human, but to all of creation to be redeemed, restored, renewed in the new creation.

So I'm very skeptical of saying that the cross is some sort of interruption rather than a revelation of what creation has meant all along. Yeah.

All of this has implications for what redemption means. I want you to return to animals. Yeah. You're saying there'll be animals in the kingdom of heaven. Yeah, everything that God loves. And so I think that that includes all animals. Now, I mean, the reason that much of the Christian tradition has not affirmed it, and there have been people like John Wesley's notable example of somebody who really said that animals will be part of the general resurrection.

In fact, elevated to an almost human appreciation. Yeah, yeah. So he sort of says as humans will become like the angels in power and glory and knowledge, so animals will be elevated to the point of humans. And basically his point was that many animals who don't have sentience couldn't properly enjoy heaven. So God would have to give them an upgrade so that they could properly enjoy what they had been given.

rather than just have sort of a passive or unknowing sense of God's grace and provision. So I like that. But the main reason people didn't think animals were part of the...

general resurrection was because they thought that animals didn't have a rational soul and that rational souls were the only part of the creature that survived death. So in Aristotle's version, you have like the vegetative soul, the animal soul, and the rational soul in humans. But I don't

actually follow Aristotle. I don't think he's a great... he has certainly contributed a lot to theology but I don't follow him in this. I prefer the Hebraic view where animals are living souls. Their bodies are the true embodiment of what they are. And so I think when we die we pass away and God resurrects us as bodies and therefore there's no need to exclude any creature from that.

Not all of this will be satisfying to everyone. Perhaps none of it is satisfying to anyone. Charles Darwin wrote another letter to his friend Hooker in 1856, saying, What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.

The famed skeptic Richard Dawkins named one of his books "A Devil's Chaplain," jumping on this issue as one that Christians have often struggled to explain. Part of me is content to let God be God. Even if all the problems were unresolved, I'd still hold that the evidence of God's existence is overwhelming. The first cause argument we've discussed before is, to me, compelling.

And even the teleological argument about the rational orderliness of creation can't be undone by this stuff, for the simple reason that we can only recognize the harshness and disorder because we recognize and expect a more fundamental beauty and order in creation.

Yes, the tap, or I guess I've got to learn to say faucet here in America, is dripping sometimes. The tap is dripping and we notice it. But we mustn't miss the more basic reality that there is a working tap there in the first place. The problem of the working tap is way more mysterious than the problem of the dripping tap.

For what it's worth, my view of animal suffering, of Genesis and the Fall, is that there was a decay and death built into the fabric of creation from the beginning. I reckon Genesis itself hints at that. There is a deceiving snake already there in the garden. There were trees with fruit that grew, ripened, and then died.

And of course, Adam and Eve are eating the fruit, so certainly that fruit dies. More than that, it seems clear to me that Adam and Eve would themselves die by their natural condition if it weren't for the fact that they were allowed to eat from the so-called tree of life in the garden.

Sure, they weren't allowed to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they were meant to eat from the tree of life. This proves to me that humans themselves were innately mortal, prone to decay and death from the beginning. The only thing that saved them in the garden was the sustaining life of God, represented by the tree of life.

Getting kicked out of the garden at the end of Genesis chapter 3, away from the tree of life, didn't introduce decay and death into the creation for the first time. What it did is leave humanity to their natural mortal realities, separated from the sustaining life itself.

On this view, creation, including animals, were always mortal, subject to decay and death, and this was all part of God's good creation. I guess I'm siding with Augustine on this. I'm with him on a lot of things.

But after the break, we've got more challenges. What's our relationship with animals? What are our responsibilities toward their care? And if we value animals, should we really need them?

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.

To end tyranny, we must first understand it.

That's the first line of chapter 5 of Peter Singer's seminal work Animal Liberation, published in 1975. The tyranny he's talking about is Christianity and its pervasive speciesism. Singer defines speciesism as "prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species."

"There have been religions, especially in the East," writes Singer, "which have taught that all life is sacred. And there have been many others that have held it gravely wrong to kill members of one's own social, religious or ethnic group. But Christianity spread the idea that every human life and only human life is sacred."

