Category Archives: Uncategorized

Faith, the Other F-Word? (2 of 2)

Posted on by

What does faith mean? Does it mean belief firmly grounded in evidence? That’s the definition in vogue among many conservative apologists (and discussed in part 1). But there’s another definition that is also popular.

Faith definition 2

If you have any familiarity with Christianity, you know that this definition doesn’t cover the spectrum. “Faith” is sometimes defined to have a very different relationship with evidence.

Faith definition 2: belief held not primarily because of evidence and little shaken in the face of contrary evidence; that is, belief neither supported nor undercut by evidence. This would be a belief that can’t be shaken by a change in evidence (such as, “I won’t give up my faith in Jesus for any reason”). Evidence for one’s belief can be nonexistent, or it can actually oppose one’s belief (as in blind faith), or evidence can simply be insufficient to firmly ground the belief.

Again, let’s start with the Bible to find support for this evidence-less faith:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. . . . And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him (Hebrews 11:1–6).

Then Jesus told [Doubting Thomas], “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.” (John 20:29)

The Hebrews passage has no need of evidence, and the statement of Jesus celebrates those who believe despite a lack of evidence.

Let’s check in with some early church fathers.

If you chance upon anything [in Scripture] that does not seem to be true, you must not conclude that the sacred writer made a mistake; rather your attitude should be: the manuscript is faulty, or the version is not accurate, or you yourself do not understand the matter. (Augustine)

[I don’t understand to believe but rather] I believe to understand. (Anselm of Canterbury)

Now consider some modern sources. Kurt Wise has a PhD in geology from Harvard, and yet he’s a young-earth Creationist. In high school he used scissors to cut from a Bible everything that science concluded couldn’t be interpreted literally. He said about the resulting corrected Bible, “I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two.”

But his definition of faith doesn’t follow the evidence:

If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.

William Lane Craig’s gullible acceptance of magic rather than evidence as the ultimate authority is equally disturbing:

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. (Reasonable Faith [Crossway, 1994] p. 36)

We can see both definitions of “faith” in Geisler and Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. In part 1, we saw how they celebrate evidence when they think they have it. But the very title of their book denigrates “faith” as a leap unsupported by evidence. They say:

The less evidence you have for your position, the more faith you need to believe it (and vice versa). Faith covers a gap in knowledge. (p. 26)

Richard Dawkins once challenged Kenneth Miller’s justification for holding some religious belief (both men are biologists, but Miller is Catholic). Miller replied, “There’s a reason it’s called faith!” (rather than “certainty”).

Finally, consider a faith that has real-world consequences. Though religion wasn’t involved, it seems faith rather than physics guided a hot-coal-walking exercise put on by motivational speaker Tony Robbins in 2012. Twenty-one people were treated for burns.

Snake handlers believe that Jesus said about them, “In my name . . . they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all” (Mark 16:17–18) despite the very clear evidence to the contrary. Pastor Mark Wolford died from a snakebite in 2012, and he had watched his father die from the same thing. Pastor Jamie Coots refused medical treatment for a snakebite in 2014 and also died. If anyone knew that God doesn’t protect believers from snakebite it was him, since that was his ninth snakebite.

Christian commentary

Christian scholars grope around as they try to justify belief without evidence.

John Warwick Montgomery suggests crossing a busy street as a parallel. You never have absolute certainty of your safety when you cross a street. Instead, you wait until you have sufficient confidence, then you cross. And then, you don’t just take 99 percent of yourself across (to match your degree of confidence in the safety of the trip); you take all of yourself. Faith jumps the gap, both for busy streets and for Jesus.

Another example is marriage. You don’t have certainty that the Bible is true, but you don’t have certainty that you’ve picked the right marriage partner, either.

Nope. Neither example makes the Christian case. Crossing a street is always based on evidence. You look for good evidence that it’s safe, and you reconsider your conclusion if new evidence comes in. You also weigh evidence in the search for a compatible mate. In the same way, we follow the evidence for the reliability of the Bible as well—and find very little, not enough to support its enormous claims.

