[Note: This essay was written in the summer of 2010 at the request of Dr. Patrick Michaels, intended for a book he was editing. His publisher declined to include it in the book because of its religious content. It was never published elsewhere until now. We hope it remains a helpful survey of the history of the debate over global warming among evangelicals up to that time.—ECB, March 11, 2016]

Introduction

In the last half decade there has been a blossoming of public concern about global warming among what many find a surprising group of people: theologians and pastors. Those steeped in the history of the relationship between the clergy and science in America’s colonial period find this unsurprising, since many of the leading colonial pastors and theologians, like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, were also leading scientists. But the often intense warfare between some scientists and some religious leaders over the past 150 years or so has made such interdisciplinary interest less common.

Why, then, have so many religious leaders begun speaking out on what might be considered a strictly scientific issue?

According to Benjamin B. Phillips, assistant professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, there are four main reasons:[1]

1. God’s being “the creator of the world” and its “owner” serves as the “basis for understanding the value of nonhuman creation.”
2. God, according to Genesis 1:26–28, 2:15, and other passages of Scripture, “commissioned humanity with the responsibility of stewardship/dominion over the earth and . . . the execution of this responsibility has been perverted by sin, with negative impact on the environment.” Evangelicals share “genuine concern for humanity’s treatment of God’s creation.”
3. Christians’ responsibility to care for the poor is “an important factor in considering environmental policy.”
4. Addressing global warming (and other environmental concerns) provides an opportunity to witness the gospel of God’s saving work for sinners in and by Jesus Christ.

The last concern reveals itself in two different ways that many evangelicals hold in uneasy tension. On the one hand, says Phillips, “The priority of missions and evangelism has made evangelicals cautious about the potential of social ministry to overtake and swamp concern for the souls of men,” leading some evangelicals to be cautious or even critical about engagement on environmental issues. On the other hand, because, according to James 2:14–16, “a faith that does not meet real physical needs is of no practical value,” and because environmental policy often has major implications for the poor, others see such “social ministry as a means to win a hearing for the gospel. . . . Care for the poor, while a real good in and of itself, also serves the furtherance of the gospel.” Thus, according to Phillips, “evangelicals have taken great pains to tie their concern for the environment to concern for the poor.”

These observations seem well justified in terms of how the two evangelical organizations that have been the most outspoken on global warming have couched their statements.

The Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), which believes global warming is not only real but also dangerous and primarily anthropogenic, in early 2006 launched the Evangelical Climate Initiative with “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” a roughly 1,800-word declaration the focus of which was on the likely harmful effect on the poor of dangerous anthropogenic global warming’s (DAGW). “The Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest,” declared the subtitle of one section. The document went on to explain:

Even small rises in global temperatures will have such likely impacts as: sea level rise; more frequent heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather events such as torrential rains and floods; increased tropical diseases in now-temperate regions; and hurricanes that are more intense. It could lead to significant reduction in agricultural output, especially in poor countries. Low-lying regions, indeed entire islands, could find themselves under water. (This is not to mention the various negative impacts climate change could have on God’s other creatures.)

Each of these impacts increases the likelihood of refugees from flooding or famine, violent conflicts, and international instability, which could lead to more security threats to our nation.

Poor nations and poor individuals have fewer resources available to cope with major challenges and threats. The consequences of global warming will therefore hit the poor the hardest, in part because those areas likely to be significantly affected first are in the poorest regions of the world. Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.[2]

The “Call to Action” initially gained the signatures of eighty-six prominent evangelical college presidents, mission leaders, and theologians.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation,[3] which believes recent global warming has been largely natural though with some minor anthropogenic contribution and does not pose major risks, likewise made care for the poor a major focus of its own Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming, a roughly 12,000-word document, released in August, 2006, that rebutted the ECI’s “Call to Action” point by point and was initially endorsed by 132 evangelical scientists, economists, theologians, pastors, and other leaders.[4] But the Cornwall Alliance argued that policies promoted to mitigate anthropogenic global warming (AGW) posed much greater risk to the poor than AGW itself. In response to the ECI’s claim, “The consequences of climate change will … hit the poor the hardest,” the Cornwall Alliance claimed,