This is the teaching that downgraded animals to things that humans could use and abuse as they wish. That's Singer's argument. The belief that humans have unique status in the world, that they alone are made in the image of God, is the belief that has doomed the animal kingdom. Animal suffering today is, according to Singer, mostly the fault of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Our next guest is Catholic ethicist Charles Camosi. He's a big fan of Singer, but he also disagrees with him. I've tried to show that that's just a fundamental mistake. In fact, there are deep, profound resources for thinking about creation more broadly, but especially about non-human animals in these traditions, which are just dynamite for thinking about what animal liberation would look like

Charles Camosi is Associate Professor of Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham University. With a focus on moral theology and bioethics, we talked to him last season about euthanasia. He's written several books, including For Love of Animals, Christian Ethics, Consistent Action. Okay, so I need to ask you, what are those pieces of dynamite in the Christian tradition? Yeah, well, it's...

I don't hope it's too condescending to say read Genesis one and two, but, but, but just read Genesis one and two and just look what's there. There's just so much there. So just to pick out a few things, animals are created good in Genesis one period without reference to human beings. So animals are not tools. They're not like hammers or pencils for us to use. However we wish they have their own dignity. They have their own value. Again, they're good full stop or at least period.

Also, at the end of Genesis 1, the ideal, right, this is not a history text. It's a theological text. It's a text that tried trying to explain theological truths through a story. And the story is very clear. The ideal that God set up in the Garden of Eden was one in which we're eating fruits and plants. It isn't until Genesis 9 after sin has screwed things up.

that God kind of grudgingly gives freedom to eat meat in the fallen world, which was not the ideal. And even then there's very...

significant strictures associated with it. As many of you probably know about Jewish kosher laws, if you're going to eat meat, there's lots and lots of rules about how that works. In particular, you're not supposed to eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. So even having that kind of respect for the lifeblood of the animal is at the heart of even the fallen world. In Genesis 2, which is a different creation story, older creation story,

The animals are brought to Adam not to eat, not to ride, not to use for clothing, but because it is not good, man should be alone. And a lot of people think that that's when Eve shows up. Eve does show up as the suitable partner, of course. But animals are brought to Adam first. So the image that Genesis 2 has, again, in the peaceable kingdom before sin enters the world, is one of animal companionship, companionship with animals.

Evolution would suggest that there was hardly a peaceable relationship in the animal kingdom prior to humans. But Charles is talking here about the ideal that Genesis portrays of peace between humans and animals. The Bible has a high view of animals from its very beginning, says Charles. And with that in mind, let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

The Bible itself does have explicit statements about the care for animals and God's own feeling toward animals. The Israelites were explicitly commanded to assist an animal that falls into a pit, Deuteronomy 22. And the book of Proverbs in chapter 12 explicitly says, the righteous care for the needs of their animals. I like it.

Then there's one little known fact that I only discovered when preaching through the Book of Jonah at my old church. Shout out to my besties at St. Andrew's Roseville. Miss yous all. Anyway, the prophet Jonah is annoyed that God didn't wipe out the pagan city of Nineveh. And God explains that he cares for a city like this with over 120,000 people. Okay, that makes sense. But the final phrase of the whole Book of Jonah is...

and cattle galore. The fact that there were so many cattle is a contributing reason God didn't want to destroy the city.

Okay, what about Jesus? Frankly, there's not much in Jesus about animals. On the one hand, we can say he ate meat. There's no getting around that. He ate a traditional Passover every year, but explicitly in his final week. And the central ingredient of the Passover meal to this day is, of course, cooked lamb. There's no Passover without lamb.

I know there are Christian vegetarians, even on the Undeceptions team, but I won't pick on him at this point because I've already picked on him earlier. But for the Christian, there can't be anything intrinsically wrong with meat eating. It only becomes wrong when our meat comes from sources that mistreat animals in the period of their growth and fattening.

On the other hand, Jesus does speak of God's own care for animals. And his words suggest an intimacy between God and animals. In Matthew 6, the famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Jesus then adds an equally important point: "Are you not much more valuable than they?" Humans are more valuable, according to Jesus, but the birds have God's explicit daily attention. The Father feeds them. Jesus' assumption is a very Jewish one, and it ought to be a Christian one. God tends to animals.

