Professor David Clough joins me on Sentientism episode 239. Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.
David Clough is a Professor and Chair in Theology and Applied Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Local Preacher in the Methodist Church.
David is also co-president of the charity CreatureKind, whose mission is “to advance collective liberation — for animals, peoples, and the earth — with a special focus on farmed animals and food systems. We encourage and equip Christians to embody the interdependence of God’s whole Creation by creating educational and worship resources, and curating sacred spaces for spiritual formation, leadership development, and community change-making.” David founded the DefaultVeg project, now part of the work of the Better Food Foundation. From 2018 to 2021 he was Principal Investigator on the Christian Ethics of Farmed Animal Welfare (CEFAW) project.
David is the author of “On Animals” volumes one and two.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips
00:48 Welcome
02:45 David’s Intro
– Christian theology and ethics particularly re: non-human animals
– Writing “On Animals”
– “The moral emergency is the way that we’re making use of other animals for food”
– “That makes very little sense if you care about non-human animals, if you care about human wellbeing or you care about our shared environment”
– “Once you’ve seen the problem… exposing billions of fellow creatures to significant unnecessary suffering… I’ve met first hand one to one a lot of animals who are caught up in this system… it’s very hard to let go of that”
– “What motivates me each day… think of ways to help others glimpse what I’ve seen about the wrongness of what we’re doing and how we might change it”
05:03 What’s Real?
– “Thinking about how to make sense of things was always a big deal for me”
– Raised in the #christian #methodist Church
– Father from a line of Methodist ministers
– “That sense of being formed in a particular tradition and encountering other worlds through that experience of faith”
– “That was never in competition with exercising my rational faculties to the utmost”
– “I always wanted to ask bigger and bigger questions about the world”
– “If the kinds of things Christians believed in… a universe dependent on God… if that made sense… then pushing with our utmost intellectual ability to try to understand better… could never be discovering anything that was foreign to faith.”
– “A faith-based formation and real a commitment to pursuing intellectual and deep philosophical questions… always felt to me to be one and the same project”
– Separate magisteria vs. a more integrated, consistent epistemology?
– “I would find it deeply, intellectually, unsatisfying if I needed to compartmentalise in that kind of way”
– “A lot of the origins of modern scientific inquiry were driven by… a monotheistic account… if we believe in a God who is the author of all of these things then somehow they must make sense… we can’t just experience… a mere chaos”
– “A lot of early modern science… was profoundly religiously motivated… you believe in an order… a created reality that has a meaning and a purpose and a sense”
– Could something change David’s Christian faith? “Yes. In the event that I found there was some deep problem… inconsistency… that could well make me think differently about my faith and probably has influenced how I receive faith”
– “As a Christian theologian I understand my task to be being attentive to all that has been received in Christian texts and traditions… working out what it means to give an account of things… in the light of the reality that we confront today”
– “Whatever faith means today it can’t be the same as what faith was 100 years ago… it’s engaging with new sets of questions”
– “Thinking and rethinking what it means to articulate faith in the context that we experience”
– Experimenting on himself “Could I work through what it would mean to take the death of God seriously… was it psychologically possible… I found it unsustainable.”
– “That’s not an insight into the truth… it’s an insight into my psychological formation”
– “Really wanting to think through these things deeply without any preconditions”
– Different versions of “faith”, some of which are influenced by evidence and reasoning
– “The task of theology… really pushing questions of intellectual inquiry as far as they will go”
– “I think I’m more curious than some of the atheists I bump into… questions of theology want to push further… they’re not happy with… just being able to shrug… want to pursue questions of truth further”
– “There’s lots of theologising that bangs into really hard questions… the Holocaust… doesn’t look like the account we’ve given of God and the world… How then are we going to do theology?… Some people might say ‘that means letting go of the theological task’… other people will say ‘we need to shape our theological thinking in the context of this new realisation…’”
– “…the work of theology as continually open to thinking through those questions of coherence and sense-making”
– Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in the square “was really important… If we’re serious about the death of God… the whole horizon’s been wiped away… That’s Nietzsche’s challenge to atheist accounts like Feuerbach or Marx that thought ‘we could pretty much get rid of God but pretty much carry on as if nothing had happened.”
– “Theologising wants to take seriously how much is dependent on what we believe about God and the world”
16:45 What Matters?
