Dear Matt Dillahunty,
You have expressed in the past your relative indifference to the issue of the treatment of non-human animals, and we understand this apathy. For you humans come first, and that's very understandable. If you don't care about something, we can't make you care.
We neither expect you to 'go vegan', nor intend this letter to have that effect.
This is not about animals, and it's not about veganism; this is about your bad arguments made in defense of your eating meat. Bad arguments that are hypocritical in light of your claims to respecting science and intellectual honesty -- which is something you should certainly care about.
We would encourage you to, at least, take a leaf out of Dawkins' book on this subject in the future: If you don't have anything rational to say, don't say anything at all.
[the quote from Dawkins about eating meat being indefensible and him having no excuse except that he's a product of the society he lives in, as Thomas Jefferson hated slavery and kept slaves]
This letter is primarily in response to your arguments on a not-terribly-recent The Atheist Experience, #583 from [date].
Here's a link for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mClv6S3BK60
We fully recognize that this may, by now, be a straw Matt, and your positions may have evolved, but due to your reluctance to comment on or discuss the issue it's hard to find an updated record of your view on this, so we're going by what we have.
Point 1: Overtly rejecting scientific consensus based on personal ignorance of science.
Matt Dillahunty wrote:
[caller:[...]it is unhealthy I mean if you look on the American heart association's website they have numerous instances where they list that diets that contain meat are more unhealthy than plant based diets]
I I simply don't believe it remotely and it's eh I can answer with one word: evolution
we evolved as an omnivorous species
Matt, it doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what the evidence shows; you should know this better that almost anybody.
You are neither an expert on nutrition, nor even evolution, and you do much better when you admit, in humility, your lack of scientific background.
It's not an appeal to authority to trust expert consensus on scientific matters.
Expert opinions are important, because novices do not have the training, experience, or time to understand all of the data.
Look at the case of evolution vs. creationism.
There are droves of theists who think they understand evolution, and physics, well enough to offer the one word checkmate of "2LOT" (Second Law of Thermodynamics). As if nobody had ever thought about it before them.
As it turns out, that mistaken perception of a contradiction between the two is based on a profound ignorance of BOTH subjects.
Your claims here are no less ignorant, and we'll explain why at the end of this section, but the most pressing matter is that you attempted to make them at all considering your criticism of creationists for pulling the same kind of intellectually dishonest nonsense. This is a very unfortunate hypocrisy.
Both cases of attempting to debunk one science you personally dislike by appealing ignorantly to some other science with only passing familiarity, pointing out a perceived contradiction (which doesn't actually exist -- and if it did, you would have to admit the other option is that evolution is false; are you really ready to make that assertion?), to discount the expert opinion of every major body of scientists on the subject in the world along with irrefutable evidence which you conveniently ignore in favor of your own preconceptions.
There is no difference here.
Except, the creationists have a good excuse; they're idiots. YOU actually KNOW that science is complex and very often counter-intuitive to the layman. The statistical models that are used to demonstrate correlations and causation in study data and control for variables would melt your brain.
You should know better than to dismiss scientific consensus on a matter so trivially.
It's not just the American Heart Association. [please provide a link]
Here's a short list:
World Health Organization
the American Dietetic Association
the Dietitians of Canada
the British Dietetic Association
the British Heart Foundation
the World Heart Federation
the British National Health Service
the United States Food and Drug Administration
and the European Food Safety Authority
[please provide links for each of these]
NIH wrote:
It has been established beyond a reasonable doubt that lowering definitely elevated blood cholesterol levels (specifically, blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol) will reduce the risk of heart attacks caused by coronary heart disease.
This has been the consensus for 30 years, and continues to be today. It's non-controversial among experts.
The only people challenging this are conspiracy theorists, like "The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics", which is a group primarily composed of various lobbyists for the meat industry.
They're essentially the dietary version of "climate change skeptics".
They offer no alternative to the lipid hypothesis, and their "contributions" are regularly debunked by actual experts.
They are, however, very popular among the meat eating public who want to be reassured that there's nothing wrong with their saturated fat rich diets (just as creationists welcome any reassurance that evolution goes against science, no matter how dishonest).
This is an instance where you have to recognize your biases, and realize that when you're hearing something you really want to hear, however true it may ring for you, that doesn't make it so.