Theologian Alvin Plantinga has an interesting angle:

No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Is there a reason to believe that there’s an even number of stars? No. An odd number? No. What about God—is there reason to think that he exists? No. That he doesn’t? Yes! You can throw up your hands in the case of the number of stars because it’s impossible to answer—agnosticism (or, more likely, apathy) is an appropriate response. But the data is in for God, and that hypothesis fails for lack of evidence, just like the leprechaun and Zeus hypotheses. (More on Plantinga’s number-of-stars puzzle here.)

Anselm said, “I believe to understand,” but that won’t work for me. If God exists, he gave me this big brain to use. It would be impolite to ignore its objections or be a Stepford wife. If God exists, he’d be happy to see me challenging empty Christian claims.

Pick a definition and stick with it

Lots of words in English have multiple definitions, even opposite definitions. Dust means to clean up dust (wiping with a cloth) or to add in a dust-like manner (dusting a cake with powdered sugar). Screen means to broadcast for everyone to see (a TV station screens a program) or to conceal (screening the baby from the sun). Cleave can mean to cling to or to split.

And as we’ve seen, faith also has two opposite definitions: belief well grounded in evidence (“I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow”) or belief uninterested in evidence (believing as your heart speaks to you). Using the latter definition, Christians might speak with unjustified confidence about what heaven is like and who’s going there, what message God sent with a recent disaster, who’s on God’s naughty list, and so on.

Christians, to help you make your own arguments more clearly and honestly, let me suggest some word hygiene. Use trust to mean evidence-based belief, belief in accord with the evidence and which will change as the evidence changes. Use faith to mean belief not primarily supported by evidence and which is not shaken by contrary evidence.

Each word has its place. Be consistent. Sloppy usage only confuses your message and yourself.

Continue: How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

Faith and science are two methods humans use
to learn about the world around them.
One works, one doesn’t.
— seen on the internet

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/13/16.)

Image from Paolo Crosetto (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

.

Faith, the Other F-Word?

Posted on by

What is faith? Is it belief in accord with the evidence? Is it belief regardless of the evidence? Something else? Faith is frustratingly defined in different ways. Let’s try to untangle the confusion, some of which I suspect is deliberate.

Faith and Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa’s troubled relationship with faith is well known. She was celebrated by society but ignored by God. About her prayer life, she wrote of “silence and emptiness.” She described her own life as “darkness,” “loneliness,” and “torture” and compared it to hell. An editor at a Jesuit magazine said, “I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented.”

And yet one biographer said about this dysfunctional life, “Her church regarded her perseverance in the absence of a sense of divine response as perhaps her most heroic act of faith.”

Heroic? When God doesn’t answer, is he inscrutable or just not there? Was Teresa displaying admirable perseverance or foolish futility? This persistence is laudable only in a world where religion celebrates faith over evidence.

For being so widely used, the definition of “faith” can be slippery. Let’s consider the two popular definitions, each staking out a different relationship with evidence.

Faith definition 1

Everyone wants good reasons supporting their beliefs—or at least to appear that way. Many Christians use the following definition for “faith.”

Faith definition 1: evidence-based belief; that is, belief that follows from the evidence. For example, you might have faith in your car’s reliability because it’s done a great job so far, but that faith will fade if it begins to act up. I would call this “trust,” and many Christians are fine with that—they just say that “faith” and “trust” are synonyms.

The Bible has plenty of examples where evidence backs up belief.

  • Elijah challenged the 450 prophets of Baal to a bake-off where the first one to get his sacrifice lit by heavenly fire gets to execute the others (1 Kings 18).
  • An angry crowd came to Gideon’s house after he destroyed an altar to Baal. Gideon’s father told them, “If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar” (Judges 6:31).
  • “After his suffering, [Jesus] presented himself to [the apostles] and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive” (Acts 1:3).
  • Jesus did his miracles in part to prove his divinity. “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves” (John 14:11).

This conflating of faith with trust is popular among modern apologists as well.

  • Mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox said, “Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence.”
  • Christian podcaster Jim Wallace said that faith is “trusting the best inference from the evidence.”
  • Presbyterian leader A. A. Hodge said, “Faith must have adequate evidence, else it is mere superstition.”

