whizkid's argument makes me think of two things:
- If humans were designed by an intelligent Creator, then we were created with the ability to eat animals, so it must be moral to eat meat.
- If humans are solely the product of evolution and there is no God, then morality is relative, so it isn't immoral to eat meat.
Of course, the above is far from a watertight logical argument. But it does highlight the fallacy of making moral arguments about vegetarianism.
Whenever this comes up within earshot, I keep thinking of a Bloom County comic strip where Binkley has hung himself upside-down in a tree with a handkerchief over his mouth to stop himself from "massacring millions of innocent germs." One has to draw the line between killable and non-killable life forms somewhere; why should it be any less ethical to draw it just below human beings than just above plants?