Follow the actual evidence, and you'll arrive at the correct conclusion (which is, scientific consensus- because that's what the scientists do).
We shouldn't even have to address your argument about "evolution", because the science should speak for itself. When there is an apparent conflict between two proven facts, that usually only indicates some degree of ignorance in the person observing that conflict, and not an actual contradiction -- this should have been your assumption, and rather than make these claims you should have tried to figure out why these two sciences seem to contradict each other.
To anthropomorphize evolution in effort to explain, "Evolution" doesn't give a shit if you have a heart attack at 40, because by that time it's done with you.
A diet of animal products will see you through reproduction, and that's all it had to promise to our ancestors; and that's clearly all it does for us. If you plan on living longer than that, you might want to actually look at the evidence in a modern context.
Meat is also healthier than starving to death, and it's healthier than malnutrition and for people hundreds of years ago or in the third world the situation is different.
But YOU aren't in the third world, and you should know that health and ethical matters are highly situational.
If the environment requires it, humans even eat each other, and it's both healthy and ethically permissible compared to starving where self-preservation is at issue.
If you throw the realities of your actual environment out the window, and substitute in any unlikely environment, then anything is healthy or morally permissible.
Smoking is also healthy, relatively speaking, if you happen to be in an environment where the air is saturated with tiny lung-eating insects that are killed by nicotine.
You can make up some far-fetched situation you aren't in and will never be in where an ethical excuse would exist, or where any given action would be healthy or somehow useful for survival.
That's irrelevant to your situation here and now. It only means that nothing is bad or wrong in itself regardless of circumstance, but it's the circumstance that means everything in ethics.
In this universe, on this planet, in a First world country, for your situation, meat is unhealthy compared to the superior alternative healthier food sources that YOU have access to.
And you know what? Some of those superior foods are partially or wholly synthetic. And there's nothing wrong with that. Thank you science.
You would do well to go on a mostly vegan diet, for your own health, just as anybody could be advised to stop smoking or drinking in excess.
We don't really want to see you follow Christopher Hitchens (peace and blessings of Darwin be upon him) in digging yourself and early grave.
That said, is it immoral to cause yourself harm? Maybe not. But there is an important ethical bottom line, and that is where the evaporation of your 'health' excuse is very relevant:
From a utilitarian perspective, it may be permissible to cause some harm to others if that harm results in a greater good. Such as, possibly, harming animals to benefit humans (medical testing is a great example).
And this seems ultimately to be the argument you're appealing to, with a health-benefit approach.
Even vegans generally accept legitimate health reasons for using animal products (medications, etc.) that are accepted by science as necessary and useful to promoting or preserving health (although views on medical testing vary, that's another issue).
This is a reasonable argument, IF there is a real benefit. There are issues of which is greater- the harm or the benefit- but these are admittedly hard to weigh. That makes it more of a moral grey area when there is both harm and benefit involved.
But when, as happens to be the case with meat (in our privileged first world context where we DO have other superior options) we're dealing with a lose-lose scenario, both harmful to animals and our own health, this is no longer a grey area, and it is no longer rational to advocate the practice.
If you manage to find some victimless way to harm yourself, there's some argument to be made that you're not doing anything wrong by it. But meat production today, in your REALITY, is not victimless.
You aren't eating roadkill, you're not freegan (widely considered morally equivalent to veganism), you aren't eating lab grown meat, and we have not developed farming and slaughtering practices that are ethical.
The fact of possible or hypothetical exceptions doesn't excuse the reality.
Until one or more of those things changes, your action of eating meat is personally indefensible. Not people in the third world or hundreds of years ago, but you, today. Not people in the 31st century eating meat grown in a glass jar, but you, today. Not the fictional characters in the Hitchhiker's guide eating that pig that was genetically engineered to want to be eaten, but you, today.
We're not saying don't eat meat. We're just saying it's wrong. Wrong for everybody, throughout the universe and all space and time? No. Wrong for you, today, in your privileged first world country, in an age of scientific enlightenment where we have the know-how to produce better, healthier food and the methodology to prove it.
You're engaging in irrational lose-lose behavior that isn't even morally gray. But worse yet, you're being intellectually dishonest when you defend it.
), and also to not let him be distracted from the actual arguments we're making.