Science, Religion, and Climate Change
A Search for Common Ground
Last week I did some hiking in Colorado in the charred remains of October’s East Troublesome Fire. A few days ago I heard from my friends in the Denver area that no one could go outside because the air quality is so bad — and the current fires aren’t even that close. Yesterday the IPCC released its major report on climate change. I spent a couple of hours looking through the 42 page summary, and then a summary of the summary by Henry Fountain at the NYT.
The most depressing finding of the report is that no matter what we do -- even if we completely stop all greenhouse gas emissions today -- we’ve got at least 30 years of worsening climate impact: more floods, more heat waves, more fires. You might hope that the analysis is wrong, but another of the findings is that climate science modelling is getting more and more accurate. So given my age and the current actuarial tables, that’s about it for me. The rest of my life on Earth will be spent in an increasingly hostile climate for the life forms currently here.
I live in a part of the world where the effects will not be as dire as elsewhere. The Great Lakes do a pretty good job of sheltering us from many of the worst consequences, and they will provide a reliable source of fresh water for the immediate future. But I hope that doesn’t make my neighbors resistant to contributing to the actions that need to happen. Another of the findings of the report is that there is still a small window of opportunity for us humans to prevent the worst of what could come. Again, we’re going above a 1.5 degree average temperature increase no matter what we do. But if we do nothing, that’s going to go up to 3 or even 6 degrees warmer by the end of the century. And that would be catastrophic for life as we know it. If we act soon and aggressively, we can still limit the increase to 1.5 degrees, and could even see that drop lower after 2050.
I’m also part of the broader Christian community. We as a group don’t typically do well with science: we’ve been bad with the COVID vaccines; we can’t quite get our theological minds around evolution; and climate change runs counter to the apocalyptic narratives we’ve told ourselves. Religion’s argument with science has been part of the culture wars in the US since at least the Scopes Trial, and part of a broader competition for allegiance for centuries. But for the most part, the war of ideas remained fairly abstract. (Of course people like Giordano Bruno, and even people like me who lost a job over the conflict, might disagree… but as attention-grabbing as these cases are, they are thankfully quite rare).
Maybe our beliefs about the past (evolution) will continue to be mostly academic. But the present (COVID) and the future (climate change) are a different story. Our very lives depend on understanding and responding to reality correctly. I don’t believe science has all the answers to such problems. But if we think we can ignore something like the IPCC report, we are beyond foolish. We must find a way to bridge between these communities and work together. That has led me to thinking about whether Christians can find some common ground with science on a response to climate change.
Some of the prevalent attitudes among (more conservative) Christians are reflected in claims like, “This world is not our home” or even, “God gave us this world to use as we see fit.” That means conditions here are temporary, and nothing we do for our climate is going to last forever. But interestingly (if depressingly), science says the same thing: our sun has a couple of billion good years left, but it will eventually expand beyond Earth’s orbit, and then burn out, making life in this solar system impossible. Maybe by then we’ll develop technology to go to another solar system, but that too is merely kicking the can down the road. The whole universe will eventually peter out.
So, I’m suggesting that both science and religion acknowledge that whatever we do here and now is temporary. Maybe that acknowledgement will ease the tensions between these communities and allow them to agree that even temporary measures can be important and worthwhile.
Some will argue that the timescale of “temporary” is vastly different according to science and religion. For science, a couple of billion years is still unimaginably long, while some versions of Christianity posit that Jesus Christ will return very soon and whisk us off to Heaven at any moment. Can these two views really be reconciled and find common ground for climate action today?
The scientific vision of the end of the universe is very difficult for us to comprehend because it is so far away. But it is still a finite amount of time. And the scientific vision of an uninhabitable Earth has become shockingly close. And even in the worst case scenario where we realize there is nothing we can do to stop catastrophe, we still ought to do what we can to make life as comfortable as possible.
On the theological side, I’d note first that Christians who recognize the Bible as any kind of authority should read it more carefully. The return of Christ is not portrayed as a complete discontinuity with this order of things, allowing the faithful to escape this world. Rather, Christ returns to establish Heaven on Earth. There probably ought to be more careful thinking, then, about the continuity of our present circumstances with what we take to be the eternal.
But then beyond that, Christians have been predicting the imminent end of the world for about 2000 years now. Maybe we should rethink whether relying on that interpretation has been very successful and accept instead that we’re here for the foreseeable future and have an important role to play. Besides, it’s only the crazy cult people who quit planning for their future on Earth. Believing that God will protect and provide for us doesn’t mean we give away our retirement accounts or stop going to the grocery store. We believe we must do things and act in ways within the parameters of the world God has given us.
So, we are not going solve any problems for all eternity. That will only happen by an act of God. But all of us should believe that we ought to do the things we can, right here and right now, that will make the world a better place for whatever time we have on this planet.
That should make us act now and boldly with regard to climate change.