On the contrary, the destructive impact on the poor of enormous mandatory reductions in fossil fuel use far exceeds the impact on them—negative or positive—of the moderate global warming that is most likely to occur. Indeed, the policy promoted by the ECI would be both economically devastating to the world’s poor and ineffective at reducing global warming. Because energy is an essential component in almost all economic production, reducing its use and driving up its costs will slow economic development, reduce overall productivity, and increase costs of all goods, including the food, clothing, shelter, and other goods most essential to the poor.” [p. 12]

If the aim is to help the poor, what matters from the policy point of view is supporting the development process by which countries acquire greater ability to deal with adverse economic, climatic, and social conditions, regardless of cause. Put simply, poor countries need income growth, trade liberalization, and secure supplies of reliable, low-cost electricity. Rather than focusing on theoretically possible changes in climate, which varies tremendously anyway with … natural cycles, we should emphasize policies—such as affordable and abundant energy–that will help the poor prosper, thus making them less susceptible to the vagaries of weather and other threats in the first place. [p. 14]

The world’s poor are much better served by enhancing their wealth through economic development than by whatever minute reductions might be achieved in future global warming by reducing CO₂ emissions.[5] It is difficult to imagine how it could possibly be that, as the ECI claims, “The basic task for all of the world’s inhabitants [emphasis added] is to find ways now to begin to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are the primary cause of human-induced climate change.” Millions of poor people in developing countries die every year because they lack clean water and indoor plumbing, electricity (forcing them to burn wood and dung for cooking and heating and to live without refrigeration and air conditioning), sewage treatment, jobs, access to affordable medical care, and adequate nutrition—not to mention just and orderly legal and economic systems. Not only will the policies proposed by the ECI not solve any of these real, present, and vast problems, but instead they will slow down and in some cases prevent their being solved . . . . [pp. 15–16]

Clearly the two groups shared a motivation in their approach to the global warming controversy: concern for the poor. But their different readings of science and economics led to diametrically opposite policy positions. This probably was affected by the fact that the ECI’s authors, led by ethics professor Dr. David Gushee, included no experts in either climate science or economics, while Cornwall’s authors included experts in both. In the years since then, both groups, sometimes in association with others, have made additional public statements. Their pronounced commitments and motivations have remained largely unchanged.

Historical Background to Evangelical Controversy on Global Warming

In 2006 Reverend Richard Cizik, then vice president for governmental affairs with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), told television documentary journalist Bill Moyers that he credited Sir John Houghton with persuading him that “The fate of the earth may well depend on how Christians, especially evangelical Christians who take the Bible seriously, respond to the issues of climate change.” When Cizik told him he trusted Houghton, Moyers asked why. “He was an evangelical,” Cizik responded.[6]

Cizik is one of many evangelical leaders who attended seminars given by Houghton at England’s Windsor Castle and came away convinced of DAGW. Indeed, believing “The United States is absolutely key to the question of climate change,” Houghton had by August of 2007 spent nearly a decade persuading American evangelical leaders, among the more prominent of whom were Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland Church, a megachurch near Orlando, and former NAE president Ted Haggard. Their conversions to DAGW put them in league with such early believers as Dr. Calvin DeWitt, founder of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies, and Rev. Dr. Jim Ball, then president of the EEN and now senior director of its Climate Campaign.[7]

Cizik’s answer to Moyers is worth pondering. No doubt Houghton’s impressive credentials as a climatologist and former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were relevant, but they weren’t what Cizik said led him to trust him. It was that Houghton “was an evangelical.” Yet at that time some of the world’s leading critics of DAGW were themselves evangelical climate scientists, such as:

• John Christy, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) as well as a contributor to the IPCC’s scientific assessment reports;
• Roy W. Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and now a principal research scientist working with Christy at NSSTC;
• David Legates, associate professor of climatology and director of the Delaware Environmental Observing System at the University of Delaware; and
• Ross McKitrick, associate professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph, an IPCC expert reviewer, and co-author (with Steve McIntyre) of the studies that debunked Michael Mann’s famed “hockey stick” portrayal of global temperatures over the last millennium,

to name just a few. Why did Cizik trust Houghton rather than these or other evangelical scholars who rejected DAGW? Was he even aware of them? Further, while Houghton calls himself an evangelical, it’s not certain that what he means by that term and what Cizik means by it are necessarily the same thing. Evangelical has never had quite the sense in Britain that it has in the U.S. In Britain, it has meant primarily one who, though Anglican, is low-church rather than high-church or Anglo-Catholic. Secondarily, it has meant an evangelist, or at least someone very sympathetic to evangelism. It has never carried the sense common to American evangelicalism from the 1940s into the mid-1980s: belief in the inerrancy of Scripture,[8] the “fundamentals of the faith” (as in the 1910s–1930s pamphlets series),[9] and the five solas of the Reformation (the Bible alone as God’s Word and supreme authority in faith and practice; justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone). “Evangelicals” are rare in Britain, but the barrier for being one isn’t particularly high.