"He makes grass grow for the cattle," says Psalm 104. "The lions seek their food from God," says the same Psalm. And in Psalm 148, we're told that the animals are somehow caught up in the praise of God. We read, "Praise the Lord, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds." Now, maybe this is mere poetry.

But I prefer to think that whatever explicit relationship humans can have with God as articulated in the Bible, the animals, in their own way, unknown to us, commune with the Creator. They look to Him, and He certainly looks to them. The Heavenly Father feeds them. You can press play now.

I asked Charles where things went off the rails, where Christians started to think of animals as mere products and tools. The main thing that we see in the church fathers is a real sense that animals, again, are not mere things. They're not mere tools for us to use however we want. In fact, they can be

very much used by God to reveal God's will to us. And even there are these amazing stories of the church fathers explaining that animals can actually sense goodness and virtue and evil and vice in ways that we don't have access to.

Yes, there's a second century Christian text called the Acts of Paul, sometimes called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. It's partly about the Acts of Paul and also partly about this woman missionary called Thecla. She's a colleague of Paul, but does a whole bunch of preaching on her own behalf.

We've discussed it before, way back in season something or other, when we talked to Professor Lynn Koick about women in the early church. I feel like saying, Producer Kayleigh, what was that episode called? What was its number? Remembering Women. Remembering Women, yes. Do you know its number? Episode 22. You just got all that in your head, don't you? She's a legend.

Anyway, the story is at least partly legendary, unfortunately, but it gives insight into what some second century Christian leaders thought about women missionaries. Thekla preached all around the Mediterranean and converted whole towns to Christ. But there are also some hints that Professor Camosi is alluding to of what these early Christians thought of animals.

On one occasion, Thecla is thrown into the arena to be executed by wild beasts. She's tied to a ravenous lioness, but the lioness can sense Thecla's goodness as an emissary of the creator, and we're told that the lioness lay down and licked Thecla's feet.

Now, I doubt that really happened. I want it to be true, but I doubt it is. But it does say something about Christian attitudes as early as the second century toward animals. Animals, in their view, have their own spiritual awareness. There's this whole other sense that animals know these things even better than us. And that sense is even, I think, kind of permeated into our own

time right we even have a sense that maybe our dog has a sense of people love me love my dog or something like that i don't know if you have that in australia but there's we have that here for sure that our animal companions like have this sense about others that that maybe we don't have access to so that's definitely present in the church fathers and the middle ages especially thomas aquinas they have their problems and this is this is where peter singer really hammers home his critique on the on the christian tradition but even with someone like thomas aquinas

who I still haven't figured this out. His mentor was Albert the Great, who is maybe the most important zoologist in all of the Middle Ages, over 600 years, and cared so deeply about animals. Thomas, though he was so influential, got so much wrong about animals. He really did say...

That though animals have emotions and animals, you know, demand serious consideration from us, again, not things, they're not treated like we do in factory farms in our own time. What's really wrong with treating animals poorly is that it reflects badly on us. There isn't something about the animal itself that is harmed. In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas wrote,

According to the divine ordinance, the life of animals and plants is preserved not for themselves, but for man.

Speechless animals and plants are devoid of the life of reason whereby to set themselves in motion. They are moved, as it were, by another, by a kind of natural impulse, a sign of which is that they are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others. He that kills another's ox sins not through killing the ox, but through injuring another man in his property.

There is of course a truth in this. Animals do not have the order of reason that human beings do. But it's easy to see how a statement like this from Aquinas can be read as a justification for the worst kind of, say, factory farming.

It's unlikely a theological statement from Thomas Aquinas or anyone else actually influenced factory farming. The forces of the market produced that. But theology can make Christians lazy in their response to animal cruelty. Now, I will say...

When capitalism comes on the scene in the modern period, that really kicks things into a whole nother level of how we treated animals that was way worse than anything that appeared in the Middle Ages or the early church. The real enemy here is consumerism and treating animals as pencils and hammers and not these ideas that were problematic, but at least understood that these were gifts from God and had their own dignity and way of being in the world.

