@ https://thehumaneleague.org/article/factory-farming-animal-cruelty
Does God Care What We Eat?
by Tim Miller *
I entered college in 1970 as an atheist. Lots of intense, late night discussions with friends in the dorm turned me agnostic. Experiments, first with pot, later with LSD, then still later back to just pot, left me suffering excruciating anxiety attacks at the end of junior year. Reading the Bible twice through in the summer combined with joining a young evangelicals group as senior year began stabilized my inner life, and I left college believing that the Bible contained the very words of God.
On my way from Texas to Chicago for grad school, I took a quick detour to Calgary Canada where I had grown up. A very close friend from elementary school, Barry, had transitioned from Catholicism to Hinduism in the four years since I had last seen him. He had also become a very convinced vegetarian. Convinced enough that he convinced me.
So in Chicago I explored ultra conservative Christianity and vegetarianism. Both explorations lasted only three years. While I was pretty sure I was finished with evangelicalism at that point, I knew vegetarianism would capture me again someday. Later moves took me to Knoxville TN via San Francisco, and it was in east Tennessee, at the very end of 1988, that I encountered my turn back to vegetarianism in the form of a book by John Robbins, Diet for a New America. So compellingly written is that book that I read it basically in one sitting, and within a single 24 hour period returned to what might now be called plant-forward or plant-based eating. No meat or fish, but I would eat some eggs and dairy products. In the years since, I have gradually moved to veganism. No animal foods, just plants.
The arguments I encountered in John Robbins’ book have only grown more solid in the decades since I read it. He came at his position from three angles: personal health, ecological health, and the health—mental and physical—of animals. The last was what really grabbed my attention at the time. He painted graphically distressing pictures of what animals endure in our various agricultural systems. Nothing about that has changed in the years since except that the evidence grows only more compelling thanks to videography. Add to that the adoption of meat-forward diets by ever more humans worldwide as prosperity spreads, and the distress just compounds.
I won’t unsettle you with gruesome details. Just know that most animals trapped in our agricultural systems are treated so brutally that it’s a mercy their lives are cut short compared to the lives of their cousins in nature. If you have a companion animal, imagine how you would feel if she or he were torn from your arms and forcibly removed to a factory farm.
I also won't go into much detail on why using animals for food is bad for the environment. Let’s just say that it’s not sustainable energy-wise or pollution-wise for most humans on earth to consume much meat on a regular basis. The waste products that spew from factory farms severely impact air, water, and land. If you want information sources for exploring this further, I will be glad to supply you with some…or with many ([email protected]).
Nor will I flog you with the costs exacted on human health by eating lots of animal products. Despite a wealth of disinformation from the animal ag industry and a host of social media influencers dedicated to meat consumption, the evidence has only grown more compelling over the last few decades. Again, contact me if you want information sources. Truly, a staggering number of well conducted medical studies going back 80 years and more confirm what I’m claiming.
Let’s just say that the single most effective thing that any individual human has the actual power to do to enhance his or her physical health, the health of the world’s ecosystems and air, and the health of animals (who feel as much pain and fear as we humans do when subjected to brutalities) is to minimize animal food consumption or go all the way to veganism. Most people can thrive on a well-designed vegan diet but a small percentage must have some, though not many, animal foods to maintain robust health.
And one last point along these lines. I can definitely testify, as can others of you who have already cut down on your animal food consumption, that eating plant foods is extremely pleasurable once you learn how to cook them well and go through a reasonably brief period of adjustment. Even though I grew up eating big amounts of meat at every meal, and loving every minute of it, I do not miss animal foods at all. Well, maybe cheese sometimes, but there are really good vegan cheeses out there these days. And they’re getting better all the time. A little salty, though. But then so is “real” cheese.
What I do want to wrestle with here are some of theological issues around choosing to forgo eating animals. For starters, all lifeforms living on earth today evolved over the last several billion years through natural selection acting on mutations. Biologists have arrived at this neo-Darwinian synthesis after a few centuries of observation, reasoning, and experimentation. The lifeforms that have arisen in this way are amazing, beautiful, and incredibly diverse, but the arising has been enormously difficult for individual creatures.
What wild animals go through is rough, though not as rough as what food animals in factory farms are forced to endure. Nearly, though, at least toward the end of their lives. If we picture God as the creator of this system, and assume that God designed the laws of physics so that the generation of life and lifeforms would entail predation, parasitism, disease, and intermittent deprivation, then who are we to say that it’s such a rough and brutal approach that surely a good God wouldn’t set things up this way? And who am I to suggest that we humans should resort to a different type of system for obtaining the foods we eat?
In other words, if God has set things up so that carnivores hunt and kill members of other species, and parasites hijack the bodies of their victims at great victim expense, and diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses infect, debilitate, and kill every organism that isn’t hunted down by something else or doesn’t starve—well, if that system is good enough for God, then shouldn’t it be good enough for us? Why should we stop killing animals brutally and eating them if God designed nature to work in this very way?
In traditional Christian theology, the fall of Adam and Eve resulted in, among other things, the cursing of nature. Nature was nonviolent in Eden. Animals did not eat each other nor did they eat humans. And humans did not eat animals. After the fall, all of this was reversed, and on rare occasions humans would even eat other humans. God did not care for this, but was “forced” to curse nature because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. The book of Isaiah, in chapters 11 and 65, paints beautiful pictures of a redeemed world in which the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the lion eat straw like the ox. So no predation and parasitism and disease and hunger in the perfect beginning and none in the perfect end. Apparently, when things are as God wishes them to be, the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest and red in tooth and claw no longer obtain.