Houghton’s discussion of the religious foundations of his approach to climate change in Global Warming: The Complete Briefing offers little assurance that, however sincere his faith in Christ might be, he has carefully built his world view and theology and their implications for his work as a scientist on the Bible, as American evangelicals would expect him to do. He barely appeals to Scripture at all (Genesis 1:26–28 once; 1:27 once; 2:9 once; 2:12 once; 2:15 once; 2:19 once), and then only superficially, without the least attempt at actual exegesis. At least once he appeals to Scripture in what seems quite an exaggeration: “… in the Old Testament [no citation given] detailed instructions [emphasis added] are given regarding care for the land and the environment” (p. 204). There are indeed some instructions, but “detailed”? Hardly. Meanwhile, he never cites scriptures that are most directly relevant to the DAGW debate, like Genesis 1:31: all that God made was “very good.” (Is that consistent with the notion that an infinitesimal change in atmospheric chemistry will set off a chain of all positive feedback mechanisms leading to catastrophic climate change—rather than a chain of positive and negative feedback mechanisms in a self-regulating, self-correcting system that prevents catastrophe? DAGW fundamentally assumes a highly unstable climate system, which seems inconsistent with the Biblical teaching that Earth and its natural systems are the product of wise design and omnipotent sustaining.) Or Genesis 8:21–22, in which God, after the Flood, promised to sustain all the natural cycles on which life depends. Or Psalm 104:5–9, which says God set a boundary for the sea so that it would never return to cover the Earth.

Houghton’s two most frequently cited sources in the chapter are James Lovelock (author of The Ages of Gaia, The Revenge of Gaia, etc.), cited 5 times, and Al Gore (Earth in the Balance), cited 7 times—together over one-fourth of all citations in the chapter. None are critical, despite Houghton’s professed evangelicalism and Lovelock and Gore’s New Age, neo-pagan, pantheistic world views. Rather, all citations embrace what Lovelock and Gore say. Houghton approvingly cites a Native American chief saying, “The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth,” directly contradicting Psalm 115:16 (“The heavens are the heavens of the Lord, but the earth He has given to the sons of men”—which Houghton also never cites) and the general teaching of Scripture that man belongs not to the Earth (which as non-personal owns nothing) but to God. Nonetheless, Cizik trusted Houghton because he was “an evangelical.”

Cizik’s conversion is part of a larger story of efforts stretching back more than two decades by environmental scientists and activists to draft support from religious leaders.

Outspoken agnostic astronomer and astrophysicist Dr. Carl Sagan spearheaded an effort leading to an “Open Letter to the American Religious Community” from many scientists. The letter was presented to the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders in Moscow, Russia, in January, 1990.[10] Some American religious leaders responded by creating “A Joint Appeal in Religion and Science” as a formal consultation in 1991, which in turn founded the Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment (JARSE), which issued a “Declaration of the ‘Mission to Washington’” on May 12, 1992, signed by 150 scientists and religious leaders. Signers included Sagan; National Council of Churches General Secretary Rev. Joan Brown Campbell; Dr. Eric Chivian, Harvard professor of psychiatry; Paul Gorman, executive director of JARSE; Rev. Dr. Richard Land, then executive director of the Christian Life Commission, now president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, of the Southern Baptist Convention; Rev. James Parks Morton, dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City; Dr. Stephen H. Schneider, then head of the Interdisciplinary Climate Systems Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Dr. Stephen E. Schwartz, senior physical chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (who fifteen years later published a widely cited paper arguing for low climate sensitivity—about 0.5˚C for doubled effective CO₂—and thus seemingly against DAGW);[11] Dr. Ronald J. Sider, professor of theology and society, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and executive director of the leftist Evangelicals for Social Action; and Dr. Edward O. Wilson, professor of science, Harvard University and longtime proponent of model-based claims of extremely rapid species extinction.[12]