Norm Geisler and Frank Turek in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist said that evidence backs up Christian claims:

[For many nonbelievers] it’s not that they don’t have evidence to believe, it’s that they don’t want to believe. (p. 30)

God has provided enough evidence in this life to convince anyone willing to believe, yet he has also left some ambiguity so as not to compel the unwilling. (p. 31)

(My post responding to Geisler and Turek is here.)

But there’s another definition of faith, which also finds support in the Bible, the works of the early church fathers, and modern Christians. That’s discussed in part 2.

Faith is the excuse people give
when they don’t have a good reason.
— Matt Dillahunty, Atheist Experience

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/13/16.)
.

Counterintuitive Puzzles that Should Be Easy

Posted on by

Simple puzzles can give insight into how our brains work.

Our brains don’t work as well as we might think. We have a poor intuitive grasp of probability (more here and here). We also have lots of inherent biases. For example: new information to correct a misperception can backfire (more here and here), cementing a false belief more strongly. And our memories are unreliable (more here and here).

3 easy puzzles

These puzzles were designed to reveal how our brains are fallible. Write your answers so you can check them below. First, some very easy ones.

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

These questions don’t take a lot of thought. Indeed, an intuitive answer pops instantly to mind for some people. How confident are you in your answers?

3 more, about as easy

4. If you’re running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in?

5. A farmer had 15 sheep and all but 8 died. How many are left?

6. Emily’s father has three daughters. The first two are named April and May. What is the third daughter’s name?

The last 3, slightly harder

These last three require more thought.

7. “You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?”

8. You have a rope around an earth-sized sphere at the equator. That makes it about 40,075,160 meters in length. Now you increase the rope length by 10 meters uniformly around the globe so that it’s suspended over the surface equally. What is the gap between the surface of the sphere and the rope?

9. You have 100 pounds of potatoes, which are 99% water by weight. You let them dehydrate until they’re 98% water. Now how much do they weigh?

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/6/16.)

Image from hans-juergen (license CC BY-ND 2.0)

Answers on the next page:

Pages: 1 2

Wanna Die for Jesus? (2 of 2)

Posted on by

Let’s conclude our look at the perplexing idea that Jesus would want you to die for him or at least be willing to (part 1). This idea comes from “Dying for Jesus” by David Mills.

There’s an important symmetry. (Or is there?)

I’m groping for the logic here. Maybe . . . Jesus was willing to die for you, so you should be willing to reciprocate? That might work if you and Jesus were in the same infantry unit. You’d risk your life to protect your buddies, and you’d expect them to do the same. But how does that make sense when Jesus is invulnerable? If you’re in the same platoon as Superman, what you’d never think is, “He’d risk his life for me, so I’ll do the same for him.”

If I sacrificed my life for Jesus, I’d be dead. When Jesus “sacrificed” for me, he wasn’t really dead, since he popped back to life in a day and a half. (More on how Jesus’s crucifixion doesn’t make sense here.)

Where is this die-for-each-other symmetry in the Bible? The closest I can find is Paul encouraging Christians to “[offer] your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), but this is a basically a call to dedicate one’s life to God. That’s quite different from dying.

You’ve probably heard the mindless Christian aphorism, “God never gives you more than you can handle.” The idea is that if you ever reach your limit of anguish, God will ensure that conditions don’t get worse, but there’s no evidence for this. It’s wishful thinking. Christians die painful, tragic deaths just like anyone else. Ask the people who commit suicide if they’ve been given more than they can handle.

Who does this make Jesus look like?

Dying for Jesus makes so little sense that I wonder if they’re imagining themselves in the role of Isaac, making this just a perverse loyalty test. An angel will zoom down at the last minute, right? But this turns Jesus into Jim Jones. Close to a thousand followers in Jones’ crazy jungle cult were occasionally forced awake in the middle of the night and ordered to drink what they were told was poison. After 45 minutes, they were told that it wasn’t, that it had been a loyalty test, and they were sent back to bed. This training disciplined them to accept suicide when the time eventually came. How can this be any parallel to the religion of a loving god? Is Christian judgment this distorted?

