I don’t want to pick on Rod, but this whole “as God made it” thing has been bugging me. Yesterday, Rod said that he preferred his meat “As God made it,” i.e. without hormones or other human tampering. Also, I’ve been reading The New Atlantis, a very interesting — though a bit dry — new journal on technology issues. So this stuff is just in my head.
Anyway, I don’t like naturalism of the sort Rod is invoking. I think it buys into some of the biggest propaganda of the left. I say propaganda because much of the naturalism (by which I mean the view that things “unadulterated by man” are always better) is based on a series of lies and deliberate misunderstandings. Take the cows Rod prefers “as God made them.” Well, in reality, the cows God made are very hard to find and probably taste terrible compared to what we find at Mortons. Cows have been genetically engineered for thousands of years, through selective breeding programs. The “organic” beef we buy at Whole Foods simply does not occur in nature. Ditto for chicken, pork and all the other tasty animals.
And that goes for even non-tastey animals — like humans. When people arrive simply “as God made them” they are a mess, physically, emotionally, psychologically, politically and — trust me on this — literally. Moreover, I believe theology is on my side on this. We are born in sin after all. It is only through the acts of man that God-made humans improve. How that improvement takes place depends on your individual faith. But the point remains that without teaching, understanding, training and insight or revelation, we remain a mess. Sure God is the conductor directing this whole symphony, but without the very human musicians no one would ever get the tune right. Give a baby a violin without human instruction and you’ve got an expensive chew toy.
I do believe there is something hardwired into our genetic codes which makes such appeals to nature “as God made it” sound more authoritative than they really are — and that alone should teach us something about the kind of world we want to live in. But if the choice is to live in any God-made world — save Eden — unimproved by man and technology or to live in a society with man’s handiwork all around, I’ll choose the latter every time.
For more on this you can see my whacky column about my hernia operation. You didn’t this post was ending there did you?