– “All of our thinking and all of our valuing is rooted in some account of how things are”
– “We’re all involved in thinking in dialogue with a particular set of starting points… there is no view from nowhere and there is no ethics from nowhere”
– “We need to be able to give an account of where we’re starting from in order to work out what the reference points… are”
– How strongly linked are naturalistic epistemology and naturalistic ontology? Can you have some credence in the supernatural based on naturalistic evidence and reasoning?
– “Thinking about animals… Peter Singer’s influence has been so strong… there’s a whole generation of people who have learned about their animal ethics from Singer”
– Engaging with Singer in a Christian, utilitarian dialogue “Virtually every time Singer talks about animal ethics he characterises Christianity as the chief ideological cause of all of our oppressions of animals”
– “It’s important to… challenge it… I’m just more sceptical than Peter is… Every time humans have wanted to exercise power over other creatures… they have wanted to find a rationalisation for that… whatever the current ideology is has been the source for that justification.”
– “When Christianity was the dominant part of the thoughtworld it was Christian answers people looked for to justify their exploitation of animals… but in secular… early modern… humanistic… ancient Greek contexts… there are all kinds of alternative accounts of why we can justify human supremacy”
– “It’s the desire to justify that starts… We’ll just take on whatever kind of ideological apparatus we want in order to justify the actions that we find convenient to do”
– JW: “Communities dominated by humanists and atheists and secularists… I can guarantee you, their lack of a Christian worldview has not enlightened them… into the types of all-encompassing non-human animal ethics that you and I share”
– “From early on I probably had the sense that, if the kinds of things we are saying about God are true… the creator of all things… gracious to us and other creatures… the basis of ethics is ‘how are we to live in response?’”
– Different strands within Methodism. Primitive Methodism “engaged with preaching the Gospel in working class communities… pit heads… farm workers… trades union units”
– Walking with David’s grandfather at 7-8 years old near a golf course and being challenged for walking on private land. “My grandfather shouts back, without any hesitation, ‘The Earth is the Lord’s!’”
– “He [David’s grandfather] just lived with this very real sense that he knew a truth about things through his religious formation that has really significant practical implications… He would drive round with a loud-hailer on the top of his car advocating for pacifism in the middle of the second world war in Portsmouth, a naval centre”
– “That sense that faith gave you a vision… a responsibility to be saying things even when they were unpopular”
– Anti-nuclear weapons activism and CND
– “You might have a view of things, ethically, that not everyone shares, but was important to be holding on to and representing… that Methodist non-conformist heritage”
– “Both what might matter ethically but also a responsibility to be active”
– “A sense of fairness… something I experienced very deeply as a child and an adolescent… that sense of some things being deeply wrong with the world that I encountered”
– “Now… the deep truth behind that… a sense… a faith in being a beloved creature of God alongside other beloved creatures of God… God’s love for the world… what it might mean to be responsible to that gracious love, not just for oneself… but for all creatures that one is living alongside”
– “What would it mean to live in accordance with the love of the God that we confess for ourselves and all other creatures?”
– Divine Command Theory vs. responding to the love of God
– Karl Bart’s theology “Karl Bart did do his ethics through this idea of divine command… to try to secure the possibility that, in ethics, we might need to deal with something radically other than our own established set of preferences and interests”
– “He would also say that the command comes to us as the command of our deepest, most loving friend… an external demand but not a demand that was normally at odds with our own interests… a deep fittingness”
– “I don’t lean on command… I talk instead primarily about ethics as determining how to respond to what we have received”
– “That echoes with some of what you’re setting out within Sentientism… a response to how things are… the reality of things”
– “If you exist in a thoughtworld where you confess all things are dependent on this being God who loved the world into being and wills the flourishing of all kinds of creatures, then ethics and what’s demanded of us becomes a response to taking seriously what it means to look around the world with that faith-based lens”
– “Once seen all of these fellow creatures, humans, non-human animals, plants, rivers, mountains, stars… once you’ve recognised them all as part of this creation that God loved into being… what is demanded from you in response is not so much a divine order… it’s ‘what does this call for from you?’”