This is persecution porn. Christians in the U.S. are so persecuted, amirite brother? One of the comments to Mills’ article quoted early church father Tertullian: “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” For Tertullian, martyrdom was a thing. It’s not for Christians in America today, but if they want to imagine how tough it is for Christians today, they can do so without much consequence. We live in a society with airbags that coddles Christians, allowing them their fantasy. Christians can be like the person who thinks that sitcoms are real or that food comes from the back of the grocery store.

Been asked to die for Jesus lately?

Christians today aren’t asked to die for Jesus, but no thanks are due Jesus. Church-state separation is why Christians of the wrong denomination (or indeed anyone with any worldview) aren’t tortured to death in the West today.

Remember Edmund Campion from part 1. He returned to England as a Catholic priest in 1580 and conducted services in secret, which was very illegal in Elizabethan times. He was captured, convicted of sedition, and executed slowly. With church-state separation in England, Campion the martyr would’ve been Campion the footnote of history.

The lesson of Campion’s story isn’t “What marvelous devotion to the Lord!” or “That’s why you should be Catholic and not Anglican.” No, the lesson is that free speech shouldn’t be a capital crime. Anyone moved by Campion’s story should ensure it doesn’t happen again by working to keep church and state separate. In the U.S., that protection comes from the First Amendment to the Constitution. If you want to declare yourself for Jesus in the presence of men (see Matthew 10:32–3), you’re welcome to. Thanks, First Amendment.

Let’s be clear on the hero in this story. It’s not Jesus. Jesus didn’t swoop in to save Campion. The hero is secular government. In a secular society, non-believers as well as believers of all kinds are allowed to think and believe as they choose.

Note also that this gives no evidence for the correctness of the claims of Christianity. There’s not even a claim that Campion received any special revelation or confirmation to provide some sort of comfort that he’d backed the right horse. The opposite is true, because this was a missed opportunity for Jesus. He not only failed to tell English society the correct resolution of the Campion matter, he didn’t bother to step in to resolve the other Christian conflicts—the Thirty Years War, the Crusades in the Middle East, the Albigensian Crusade in France, the Inquisition, and so on.

Wrapup

Mills gives this summary.

We have one way of knowing (as much as we can) if we would go all the way to death in serving Jesus. . . .

[Campion] practiced being faithful, in little things and big things. He grew both in his love for his Lord and his ability to say no to the world. When the persecutors threatened to kill him, he loved Jesus too much and was too well-trained to give in.

It’s true that Christians killed other Christians by the millions in the not-so-distant past, but that’s where Mills’ thinking is stuck. Don’t celebrate Edmund Campion dealing with an inhuman situation brought about by religion. Rather, celebrate modern secular democracies that make that situation inconceivable.

Common sense is not a gift, it’s a punishment.
Because you have to deal with everyone who doesn’t have it.
— George Bernard Shaw

.

Image from jimmy brown (license CC BY 2.0)
.

Wanna Die for Jesus?

Posted on by

Would you die for Jesus? That’s the question asked to Christians in a recent article from the online ministry The Stream.

But hold on . . . does Jesus want Christians to die for him? What sense does it make for ordinary mortals like us to die for an immortal god? Who could possibly benefit? How could such a sacrifice possibly inform a god who already knows everything?

Let’s try to make sense of “Dying for Jesus” by David Mills.

Two contemporary lives that ended very differently

Mills illustrates serious devotion to Jesus through the lives of two accomplished men of Elizabethan England. The first was Tobias Matthew, who become the Archbishop of York in the Church of England and died in 1628 at the age of 81.

The second was Edmund Campion. Though he was a few years older than Matthew, the two were contemporaries at Oxford. Campion followed a different path. At age 24, he became an Anglican deacon, but he held Catholic views and soon had to retreat from public view, leaving England for Ireland and then the Continent. He became a Jesuit and, at age 40, returned to England to preach. At the time, preaching Catholicism was treason, and he held services in secret. He was soon captured and put in the Tower of London. When he acknowledged Elizabeth as the queen, showing that he had no goal of replacing her with a Catholic monarch, he was offered freedom and the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. He refused because he couldn’t renounce his Catholicism. He was tried, convicted of sedition, and executed painfully.

