The Consumption Of Meat

Many typical stances on the moral nature of eating meat, as well as the reasons those stances are adhered to, are quite irrational one way or another.  While the dietary restrictions in Mosaic Law never forbid meat itself, there are kinds of meat that are initially prohibited, yet many Christians, even if the dietary laws were universally obligatory like other parts of Mosaic Law, would almost certainly never abstain from meat if it was required of them.  It would be perceived as too inconvenient.  Non-Christians (and plenty of Christians too), though, look to subjective conscience and emotional comfort, social agreement, or cultural norms for what are ultimately their moral assumptions.  Even as people who like to eat meat might believe it is morally permissible to do so because they are used to it, whether or not they are Christian, others might object to the consumption of meat based on how the animals were treated before the slaughter or simply because an animal must die.

It is possible to raise and kill animals without torturous methods, and meat is one of the best foods for people with health or aesthetic conditions that are worsened by eating carbs, such as certain aggressive skin inflammations like seborrheic dermatitis.  All cruelty in preparing animals for death can be fully avoided, though of course their death would still occur in order for their meat to be secured.  Artificial/synthetic meat would do away with this by allowing us to sidestep the death of a creature in order to obtain and enjoy a substitute for animal flesh.  While other animal products might still need to actually come from animals unless synthetic versions of them were also concocted, if artificial meat--not plant-based substitutes, but artificial meat--was to become a normalized option for human meals, the Biblical obligation is clear.

Should synthetic meat be accessibly distributed, then it would certainly be better on the Christian worldview to consume artificial meat with the same flavor or nutrition than it would be to, at that point, unnecessarily kill a creature that is a part of God's creation (whether directly or indirectly, God is responsible for the existence of life according to Genesis), a creature that God has called "very good" (Genesis 1:31).  Neither killing animals nor consuming their meat is inherently a moral problem by Biblical standards.  It is the abuse of animals, the reckless slaughter of creatures in a way that devastates the natural world and its ability to produce food for us (such as by eating or wasting too much meat that animals would grow scarce), and the needless killing of animals themselves, even if it does not otherwise devastate the environment, that is sinful.

Animal life would have some degree of objective moral value for the same reason the physical planet and cosmos and the human body and mind would: they are creations of God or at least have their value grounded in his nature, without which nothing could be good even though some things would still exist (the laws of logic and empty space) and still be true.  If meat is synthetically replicated, as well as easily accessible in an economic and distribution sense, it would very obviously follow logically from Biblical ideas stated as early as Genesis that such a substitute would be morally superior.  For someone to willingly, consistently consume artificial meat when possible instead of animal flesh is not to treat animals as the equals of humans, but it is another way to enjoy the taste or other benefits of meat while honoring God and his creations beneath humanity.

Animals are sub-human, not that this means they deserve malice or neglect.  Even as their own death was part of God's good creation--human sin seems to have only introduced human death (Romans 5:12, 6:23), and even herbivores would have to kill something in order to survive before the fall of the first humans--to gratuitously kill an animal is to trivialize a thing that still by all appearances shares, in a lesser kind of way, the breath of conscious life that God imbued in humans, a living thing that God regards as very good.  The Biblical stance towards animals is not that one must brutalize, ignore, or be apathetic towards them, even as it is not that they are to be revered as having the same metaphysical status as humans, the supreme animal which alone is said to have the full image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).  The common deviations from acknowledging these doctrines are all abominations in their own way.