– “You discover the wounded rabbit by the side of the road… it’s not that God is instructing you… it’s just that once you see that fellow creature… you respond in love… the ethical demand is already clear”
– Hagiographies of the saints “I’m very struck by how many of those related to the extension of compassion… St. Kevin and the blackbird… a blackbird began to make her nest on one of his hands because he’d been praying for so long… he thought he should leave his hand there… until the chicks flew away”
– “Christian holiness belongs to a radical recognition of the interests of all God’s creatures and being radically prepared to being attentive to what fellow creatures need from us… beyond kin group or even species boundaries… there need to be no boundaries”
– JW: The positive compassionate aspects of some types religious worldviews, but the exclusionary or harsh ethics of some other types of religious worldviews “ingroup/outgroup… we are the special ones… discrimination… even the concept of hell seems arbitrarily brutal to many people”
– “Religion gets abused in order to justify exploitation… where religion has been a powerful social force and people have wanted to justify bad things, then religion is very widely used to justify them… Because it’s such a powerful tool of social formation and values transmission…”
– “Non-religious traditions of thought have also been weaponised in very similar ways”
– “I’m actively concerned about the ways that Christianity and other faith traditions are used to inculcate hate and intolerance and justify immoral action”
– “Previous [Sentientism] guests… who would be motivated to reject particular forms of religion because of what they’ve experienced… I’d be very likely to be in sympathy… when people talk about the God that they disbelieve in [who motivates immorality]… yes I also don’t believe in that God.”
– “The next question… does that mean we give up on this whole thing or do we instead try to work for expressions of faith that draw on… what is best and most important about these traditions?”
– “Where we try to abolish religious institutions… there is either a vacuum of organisations able to… get people to meet and shape values… or that the institutions that replace religious institutions don’t turn out to be any more reliable”
– “What keeps me in the church today… I think there are many insights among fellow Christians… that are really direly needed in the world that we confront. My best sense of what it makes sense for me to do is to be working within religious communities… making the case for a faith that’s competent to respond to the pressing questions of our time”
– “I’m at least as concerned as your previous guests about the ways my faith and the faith of others have been used in problematic ways”
40:36 Who Matters?
– Seeing cruelty as a teenager “A classmate presented on these appalling LD50 tests for toxicity… by increasing its concentration until half the population of rabbits die… I remember that gut sense… a horrific thing… I’m scandalised by it”
– John Wesley, the founder of Methodism “…was unusually concerned as an 18th Century figure for animals and for the suffering of animals… The General Deliverance… ‘and look at all the cruelties that we’re visiting on animals in the street every day… we ought to be especially concerned’”
– “Methodists… alongside other non-conformists and other Christians, in British history, were drawing attention to the suffering of animals in significant ways”
– Samuel Johnson reports on someone freeing an insect through a window, to then be told “They’re going all Methodist”
– “The Methodist must have been quite infamous for an irrational, eccentric concern, even for tiny creatures”
– “That wasn’t preached in the Methodist church I grew up in… I do wonder if there was something in the Methodist DNA that made be susceptible to concerns about the suffering of others”
– Going to University “It seemed like it was a completely obvious choice… a menu that required the suffering and death of animals and a menu that didn’t, it just seemed like a morally obvious thing”
– “I turned vegetarian when I was 18 and it took a bit longer to make the connections with veganism… I’ve been vegan for at least the last 20 years”
– “That sense of responsibility to fellow creatures turned into an ethical obligation once I began to make those connections…”
– “This non-conformist religious formation… the idea that how you lived mattered… it mattered even when it was inconvenient or difficult… living in the way that… you were called to”
– A common Christian response “didn’t God make the animals for humans to use?”
– “My response is ‘Where does it say that in the Bible?’”
– “Christians are monotheists… one God is the creator of all creatures… everything that exists…”
– 1st Century arguments against Gnostic arguments “that the world was a nasty place and that we ought to try to escape from it to a better spiritual reality”
– “Orthodox Christian theologians were arguing against that for the goodness of creation”
– “God is good… the creation that God has made is good… a fundamental theological affirmation of the goodness of the creation in which we exist”
– The 1st Chapter of Genesis: “All creatures are dependent on God. God brings them into being, declares them good and wills their flourishing. That’s the opening statement of the Bible”
– “I don’t interpret that in a way that’s at odds with an evolutionary account of the origins of life… not a day by day description, but a way of representing the dependence and the relationship of creatures upon God in poetic terms”
– “Those early chapters… being received by an agrarian community that is depending on animals for food… when they think about what must have been the case when the world, began they think about an existence in which humans and other animals weren’t eating other animals for food”
– “Genesis 1 sets out an idea of humans and other animals eating plants to get by”
– “That deep, religious sense that there’s something not quite right about a life in which we’re taking the lives of other animals in order to get by”
– The Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Hebrew Bible: “Looking forward… The Book of Isaiah… When the messiah comes, there will be peace between humans and other animals and between all kinds of animals. The lion will lie down with the lamb.”
