Religion and Animals - David Clough -

David Clough is 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 and he 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 two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....

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"
16:45 What Matters?
40:36 Who Matters?
01:17:33 A Better World?
01:28:25 Follow David
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/david.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L...
  / prof-david-clough  

& much more... see https://sentientism.info/ for full notes.
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