Mills’ point is that this is what true devotion to Jesus looks like.

God’s perfect plan

The article includes a bit of atheist wit. Under a painting of Christians being fed to lions in a coliseum is the line, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

(Which reminds me of another clever meme I saw at The Stream, to which I responded in this post: Prayer: Because Jesus Already Knows What You Want, He Just Wants to Hear You Beg.)

On the question of Christian martyrdom, Mills asks if your faith is strong enough that you’d die for Jesus. Would you have the mental strength of Edmund Campion?

And there’s the problem: where did this concept of dying for Jesus (rather than the other way around) come from?

In three gospels, Jesus told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him. That might mean living a life that sets a good example, sharing the Good News when the opportunity presents itself, and so on. But where does martyrdom fit in? Both testaments of the Bible make clear that God protects the righteous.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life (Psalm 121:7).

No harm overtakes the righteous, but the wicked have their fill of trouble (Proverbs 12:21).

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them (1 John 5:18).

(Yes, there are also verses that promise persecution. One example is 1 Peter 4:12: “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you.” The Bible, as usual, can be used to argue both sides. To any Christian who offers that argument, I say: you’re right; you win—the Bible is contradictory.)

Not only will no harm come to these people, but much good is promised in this life, not just in the hereafter.

[God said:] Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it (Malachi 3:10).

[Jesus said:] No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (Mark 10:29–30).

Where in the Bible is the demand to die for Jesus? Endure difficulties for the truth, sure, but die?

It’s all about Jesus’s honor

Mills’ point is that Christians have taken that first step already by committing to Jesus, but they must practice daily. Take out the Jesus part, and it sounds good to me. Mills said:

Do we walk the second mile, turn the other cheek, forgive those who hurt us, stand up for others who need our help, stand with Jesus when the world demands we give Him up?

[You try to avoid] complaining to yourself about your spouse or children when they annoy you. And cheerfully doing the little things for them you wish they’d do themselves.

Be a decent person—I get it. Things go off the rails, however, with his conclusion:

And most important, standing up for Jesus when you need to. That’s the best training and the best test. Will you really face the lions if you can’t face the conceited atheist at the office?

Being a good person is important, but defending Jesus’s honor is more important? Let me suggest instead that we focus on what we know exists (you and your interactions with family, friends, and others) as our first priority and let the mythology prove its worth before we worry too much about it.

If Jesus’s honor is being defamed, why can’t he deal with that himself? He could do a much better job. And where’s the evidence? Why isn’t Jesus’s good name as widely accepted as that the sky on a clear day is blue?

Take another example: suppose a gunman said to you, “I say your father is a rotten scoundrel. Contradict me, and I’ll kill you!” What would you do? What would your father want you to do? No father worth the title would consider his own honor to be more important than your life. I respond to another Christian apologist and explore the question of a gunman asking, “Are you a Christian?” here.

And why are we worrying about something so petty as someone’s honor anyway? That’s the last thing an actual god would want your help with.

Think about this idea of dying for Jesus. Suppose you were a king. Would you accept a barricade of three-year-old children or puppies sacrificing their lives for, not your life, but your honor? What heroes need ordinary people to defend their honor or would want to test the allegiance of their followers?

(More on the illogic of all-wise gods needing worship here and on how the Great Commission doesn’t apply to you here.)

Conclusion in part 2.

Quantum Hermeneutics
n. The principle of biblical interpretation
whereby a verse changes meaning
each time an inconsistency is discovered,
thereby rendering it impossible to directly observe a mistake.
— Neil Carter

.

Image from engine ekyurt (free-use license)
.

Can a Moral Person Eat Meat?

Posted on by

Morality changes, and we shake our heads in disbelief at the conditions that Western society tolerated just a century or two ago—slavery, child labor, mental hospitals as warehouses, voting for white men only, and so on. But let’s not pretend that we’ve now got it all figured out. A century in our future, society might look back on our world in disbelief at the moral errors (from their standpoint) that we found acceptable. Raising animals and then killing and eating them may be one of these moral errors.

There is a solution: cultured meat.