But when our consumerist capitalist culture took over, that all went out the window. The Christian church has an imperfect tradition with respect to animals.

often swinging too far in its emphasis on humanity as the pinnacle of creation and being dominant over everything else. But as with so much of human history, even when the church was getting it wrong, there were individual followers of Christ who often had very loud voices, and they advocated for a better way. They are the prophets calling God's people back to their own ideals.

One good example is William Wilberforce. Now, I know he's best known for his fight against human slavery in the late 18th and early 19th century, but he was also concerned for animals. He was a founding member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the RSPCA, which is still super active in the UK and Australia today.

Wilberforce led the fight to outlaw bull baiting in Britain. For 200 years or so, bull baiting was a spectator sport to watch a pack of dogs fight a bull. People also thought it made the bull meat more tender when eaten.

Wilberforce and his friends got it banned eventually. Sadly, he died two years before the full-scale Cruelty to Animals Act was passed in 1835. And actually, he died just a month or so before the Slavery Abolition Act became law as well. There is a link between the Christian care for humans and the Christian care for animals.

It's exemplified in the work of someone like Wilberforce, but he's not the only one, of course. Writing in Time magazine back in 2014, influential American writer Mary Abistat said religious concern for animals comes as a surprise only to those unacquainted with religion.

Animal welfare is a lively topic among Christians, and not just the lefty types, so-called. One of the most influential Christian takes on animal welfare came from Matthew Scully, a prominent speechwriter to Republican President George W. Bush. Scully's book Dominion made a splash in the early 2000s.

His conservative Catholic background seemed to clash with his call for humans to be the defenders of animals. Some see advocacy for animals as a distraction from our advocacy for human life. It's a waste of resources, say some, when the true fight should be against, say, abortion.

But Charles Camosi says it's all about having a consistent life ethic, one that resists throwaway culture. Being pro-life is entirely consistent with caring for animal life, even chickens. Pies? Yes, but I want to be a... I don't like gravy.

That's a clip from the charming and hugely popular 2000 claymation film Chicken Run, researcher Al's all-time favourite film, I'm told reliably. It's about an American rooster who falls in love with a hen on a British farm and their attempt to escape the farm and its evil farmer before they're turned into chicken pot pie.

More than 20 years after the first movie, producer Kayleigh tells me Netflix has announced a sequel for Chicken Run. It'll come out in 2023 and it's called Chicken Run Dawn of the Nugget. Not much is known so far about the new movie except this synopsis. The chickens escaped from the farm and made it to a peaceful island sanctuary, far from the dangers of the human world. But

back on the mainland, the whole of chicken kind faces a new and terrible threat. Presumably that threat is chicken nuggets. I'm wondering how McDonald's is going to respond to this. Probably not with a Happy Meal film deal. Anyway, chickens bring us to the real practical outworkings of what we've been talking about so far.

How are we to deal with animals in our everyday lives? Is it okay to have pets? And can I eat meat? Even just one measly nugget. Okay, so is it wrong to eat meat? I don't know if this makes me an annoying academic ethicist, but I'll say it depends. Even someone like Peter Singer will say, if it's you and the pig starving in the forest, you get to kill the pig. He uses utilitarian reasoning for that, despite the sophistication of pigs who are quite sophisticated. They can play video games, open doors, etc.,

He would say that the kinds of preferences that you have are more sophisticated and therefore you can do that. The teaching of my own church is that you can use Catholic church, Catechism of Catholic Church says you can use animals for food and clothing, but you also have to treat animals with kindness.

It's interesting, both those things appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is the official document of Catholic teaching. It's hundreds of pages long, and it combines some Bible, some tradition, and some philosophizing to produce a pretty comprehensive account of what Catholics are meant to believe.

Now, as a proud Protestant, there's quite a bit I can't accept. Stuff about Mary, stuff about the Pope, stuff about grace and good deeds and so on. But I have to say, some of it is utterly brilliant. And I wish there were a Protestant version of the Catechism that Protestants agreed on.

And on animals, it makes a bunch of important stuff pretty clear. I hope my hardcore Protestant mates don't get upset with me here, but I have to read the section on animals because I agree with every line.

The seventh commandment enjoins respect for the integrity of creation. Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present and future humanity. Use of the mineral, vegetable and animal resources of the universe cannot be divorced from respect for moral imperatives.