The JARSE also led to a consultation, June 2–3, 1991, of twenty-five religious leaders who concluded, “A consensus now exists, at the highest level of leadership across a significant spectrum of religious traditions, that the cause of environmental integrity and justice must occupy a position of utmost priority for people of faith,” and “Response to this issue can and must cross traditional religious and political lines. It has the potential to unify and renew religious life.”[13] The group determined to work in the next two years in the Jewish, evangelical, and Black church communities to promote its priorities. Eleven environmental organizations (including the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Cub, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Resources Institute) responded with a letter commending the group’s endeavors. Shortly afterward the Episcopal Church began a program on environment and sustainable development; the U.S. Catholic Bishops issued their first pastoral statement on the environment; and the United Church of Christ started an office on environmental and economic justice.. In March, 1992, over one hundred Jewish leaders formed the Consultation on Environment and Jewish Life.[14] In the following two months, Dr. Robert Seiple, president of the evangelical relief and development organization World Vision, and Sider launched the Evangelical Environmental Network. On May 11–12, 1992, seventy religious leaders met in Washington with scientific, environmental, and governmental leaders, culminating in the founding, on May 12, of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), with four independent governing bodies—the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the National Council of Churches, and the Evangelical Environmental Network.[15] In late May, leaders of African-American denominations formed a Black Church Environmental Justice Network.[16] The NRPE formally began its activities in October, 1993.[17] NRPE’s board of trustees consists of Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, now director of religion, the Chautauqua Institution; John Carr, director of the Department of Social Development and World Peace in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; Dr. John Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) Federation of New York; Dr. David Saperstein, director, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; and Sider. Its director for its first twenty years, Paul Gorman, retired in May, 2010.[18]

In the seventeen years since the NRPE began, it has successfully promoted environmentalism as a cause among many religious denominations—Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant; liberal, moderate, and conservative; mainline and evangelical. And, although it was only hinted at in the “Declaration of the ‘Mission to Washington’” in 1992, DAGW has become the primary rallying cry.

The Global Warming Debate among Evangelicals

My focus, as an evangelical myself, will be on how one branch of the NRPE, the EEN, has promoted belief in and advocated action to mitigate dangerous anthropogenic global warming, and on how a different organization, the Cornwall Alliance, of which I am a leader, has presented a different perspective.

Although work to form the EEN took place in 1992, its formal launch seems to have been at a meeting at the White House with then-Vice President Al Gore that included Sider, Asbury Theological Seminary President David McKenna, World Vision Vice President for U.S. Advocacy and Education Paul Thompson, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship President Steve Hayner.[19] Some of its earliest actions included

• assistance in convening a Christianity Today Institute on the environment October 28–29, 1993;
• release in late 1993 of an Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation; and
• mailing twenty thousand copies of Let the Earth Be Glad: A Starter Kit for Evangelical Churches to Care for God’s Creation to evangelical congregations.

The most significant of those steps seems to have been the release of the Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation. It decried what it called a “growing crisis in the health of the creation” consisting of seven “degradations of creation”: (1) land degradation; (2) deforestation; (3) species extinction; (4) water degradation; (5) global toxification; (6) alteration of atmosphere; (7) human cultural degradation. The document suffered from two weaknesses common to many EEN statements since then: vagueness and lack of reference to supporting research. Having been sent a draft of the document by then NAE Vice President for Governmental Affairs Robert Dugan, who wanted my evaluation, I prepared a critique, in response to which Dugan revoked his intended endorsement, persuaded the NAE not to endorse, and eventually resigned from his position on the EEN’s board of advisors. In an article published by World magazine,[20] I pointed out the lack of specificity and empirical support for the various claims. As a theologian myself, I concluded that while the Declaration rightly reminded Christians of our responsibility for the environment, it fell seriously short on some Biblical principles and empirical accuracy. One of my greatest concerns was that most of the Christian leaders who had been asked to endorse it—pastors, seminary professors, parachurch ministry leaders—lacked the necessary expertise in the pros and cons of environmental debates to assess the current state of the environment adequately before deciding whether to lend to it their moral authority and, in many cases, the moral authority of the organizations they led.

