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blogs :: S Word :: November 1, 2009

Climate and Hubris

by Larry Gilman

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Recently I heard the idea that religious conservatives resist the scientific view that human beings are changing the climate because they think it would be blasphemous, proud, or at least silly to think that we have to the power to alter something that God has made — namely, the climate.

But how many religious conservatives actually think this?  A few . . . many . . . most?  There is, as surveys have shown, a strong correlation between religious conservatism and denial of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change, but why?  Is theological reasoning involved?  If so, is it the reasoning described above?

I don’t know the big Why, but I have taken a first crack at the Hubris Theory of Conservative Climate Resistance.  My first step was to extensively Google various combinations of “global warming God” or “climate change God” with words like pride, hubris, presumption, and sin. 

Surprisingly, at least to me, I didn’t find much.  Most common, apparently, though still not very common, is the idea that God is not going to let us screw up the climate — as distinct from the idea that it is foolish pride to think we could screw it up. For example, in “Pride (in the Name of Climate Change)” (Pittsburgh Evangelical Examiner for Oct. 13, 2009), Douglas Comin argues that God has promised to keep climate change from being extreme:
“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (Genesis 8:22).  This divine promise was made to Noah just after the great flood. It was given in the context of God assuring Noah that He would never again destroy the earth with a worldwide catastrophe.  It is not a promise that there will never be changes in the climate patterns on earth, nor a promise that there will never be local meteorological shifts that will result in, for example, previously temperate regions becoming colder or frigid climates becoming milder.  It is a promise that the global patterns of seasonal weather will always remain intact, as long as the earth endures.
Well, actually, no, it isn’t: because the mere existence of “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night” is not synonymous with any given “global pattern of seasonal weather.”   All those things—especially “day and night” — are slated to continue under any plausible degree of anthropogenic climate change.  (Venusizing the planet doesn’t seem to be in the cards yet, nor stopping its rotation.)  “Seedtime and harvest” might show an unpleasant tendency to shift from Ethiopia to Siberia, but they will continue in at least a few places.  And the South Pole, at least, will continue to experience some nippy weather every June.  So we don’t even have to argue about the “as long as the earth endures” thing.  On the face of Scripture, even read literally, God has not promised to save us from anthropogenic climate change of the kind science is actually observing and forecasting.

The writer goes on to say: “Can man really overpower God’s resolve to maintain a stable climate on planet earth? To imagine this possible is an extreme expression of hubris.”

Note the precise argument: it is that God is resolved to keep the climate stable, not that the climate is going to remain stable just because God made it.  God made the dodos, too, and we stomped or shot every last one of them: most fundamentalists are, I think, well aware that this sort of thing goes on, and so they do not claim that we are flat-out incapable of destroying or changing something just because God made it. They do, however, sometimes assert that God is actively going to prevent us from changing the climate — perhaps (I speculate) by miraculously tweaking the absorption spectrum of atmospheric CO2.  If God is going to do that, then it would indeed be silly to think that our paltry tailpipes, powerplants, and belching beefaloes could prevail against the Almighty.  But it’s a very big “if.”

I say “most” fundamentalists are aware that we obviously can and do change Creation all the time not because I have polled the fundamentalist world but because statements of the contrary view seem rare and because I know that fundamentalists are not dumb.  However, former House Majority leader Dick Armey (R-TX) did his best to shake my reason with his testimony to a bicameral legislative hearing in July, 2009:
Let me say I take it as an article of faith if the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth, and he made them to his satisfaction and it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation.
Here Armey deploys the straw-man fallacy, one of the commonest and laziest.  In rhetoric and argument, a straw man is any exaggerated, incomplete, or otherwise falsified version of an opponent’s view that one can easily mock or refute.  In this case, Armey substitutes for the scientific mainstream understanding that climate change is real and human-caused the absurd notion that we are going to “destroy God’s creation.”  In fact, we’re not talking about destroying the climate, much less the whole creation — we’re only talking about changing it a bunch, a much shorter order of business.

Here’s my own little theological squeak:

God manifestly doesn’t stop us from doing anything at all to anything or anybody.  So the question of whether global warming is real, human-caused, and dangerous is simply a factual one, a scientific one, without a smidgen of religion in it. 

And it is a question that has been answered.  The answer is “yes.”
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