Man's dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute. It is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come. It requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation. Animals are God's creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care.

Okay, I'm not a big fan of that particular line. It goes on.

God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Genesis 2:19-20 and 9:1-4. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure.

Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives. It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery.

One can love animals. One should not direct to them the affection due only to persons. Humans are the first priority, in other words. But animals are still to be loved. They are creatures with a measure of dignity. They have claims on us. I like it.

And it also very much emphasizes that they aren't things for us to use however we wish. So holding these things in balanced tension, I think, are interesting. And I don't eat meat. I eat fish. I try to avoid most dairy. Don't always succeed. So I'm maybe the least of the hardcore. There are a lot of people way, way more hardcore than I am about this. But I do think it matters. Like, for instance, in the United States,

Given our radical inequality here, there are food deserts where it's very difficult for especially economically vulnerable populations to get protein. I think somebody in those circumstances is quite different from somebody who is just feasting on factory farm meat day in and day out who would have the resources to get protein.

In 2004, the organisation PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, launched a new campaign they called Holocaust on Your Plate. Advertising displays juxtaposed images of humans in Nazi concentration camps and animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms. And the slogan read, For animals, all people are Nazis. Yikes.

In Germany, the campaign was banned. Germany's highest court stated that the displays would have made, quote, the fate of the victims of the Holocaust appear banal and trivial. But Peter argued that the ban by the German government showed that it is the animals' suffering that is considered banal and trivial. I'm with Germany here.

there is a problem that emerges in a merely evolutionary, God-less view of creation.

If all living things are accidental products of time and space, there can be no arguments for the intrinsic worth of one living being over another. So this naturalistic, atheistic viewpoint allows two completely contradictory approaches, both of which are logical outworkings.

One is to see animals as equally valuable to humans and therefore killing a chicken is like killing a human. There's no value difference. The other though, which is just as logical, sees no real intrinsic value in animals beyond my needs and the needs of society. So I can treat them how I like since I'm the one with the decision-making power.

Christianity's view rules out both of these. Christianity does teach a hierarchy. There's no way around that. Only humans are made in the image of God. Only humans bear the responsibility to tend the earth on behalf of the Creator. Humans are more valuable than animals for this reason.

However, this view rules out treating animals as mere commodities, as one version of the atheistic account would allow, for the simple reason that creation has been entrusted to us by the Creator. Animals have intrinsic value as creatures beloved of the Creator and granted to our stewardship. And this has real-world implications.

Are you saying then at a minimum, we should only eat the meat that we are confident has come from places that care for the animals and kill them humanely, that avoiding factory farms is an absolute goal?

even though you don't like absolutes. Yeah. So I do think for the vulnerable person who has very little other way to get protein, I think maybe not. I think if they can find excess protein other ways, that would be better. But many, at least in this country, do not. But that doesn't describe the vast majority of people in the developed West. The vast majority of people in the developed West

do have access to alternatives, do have access to substitutes to animals that they can research and see how they were treated. And I was about to say something about factory farming. That is where I put my focus, not only when it comes to animal liberation or justice for animals or however we want to talk about a peaceful kingdom and animals.

But also, it's just so, again, interconnected with a host of other issues. I probably don't need to tell you that one of the most serious sources of carbon emissions for global climate change is factory farms. In fact, if one is driving around in an electric car but feasting on the flesh of animals from factory farms, I just don't know what's going on with that person.

something has gone wrong. Also, at least in my country, a lot of the workers who are hired to work these farms are treated incredibly poorly and certainly not paid a living wage and

often manipulated via human trafficking and certainly related to the complex issues we have with immigration in this country. So worker justice is a major, major part of the concern as well. And then just straight up no chaser economics, right? If you just do an analysis of how to get the most calories out of an acre of land, it isn't growing crops, feeding them to an animal,

and spending energy resources growing the animal and then eating part of the animal. That is just, in fact, a really, really inefficient way to get calories out of an acre. So even if one is just taking the hardest of the hardcore economic kind of approaches here, there's really nothing about this that makes sense from these kind of perspectives.