The EEN’s response exemplified the ad hominem tactic that characterizes much of the DAGW movement’s response to critics. EEN staff member Gordon Aeschliman, who also led the Christian Environmental Association, writing in Prism, ESA’s new flagship magazine, awarded World and me a “Toxic Turkey Award.”[21] Eventually he charged me, because of my disagreement with the EEN’s environmental views, with “racism, sexism and cold heartedness” and “discrimination against the poor.”[22] Ironically enough, the same issue of Prism included a copy of the Chicago Declaration II: A Call for Evangelical Renewal, adopted by ESA. Declaration II included the following: “Too often, recent evangelical political engagement has been uncivil and polarizing, has demonized opponents and lacked careful analysis and biblical integrity.” Perhaps at the ESA the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing.

In the fall of 1999, a group of evangelical, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish religious scholars met in West Cornwall, Connecticut, and drafted “The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship,” which they released in early 2000 under the auspices of a loose-knit network they formed called the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICES).[23] The “Cornwall Declaration” gained the signatures of over 1,500 religious leaders from around the world,[24] and the ICES eventually relaunched itself, in August, 2005, as the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), which changed its name to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation in 2007.

Over the dozen years between its release of the “Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation” and its 2006 “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” the EEN regularly published a newsletter on creation care but did little about global warming that was of high public profile. Behind the scenes, though, it was working to persuade prominent evangelical leaders to embrace its view that stringent policies were needed to counter DAGW. It brought many leaders to Houghton’s briefings, and some of them were key signers of its “Call to Action.” During 2005, it worked to build support for its views among board members of the NAE, which has some 40 member denominations with 45,000 churches and was generally recognized as the a mouthpiece for American evangelicals. The aim was to get the NAE to endorse the “Call to Action.”

Aware of that growing effort, leaders of the ISA (later Cornwall Alliance) commissioned climatologist Roy Spencer, energy policy analyst Paul Driessen, and myself to study the issue and report. The result was An Evangelical Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy,[25] released in November, 2005. The 20,000-word study argued that scientific support for belief in DAGW was weak and there were both empirical and religious reasons to think Earth’s climate is robust and self-regulating; that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and moderate warming would bring net benefits to the Earth, especially to the poor through increased agricultural yields and consequent lower costs for food; that switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and biomass would increase the cost of energy and everything produced and transported using it, hurting the poor; and that sophisticated risk analysis pointed toward adaptation through economic development as preferable to mitigation. The Cornwall Alliance then coordinated an effort by prominent evangelical leaders including James Dobson and Charles Colson that in January, 2006, succeeded in persuading the NAE board not to endorse EEN’s “Call to Action” on the grounds that the scientific, economic, and ethical issues were insufficiently clear to warrant a consensus statement.

In December, 2006, a group of scientists and evangelical leaders convened jointly by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and the NAE met and prepared “An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation,” a one-page letter that spoke of “a cascading set of [environmental] problems such as climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and species extinctions ….” Among those signing the statement, which was released in January, 2007, were various people who had been involved in founding the NRPE and the EEN, including, among the evangelicals, Jim Ball and Calvin DeWitt, and, among the scientists, Eric Chivian and Edward Wilson.[26]

Whatever effect the EEN’s “Call to Action” and Harvard and the NAE’s “Urgent Call” might have had on others, they appeared to have little on the leadership of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, which in June 2007 adopted a resolution on global warming that very closely reflected the Cornwall Alliance’s positions.[27] The resolution, promoted at the SBC’s annual convention by the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (headed by Dr. Richard Land, who had signed the  “Declaration of the ‘Mission to Washington’” in 1992), cited long- and short-term natural cycles of global warming and cooling and denied that there was scientific consensus behind DAGW. It said measures to reduce warming would make little difference in long-term temperatures but would be extremely costly, harming the poor most of all. It warned that forcing such measures on developing countries would slow their rise out of poverty. Adding, “The poor and most vulnerable people around the world are faced with many more quantifiable, immediate, devastating problems,” it

• urged Southern Baptists “to proceed cautiously in the human-induced global warming debate in light of conflicting scientific research”;
• judged “proposals to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions based on a maximum acceptable global temperature goal to be very dangerous, since attempts to meet the goal could lead to a succession of mandates of deeper cuts in emissions, which may have no appreciable effect if humans are not the principal cause of global warming, and could lead to major economic hardships on a worldwide scale”;
• urged “Congress and the president to only support cost-effective measures to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions and to reject government-mandated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”;
• urged “governments to begin to take steps to help protect vulnerable communities and regions from the effects of the inevitable continued cycles of warming and cooling that have occurred throughout geologic history”; and
• strongly requested “that all public policy decision makers ensure an appropriate balance between care for the environment, effects on economies, and impacts on the poor when considering programs to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.”

