Gary :
You are listening to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still to come in this revisit to our 2000 series, Religion in the News plus answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith, and in Understanding the Scriptures Dave and Tom will continue their discussion of God’s salvation. In addition to this radio program we publish a monthly newsletter which we make available free of charge. We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books in print, e-book and audio book formats, CD’s, DVD’s and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials, or to get a copy of today’s broadcast write to us at POB 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708, call our toll free order number 800-937-6638, that’s 800-937-6638, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org . If you would like a copy of this broadcast on compact disk ask for Program #2109, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station. We’ll repeat this information at the end of the program. We continue now with our special revisit to the year 2000. Now:
RELIGION IN THE NEWS
A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from The Seattle Times with a headline “Activist Seeking Legal Personhood for Great Apes.” Sometime in the next decade a chimpanzee will have its day in court and on that day it will be decided if “chimps are people too.” At least this is the goal of an ambitious group of lawyers fighting to dismantle the legal principle that animals are property with no fundamental rights. The lawyers call it “The Great Ape Legal Project.” It supporters hail from some of the most prestigious schools in the land. The goal, what many see as the next logical step in the animal rights movement is to raise the status of Great Apes from property to people with rights to life, liberty and perhaps even the pursuit of happiness. The question at the core would be whether chimpanzees and other great apes possess the characteristics that qualify them as legal people. The property status of animals is what allows humans to buy and sell them, breed and experiment on them, eat them and make their body parts into trinkets, trophies and briefcases. If animals gain legal standing, it would allow for dramatic changes in the way animals could be protected. Animal law courses are now being taught at Harvard, Yale, Georgetown and a dozen other law schools. And hundreds of lawyers in the United States , a dozen of them in the Seattle area practice some form of animal law. Predictably there’s no shortage of critics who consider the project ludicrous and dismiss the notion of a great ape legal trial as absurd. But a growing number of legal thinkers on both sides of the debate say such a case is not only possible, but inevitable. Stephen Wise a Boston lawyer and teaching Animal Law at Harvard says the social and intellectual climate in the United States will be ready for a great ape trial within 10 years. Wise was in Seattle recently promoting his new book Rattling the Cage which calls for legal personhood for chimpanzees. One consequence of this trial may be the end of society as we know it according to University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein who calls legal personhood for animals a dangerous idea. “Where would it stop?” the law professor asks. Would we then proffer rights to whales and dolphins, rats and mice? Would even bacteria have rights? It’s one thing to raise social consciousness about the plight of animals and another to raise their status to an asserted parody with human beings Epstein says. That move would pose a mortal threat to human beings. Steve Van Chambers is president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund a national network of lawyers working on behalf of animals. He believes the legal status of apes will change in increments, but cases would build a legal foundation upon which an eventual breakthrough trial maybe launched.
Tom:
Dave, all of this raises some interesting scenarios. For example, think of the gorilla that is successfully granted legal personhood and then is released from an animal internment compound once known as a zoo and after release he steals a bunch of bananas from a local grocer, hospitalizes a couple of policemen who try to apprehend him, and ends up in the county jail for theft and resisting arrest. So we’ve moved him from the zoo to our county jail.
Dave:
Tom, I almost can’t take this seriously.
Tom:
But Dave, these are attorneys, Harvard, Yale, Georgetown graduates. These guys are serious.
Dave:
Some of them I can’t take seriously and I’ll tell you why. This springs from evolution and I can’t take evolution seriously. It just isn’t true. Collin Paterson for example, the head paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History—he wrote a book about evolution and someone just wrote to him and asked why didn’t you have some pictures in there of intermediary fossils? There should be millions, and billions of examples of intermediary stages. He wrote back and said frankly there aren’t any. And if I were writing that book today I would say something different. But evolution, we’ve talked about it before. Mathematically impossible, it is ludicrous.
Tom:
That life would form by chance. From non-life.
Dave:
Yes. Well that you could even get enough of the thousands of molecules strung together in the right order by chance. I mean you haven’t even begun to get to human brains. So it just is ludicrous, it is absolutely impossible, no rational person would entertain such an idea except—if you deny chance then you have to admit that it’s design. Our brain has been designed, our universe has been designed, the atom has been designed—then there must be a Designer and we are accountable to Him. So this whole thing now—well if we could just prove that animals are persons. Look, I don’t much about law, but if I were the attorney on the other side, I would say let us call the plaintiff to the witness stand. Let’s have the gorilla there and I will cross-examine him. The guy can’t even answer questions, he doesn’t have any idea of what this lawsuit is about, we’re going to make a person out of him? No!
Tom:
Now Dave, I know we’ve said on these programs before animals do not act morally. They act naturally. Things that they do one to another—I mean are we going to charge a gorilla with rape? Are we going to charge a gorilla, or a baboon that’s leading a troop that he kills his most fierce competitor? Is he going to go on death row now for premeditated murder? I mean this is just absurd!
Dave:
Yes it is absurd Tom and the only reason why they are pushing this is to escape God. To escape what the rational mind tells you it couldn’t happen by chance. What the conscience tells us. We are accountable to God, Romans 2. The laws of God, His moral laws are in every human conscience. They are not in animal consciences. The Bible of course says the spirit of the animal goes to the earth. The spirit of man returns to God who made it either for judgment forever or to be with Him in heaven. Not animals. So the animal has no concept of right, he wouldn’t even know what was going on in the court room. We have the idea of incompetency—they’re insane or they’re incompetent, they don’t understand their rights and so forth. They are not treated like competent people. Now an animal hasn’t even come that far. They’re animals, they have no idea what’s going on and this is ludicrous!