Can process theology and open and relational theology (P&ORT) borrow some of this beginning-of-time and end-of-time thinking? Most P&ORT people don’t believe there was a literal Eden—at least I don’t think they do and I certainly don’t—and don't believe that Christ will literally descend from the sky, along with the New Jerusalem, and force all things to be new. That’s a thought, isn’t it, that Christ would force things to be nonviolent.
What we do believe is that from the beginning God drew and lured and inspired things in new directions, and by cooperating with the creativity of creatures, God and they (and we) co-created the reality we experience now. And going forward, God is drawing and luring and inspiring that reality in even newer directions toward, I believe God hopes, a reality in which all sentient beings thrive and flourish and none have to be tortured or sacrificed for the thriving of others.
Why does reality have to pass through this very difficult, brutal stage on its way to a state in which all thrive at no cost to others? It’s because God isn’t the only one drawing and luring and inspiring. And God does not have the power, nor the inclination, to force what God wants on everyone else. So God tries to change our minds, to gentle us by using persuasion with beautiful visions of what could be. But we and others vastly different from us, both on earth and throughout the universe, are a difficult lot to gentle. This is so because we arose though natural selection, and its effects linger in our genes and in our minds and in our cultures to a degree that isn’t easy to dislodge. Natural selection isn’t what God chose. It’s what creatures chose. And now it’s up to us to unchoose it.
That won't be easy, but humans are perfectly positioned to start giving it a shot. Members of other species don’t have a choice in what to eat. They eat as their genes and habitats dictate, with scarcity hovering always around the edges (and sometimes in the middles). Humans are omnivores. We can get along on animal foods alone, on plant foods alone, or on a combination. We have struggled our way out of scarcity (if we would but share). We get to choose how to eat and what to eat. We can choose to eat only plant foods and that will radically cut down on the suffering we cause other creatures and only make us thrive all the more in terms of personal health. By doing so, we would be taking a small but meaningful step toward what God is drawing us toward, a reality that does not require violence in order to establish and maintain universal thriving.
But wait, what if plants are sentient? They may possess a form of consciousness so different from ours that we just haven’t recognized it yet. They certainty have been proven to respond to different environmental stimuli. Since we don't know for sure whether or not they’re conscious, if we switch away from animal to plant foods, might we just be switching to torturing different creatures? Well, two things about that.
First of all, in order to produce animal foods, not only do we have to kill animals, we have to feed them lots and lots of plants in order to fatten them up to make them worth killing for food. And it turns out that we have to feed them way more plants to fatten them up than the number of plants we would need to eat to fatten ourselves up. So even if plants can suffer, we would be reducing the total amount of suffering dramatically if we would just restrict our diets to them.
Second, assuming we are not heading quickly toward civilizational collapse, which some feel is making a pretty big assumption, the day of our creating foods in facilities rather than in fields is fast approaching. Meat equivalents are cultured in this way already, though they are not as widely and affordably available as might be optimal, and not in all the forms in which butchered meat is available. Also, many people are reluctant to eat cultured meats, considering them to be Franken-foods. Another few decades and we may be able to produce all our foods this way. Extremely nutritious, ultra delicious, ultra safe foods that do not require killing either plants or animals to obtain. And in the meantime, we can radically reduce animal and plant suffering by decreasing our consumption of animal foods.
That kind of technological solution, which the next few decades may deliver, hints at what God may be trying to draw us toward in the very long term. This is going to get very “out there” and I’m not saying it’s what will happen. I’m just saying that, if we want to envision the conversion of the entire universe to an Eden-like state, it’s interesting and fun to speculate along lines like these.
What are the laws of physics, actually? Once the notion entered human thinking, first perhaps with the Greeks and Romans (and the Chinese?), then in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Enlightenment, the idea settled into a couple of formulations. One was that such laws exist in a sort of Platonic realm, and something causes the material universe to “obey” them. A second was similar, except it was specifically God that makes material reality obey. More recently, some, like those who hold with P&ORT, wonder if the laws are more like patterns that got established, then solidified, through repetition and habit early in the evolution of the universe.
I’m not sure any of these views is really coherent, but it just might be that the laws of physics are not, so to speak, cast in stone, but instead are malleable. This is certainly consistent with P&ORT. The idea might be that God tried to draw the early universe toward a way of functioning that would be free of violence, but early creatures drew it in a different direction and did it consistently and for long enough that the patterns of functioning became entrenched. And now they appear to be law-like due to their entrenchment. But God, of course, is determined that they not be eternal, and never ceases trying to draw and lure creatures toward new and better patterns, patterns like the original ones God envisioned.
If humans would get on board with God’s preferences, and one way we could begin is by reducing our violent patterns—including not eating that which has to be killed—we might be able to help God with God’s aims. Through scientific research, humans and our descendants, both biological and artificial, and intelligent aliens and their descendents throughout the universe, might be able to figure out precisely what the physical laws are and how they can be modified to rewire the functioning of physical reality.
Who knows, perhaps someday intelligent life inspired by God might be able to tame and gentle natural selection and countermand the second law of thermodynamics, and then the universe could continue to evolve new and amazing forms forever, never running down, and with violence never again being needed to make stuff happen. And of course, we may be talking a multiverse here, not just a single universe—God’s everlasting, flourishing community of universes, replete with thriving lifeforms and individuals.
Or maybe that’s all nonsense. But whether it is or isn’t, one compassionate and environmentally sensible step we can take now is to choose to nourish ourselves by employing the least amount of violence we can imagine.
* Tim Miller is a graduate of the doctorate of theology and ministry program in the Open and Relational Theology department at Northwind Theological Seminary. His book The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of Christ and God was published by SacraSage Press in May of 2025. He writes a series of articles on Substack under the title Our Evolving God.