Through the autumn of 2007, a group of thirteen scholars prepared a new study for the Cornwall Alliance, The Cornwall Stewardship Agenda, which was released in January, 2008.[28] Intended for expansion in the future, the document addressed poverty and development on the one hand and energy and climate change on the other. It asserted that “environmental policies should harness human creative potential by expanding political and economic freedom, instead of imposing draconian restrictions or seeking to reduce the “human burden” on the natural world. Suppressing human liberty and productivity in the name of environmental protection is antithetical to the principles of stewardship and counterproductive to the environment.” It explained that abundant, affordable energy is important to the economic development necessary to lift out of poverty the roughly 2 billion people in the world who live without electricity and are subject to dangerous air and water pollution and food spoilage that together cost some 10 million premature deaths every year. And while it affirmed the importance of continued research and development on alternative fuels, it insisted, “Only fossil fuels, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy can, at present and for the foreseeable future, do that–taking advantage of the coal, oil, natural gas, water power, and uranium that many of these nations have in abundance.”

In March of 2008 a group of Southern Baptists calling themselves the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI) issued what they titled “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change,”[29] initially signed by 44 pastors, seminary professors, and others.[30] The “Declaration” differed dramatically from the denominational resolution adopted the previous year. The SBECI was led by Jonathan Merritt, a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary at the time and son of former denominational president James Merritt. (The younger Merritt had been working closely with the EEN’s Jim Ball and Rusty Pritchard and later, with Pritchard, founded a new group called Flourish.) But the denomination’s official mouthpiece on such matters, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, quickly issued a statement pointing out that the SBECI did not speak for the denomination and that its statement ran contrary to the denomination’s own position, which had been adopted on a 60/40 split.[31]

In summer and fall of 2009, the Cornwall Alliance produced its weightiest document to date, A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming,[32] a 76-page study by ten lead and contributing authors and eighteen reviewers. The executive summary reported:

Our examination of theology, worldview, and ethics (Chapter One) finds that global warming alarmism wrongly views the Earth and its ecosystems as the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining. It rests on and promotes a view of human beings as threats to Earth’s flourishing rather than the bearers of God’s image, crowned with glory and honor, and given a mandate to act as stewards over the Earth—filling, subduing, and ruling it for God’s glory and mankind’s benefit. It either wrongly assumes that the environment can flourish only if humanity forfeits economic advance and prosperity or ignores economic impacts altogether. And in its rush to impose draconian reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, it ignores the destructive impact of that policy on the world’s poor.

Our examination of the science of global warming (Chapter Two) finds that global warming alarmism wrongly claims that recent temperature changes have been greater and more rapid than those of the past and therefore must be manmade, not natural. It exaggerates the influence of manmade greenhouse gases on global temperature and ignores or underestimates the influence of natural cycles. It mistakenly takes the output of computer climate models as evidence when it is only predictions based on hypotheses that must be tested by observation. It falsely claims overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of the hypothesis of dangerous manmade warming (ignoring tens of thousands of scientists who disagree) and then falsely claims that such consensus proves the hypothesis and justifies policies to fight it. It seeks to intimidate or demonize scientific skeptics rather than welcoming their work as of the very essence of scientific inquiry: putting hypotheses to the test rather than blindly embracing them.

Our examination of the economics of global warming alarmism (Chapter Three) finds that it exaggerates the harms from global warming and ignores or underestimates the benefits not only from warming but also from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. It grossly underestimates the costs and overestimates the benefits of policies meant to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It exaggerates the technical feasibility and underestimates the costs of alternative fuels to replace fossil fuels in providing the abundant, affordable energy necessary for wealth creation and poverty reduction. It ignores the urgent need to provide cleaner energy to the roughly two billion poor in the world whose use of wood and dung as primary cooking and heating fuels causes millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of debilitating respiratory diseases every year. It fails to recognize that the slowed economic development resulting from its own policies will cost many times more human lives than would the warming it is meant to avert.