– “This middle that we’re living in, in which humans are using, killing other animals for food, there’s something second best about that”
– “When Gods will was fully done and will be fully done, that will no longer be the case”
– “Eating animals was controversial, both in… The Old Testament and in The New Testament… everyday practice didn’t seem like a good fit for what religious people were confessing about their beliefs in God”
– “Right through scripture there’s really strong affirmations that God loves and cares about and provides for all kinds of creatures”
– The Book of Jobe “’Don’t you realise that this universe that I’ve created is so much bigger than you are’… this positioning of the human within this huge landscape of creation”
– Jesus’ teaching: “He says ‘You know that God cares for even the falling of a single sparrow… how much more will God care for you?’… Christians have often made the mistake of rushing to the end of that teaching without really realising the radicality of the beginning”
– “I’m less interested in worries about the relative value of humans and sparrows… than to say what would it mean to really live in a way that respected God’s care for even the humblest of creatures…”
– “That sense of compassion for all of these fellow creatures seems to me a non-negotiable part of what it means to think Christianly about the world”
– “There are lots of times when humans have been dependent on killing animals for food… while we can’t always live peaceably alongside creatures… we should never subject fellow creatures to suffering unnecessarily”
– “A widespread Christian consensus from medieval times until the early modern period was that humans have the right to use animals for what’s necessary, but they shouldn’t be subjecting them to unnecessary cruelty”
– “That, in the context that we live in today, becomes a very radical challenge once we begin to realise it’s not necessary in almost every context now to be using animals for food”
– The Lisa Kemmerer Sentientism episode
– Wild animal ethics JW: “If creation is good… the wild is substantially unimpacted by humans… nature is good… how do we engage with the very visceral reality… while there’s a lot of joy… there’s also a lot of horror and suffering and pain too…”
– The problems of evil and suffering for theism
– A theology less focused on “origins and endings and complete rational coherence”
– “Prepared to start in the middle of things… try and work out what’s going on and what follows from what we care about”
– “Wild animal suffering… I would see that in a very similar way to the suffering we see among human beings… … a really terrible thing… there’s a messy range of reasons… some are amenable to action and others less so”
– “The first concern we ought to have is not to give a causal explanation… but what is ethically demanded of us in response… in relation to… wild animal suffering… that would be my primary motivation as well – not to try and find an explanation of why it is the gazelle is suffering… but thinking where am I called to intervene and have an impact”
– “The lion vs. the gazelle… the lion is going to starve… [or] the gazelle is not going to survive… I don’t think we have a reason to prefer… the survival of one over another… we might step back and lament”
– “Where we do have an obvious ethical responsibility is the animal lives that are directly under our control”
– “I think that’s [focusing on wild animal suffering] a very, very problematic thing to be spending much time over when we’ve almost eradicated all the wild spaces where animals get to live”
– “We’ve just got a tiny space of wild nature left. The last thing I think we should be doing is trying to intervene to impose views of how that should be managed.”
– “Instead, we need to be making more space for wild nature… the primary way we’re going to do that is by subjecting fewer animals to live in industrial animal agriculture”
– “Let’s put our farms in order before we worry about what lions are doing to gazelles”
– Going beyond sentience to biocentrism or ecocentrism
– People using “the circle of life” or the glory of God’s creation (nature is good so predation is good) to justify human predation of non-human animals through animal farming
– Do sentient beings still have a distinctive importance in a wider “God’s creation”?
– Working to “deconstruct some ways in which we differentiated between humans and other kinds of animals”
– “That’s given me quite a strong allergy to creating binary categories with creatures on one side that matter and creatures on the other that don’t”
– A worry from some Christians “Are you saying that we shouldn’t really care about humans so much any more… are we flattening this out”
– “No, it’s appropriate to attend to what our responsibilities to fellow humans are morally but that doesn’t exhaust our moral responsibilities”
– “We could then think about different kinds of non-human animal creatures and pay attention to what they need to flourish and the extent to which we can enable or block that flourishing… that matters too.”