The moral issue

How many of us know someone who studied where meat comes from or took a tour of a slaughterhouse and became a vegetarian as a result? Some cows, chickens, and pigs live fairly natural lives before they are killed for meat, but millions don’t.

I eat meat. What’s my moral excuse? If pressed, I’d argue with a combination of “I enjoy eating meat” and “Yeah, but everyone else is doing it.” There is a health benefit—getting the right amino acid mix is easy from meat, but from plants it requires some effort—but that is easily resolved. By eating meat, I’m taking the easy route, but I don’t have much of a moral defense.

Five years ago, I listened to a Sam Harris interview with Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats, one of the first companies working on cultured meat. I’ll review that interview and summarize what’s happened since.

The environmental issues

The magnitude of the environmental problem is as shocking as the moral one.

  • Land use. Pastureland (land used for open grazing as well as that used to raise crops for livestock) is one quarter of the earth’s land area (Annenberg). “Only about 20 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used to produce food that is eaten directly by people, while about four times as much is used to feed livestock” (Union of Concerned Scientists). Cultured meat may use 98% less land.
  • Greenhouse gases. Cows produce a lot of methane. The agriculture contribution to worldwide greenhouse gases is 15% (UN FAO). Cultured meat may reduce that by 95%.
  • Deforestation. The need for more pastureland is a major driver of deforestation (Union of Concerned Scientists).
  • Water use. “The consumption of animal products contributes to more than one-quarter of the water footprint of humanity.” Source
  • The environmental impact of beef is especially large: “Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2% of the calories that are consumed throughout the world. Beef makes up 24% of the world’s meat consumption, yet requires 30 million square kilometres of land to produce. In contrast, poultry accounts for 34% of global meat consumption and pork accounts for 40%. Poultry and pork production each use less than two million square kilometres of land.” Source

These problems also touch on political tensions caused by scarce fresh water and climate change. There’s also the energy used and the pollution caused by raising livestock.

Could cultured meat be the answer?

A 2013 article titled, “A quarter-million pounder and fries” documented the taste test of a €250,000 hamburger, the first made from cultured beef. We have a long way to go, but, as Sam Harris noted, the cost to sequence a human genome is now around $1000, while the first one, sequenced in 2003, cost $3 billion. There is room for optimism.

Valeti of Memphis Meats cites the problems with the status quo, both moral and environmental, as the motivation for cultured meat.

  • No antibiotics would be needed with cultured meat (70% of antibiotics used in the U.S. today are for livestock).
  • The amount and kind of fat in cultured meat can be tuned.
  • There are more than 2 million illnesses every year from eating meat and poultry in the U.S.
  • Eliminating animal breeders would reduce the likelihood of pandemics.
  • Prion disease such as BSE (mad cow disease) would be eliminated.
  • The cultured process is more efficient. It now takes 23 calories to make 1 calorie of beef, while Valeti’s process should require just 3 calories.

How will the public respond?

Harris said that his own informal Twitter poll reported that, while most people would switch if the cost and taste were identical to conventional meat, the creepiness factor was a problem to some. I suppose they imagine peacefully grazing cows tenderly managed by hay-chewing cowboys on horseback replaced by bubbling vats of chemicals monitored by white-coated technicians. So they’re grossed out by vats but okay with a slaughterhouse?

“Natural” as a trait of food is in vogue, and there will be pushback against cultured meat. But how natural is our food today? Jason Matheny, a director of a nonprofit that funds research on cultured meat, said:

Cultured meat isn’t natural, but neither is yogurt. And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn’t natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?

We’re not there yet

We must hold off on the celebrations. Hamburgers and sausage may happen soon, but complex structures like steak will take longer. A technology maxim that we often forget is that you can’t schedule a breakthrough. And the politically powerful ranching industry might put up regulatory roadblocks to defend the status quo.

But cultured meat seems inevitable. Memphis Meats has raised the most funding so far (nearly $180 million), and there are about 30 cultured meat startups worldwide.

The switch to a diet with meat has been credited with changing our genus and permitting our large human brain. Maybe we’ll soon be able to eat that diet with a clear conscience.

In 50 years, I personally believe that
the thought of slaughtering animals for meat
will be laughable.
— Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/11/16.)

Image from IQRemix (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

.