So even if you wanted to take an attitude more akin to Thomas Aquinas and focus on what our treatment of animals in factory farms says about humans instead of considering the animals for their own sake, factory farming is still just out and out harmful. It's a symptom of an all-consuming consumer culture.

Now, I admit, I've had a growing sense that the meat I buy in the supermarket, and I love eating meat, matters to God. Especially in inflationary times like these, it's so tempting to go for the cheaper cut of steak, the cheapest chicken. But over the last few years, and especially since I've been introduced to thinkers like Charles...

I feel I can't purchase the cheapest meat and poultry because it almost certainly comes from farms where animals were treated as having no value, where there was no human stewardship of creation, just a use and abuse of creation for our gain. Now, I don't feel I can be preachy about this because it's not a conviction I've lived by for very long at all.

But this thought has really got a hold of me and my darling buff before me. God loves animals. And as a steward of his creation, as his image bearer, I owe animals kindness.

Are you okay with my owning pets? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think maybe we need- You don't see that as an objectification of animals? I mean, I would need to know more about how you treat your pets, but- Very well. I imagine so. But I really think this gets to the Genesis 2 thing I was talking about earlier, right? This idea that God brought the animals to Adam because it was not good. He should be alone. And so to the extent that we are fostering

along these lines, I think that's a good thing. And I don't think it should replace human relationships. I'm with Pope Francis on that. He came out with something, really made headlines a few weeks ago by saying, you know, it's too many people are replacing human relationships with their relationship with their pets, which may or may not be true depending on where you live in the world, I guess. But it certainly may be true in Manhattan. But relationships with animals are good. And especially if one is taking a biblical perspective, those kinds of relationships are really good. ♪

Charles writes in his book that there is a culture war going on around animal rights. Many traditional Christians, he says, associate animal rights activism with a challenge to their fundamental beliefs about God and the value of human life. Their rejection of animal concerns becomes a way to defend their faith.

Some in the secular community, by contrast, see Christian inconsistency with regard to animals as just another part of a religion they find primitive and foolish. The result? Traditional Christians cannot see any good coming from standing up for the dignity of animals, and atheists promoting animal rights see Christianity as a source of the problem rather than part of the solution.

That is so typical of the bifurcation going on in our culture. We break into our tribal groups and don't concede anything to the other side.

But my progressive atheist friends, to use cliched language, have more than a point when they say Christians have sometimes been careless when it comes to animal rights. In trying to preserve the dignity of the human person, Christians have sometimes avoided the call to care for animals. On the other hand, I don't think a naturalistic, atheistic view of the universe can logically ground care for animals.

Like I said earlier, if everything is an accident, sure, humans can't really claim to have greater intrinsic worth, but nor can we claim any intrinsic worth for anything. Not for ourselves, not for the environment, and not for animals.

Christianity provides a logical and ethical framework for kindness toward humans, as made in the image of God, and kindness toward animals, as creatures committed to our care on behalf of our Shared Maker. I thank God there are people like Charles Camosi trying to point the way.

If you like what we're doing in this podcast, you might want to check out some of the other podcasts in the Undeceptions Network. Our newest one is DeLorean Philosophy, and it tries to help us think through the future implications of today's news. We'll be back in just a moment.

Well-known author and commentator Steve McAlpine takes an in-depth look at a trend or event that's playing out in society right now, and he asks, where is this taking us? You can find DeLorean philosophy and everything else we're up to at underceptions.com. While you're there, pick up an Underceptions t-shirt, or perhaps even consider making a donation to support the work of Underceptions. We still really need your help.

We've got a bunch of exciting things coming up in 2023. I can't wait to tell you about them when I'm allowed. But they'll help you engage even more deeply with the Christian faith, wherever you are in your journey of doubt and belief. And we can certainly only do these things because of people's generous support. All right, next episode, we're thinking about time travel.

The past, the present, the future, and why the way we think about time matters for how we live the good life in time. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark the Animal Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. And Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant in a different time zone. Editing by Richard Humwee. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan Academic, and their master lectures for making this Undeception possible.

Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. We're letting the truth. An Undeceptions podcast. Here's the newest member of the Undeceptions team, Alistair Belling, our researcher and writer, and of course, house drummer.