– “Sentience is one thing we ought to be concerned about… but we need a pluralistic account of how other creatures matter… consciousness or sentience… might not be the end of how we think morally about more than human creatures”
– “The category of animals… this myriad complexity”
– “The boundary between animal and non-animal is fuzzy as well… slime molds…”
– “This category of creaturely flourishing… if God cares about the flourishing of the creatures God’s made… Christians should care about that too… think about how far they can enable the flourishing of fellow humans, fellow non-human animals and fellow non-animal creatures too”
– Albert Schweitzer’s concept of “reverence for life”
– “It’s not a morally neutral act to just wander past a hedgerow and strike at plants… without any good reason… respect for life might have a particular relevance [even beyond sentience]”
– “I’m motivated to think even beyond that to… the boundary between living and non-living as well… in some sense that’s a modern invention”
– “There are both Biblical worldviews and indigenous worldviews that aren’t terribly interested in that living/non-living division”
– “Creatures… like mountains or rivers… it begins to be reasonably clear that we could wrong a mountain by mining it… a river by dumping effluent from poultry farms…”
– “I don’t think we need an account of animal ethics that depends on the denial of moral responsibility beyond the human”
– Tom Regan’s animal rights account: “instead of a human/non-human bright line we need an animal/non-animal bright line in order to justify special treatment of everything within that line and it not really mattering what we do with anything outside… I don’t think that’s plausible”
– “I don’t think that means a flattening… we can be attentive to the needs of particular kinds of creatures across that expanse”
– “I think lots of things matter morally”
– A conversation with David’s daughter at 7-8 yrs old “Daddy, why do some people eat animals? [Maybe because they say lions eat gazelles]… Yes, but Daddy lions don’t have the choice.”
– AI sentience and moral patiency?
– “I think we should be curious and open to the possibility of discovering other kinds of creatures for whom their lives matter. At the moment I don’t think large language models… is yet a plausible candidate for… needing moral regard”
– “By not being prepared to give the possibility of AI the benefit of the doubt we may be impeding basic human responses…”
– If we come to think it’s OK to be abusive to humanoid robots that could impact how we treat other humans
01:17:33 A Better World?
– “A Christian thoughtworld is one way of recognising a tension between the world as we experience it and the world as it could and should be”
– “Biblical visions… origins and futures in which the will of God is fully done… a powerful motivation… that sense of a gap”
– “The Kingdom of God… in a sense already present and coming in the future… a version of that utopian structure”
– Writing “On Animals” V1 and V2 “surveying how humans are currently treating other kinds of animals… food… textiles… labour… research… entertainment… companions… dealings with wild animals.”
– “The moral emergency of all of that in terms of its scale and impact was the way we use animals for food”
– “The chief threat to the viability of wild animal populations was the increasing grabbing of land for increasing numbers of farmed animals… or growing fodder for them”
– “What has encouraged me… it doesn’t really matter if you care about farmed animals… wild animals… human wellbeing… climate crisis… biodiversity crisis… water crisis… whatever you care about, industrial animal agriculture… is a key problem”
– “Who does this practice actually benefit, if it’s disastrous for animals… humans… and the environment?”
– “It’s generating profits for a small number of people in a very highly concentrated industry, 4 or 5 major meat companies… shareholders… executives… well-funded lobbyists… it’s benefitting virtually nobody else”
– JW: “The marketers and the PR agents… deserve all of the gold medals because they are selling at a mass scale to a population that is horrified by the basic practices of their industry.”
– “It’s not the kind of problem that the only kind of thing you can do is sign a petition… we are implicated in in ordinary, everyday life”
– Helping institutions change to plant-based defaults for the food they serve “minimal, moral response of institutions”
– “Changing the defaults feels like a modest step… studies show… you reduce consumption of animal products by about 80%”
– Experiments on US campuses by Selecta the contract caterer “they got big reductions”
– “Has the potential to go mainstream… makes really significant shifts in consumption practical”
– “A morally obvious case… plus a practical strategy for achieving significant change… one obvious part of a step towards a better future”
– “When I visit broiler chicken sites… it’s very clear that their business is very tightly tied to consumer demand”
– “Their consumption choices, especially if they’re part of institutions… have direct effects on the numbers of animals being dragged into these horrific systems”
– The Creature Kind initiative “What would it mean to get this message out to Christians at large?”: DefaultVeg congregations, Christian leadership, education
– “I would really like for people who are motivated to care about this stuff for religious or non-religious reasons to be looking for ways to collaborate on practical initiatives”
– Talking to Peter Singer: “Look Peter, I don’t think you’re going to make Christians kinder to animals if you tell them to give up on the Bible and their faith first. Let’s look for ways of building bridges and finding ways to engage people wherever they are in religious or secular contexts with how the things that they’re committed to might point them to a different practice in relation to animals.”
01:28:25 Follow David
– David on BlueSky
– David at Aberdeen University
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop. Sentientism is proud to now be part of the iRoar podcast network – go check out some of the other wonderful podcasts there.