At the same time it released the Renewed Call to Truth, on December 3, 2009, the Cornwall Alliance also released “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” which warned that mandated actions to mitigate DAGW would raise the cost of energy, destroy millions of jobs, slow or reverse economic development, and harm the poor. It asserted that “Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.” It denied that “Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry.” Rather, it said, “Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.” It called on political leaders “to adopt policies that protect human liberty, make energy more affordable, and free the poor to rise out of poverty, while abandoning fruitless, indeed harmful policies to control global temperature.” The “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” quickly gained the endorsement of over 150 prominent evangelical theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, and other scholars, and hundreds of signatures from rank-and-file evangelicals.[33]

Evangelicals, Global Warming, and Biblical Teaching

Such has been the history of prominent evangelical statements on global warming. The topic remains hotly debated. What is often overlooked, however, is that in addition to such basic principles as that God created people in His image and mandated that they were to multiply, fill the Earth, and subdue and rule it (Genesis 1:26–28), starting by cultivating and guarding the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15) and then moving out from there to subdue and rule the rest of the Earth, and that God’s creation reflects His divine attributes of wisdom, power, and goodness (Genesis 1; Psalm 8), there are some other passages of Scripture that seem to have direct bearing on particular topics in the global warming debate. In what follows I shall discuss a few such passages.

The Robustness of Creation. A crucial element of the environmentalist world view is that Earth and its habitats and inhabitants are extremely fragile and likely to suffer severe, even irreversible damage from human action. That view contradicts Genesis 1:31. It is difficult to imagine how God could have called “very good” the habitat of humanity’s vocation in a millennia-long drama if the whole thing were prone to collapse like a house of cards with the least disturbance—like a change in carbon dioxide from 0.027 to 0.039 percent of the atmosphere (the change generally believed to have occurred from pre-industrial times to the present).

Some object to this reasoning, pointing out that after all some things in this world are fragile—a fly’s wing, for instance. But there are two mistakes in this argument. First, it confuses the part with the whole. That some inhabitants of the Earth are fragile doesn’t entail that the whole Earth is, and that the wings of individual flies are fragile doesn’t entail that therefore the genus Drosophila, or even the species Drosophila melanogaster, is fragile. Though many individual flies lose their wings and all flies die, the genus and even the species endure. Second, it neglects that, seen in proportion, what deprives a fly of its wing is not, in proportion to the fly and its wing, a tiny disturbance. The fly’s wings serve quite well for their normal purposes and in the absence of proportionally overwhelming impingement.

To speak of the whole biosphere, or even of extensive subsystems, such as the climate system (comprising the entire atmosphere, oceans, and land masses of the planet, with all their biota), as extremely fragile is both to neglect the force of Genesis 1:31 and to ignore the testimony of geologic history, which includes the recovery of vast stretches of the Northern Hemisphere from long cover by ice sheets several miles thick—which certainly wiped out more ecosystems more thoroughly than human action has come close to doing—not to mention the recovery, according to Genesis, of the whole Earth from a Flood that destroyed all air-breathing life but the few representatives rescued in Noah’s ark.

Fear of Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming. The most important scientific question about manmade global warming is about “climate sensitivity”: How much would Earth’s average surface temperature rise in response to doubled concentration of carbon dioxide? Basic physics tells us it would rise by about 2.16˚F (1.2˚C),[34] but that is before climate feedbacks (evaporation, precipitation, winds, convection and advection, ocean currents, clouds and ice reflecting solar energy back into space, etc.). There is tremendous debate about individual feedbacks—not only about how strong they are but even about whether they’re positive (increasing the warming) or negative (reducing it). But there’s a “big-picture” way to address the problem that avoids the need to settle all those disputes.

With no greenhouse effect, Earth’s average surface temperature would be about 0˚F (-17˚C). With its natural greenhouse effect but no feedbacks, it would be about 140˚F (60˚C), meaning the natural greenhouse effect raises Earth’s average surface temperature by about 140˚F (77˚C). But in fact, after all the climate feedbacks, its average surface temperature before the modern increase in carbon dioxide hovered around 59˚F (15˚C). Basic arithmetic tells us this means the feedbacks eliminated about 58 percent of the greenhouse warming. In other words, no matter what individual feedbacks do, the overall collection of feedbacks is negative, not positive—and it’s strongly negative.

The computer climate models on which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depends, and the results of which the mainstream media wrongly portray as an “overwhelming scientific consensus,” all assume that overall climate feedbacks on greenhouse warming are strongly positive—that is, that they add to it, rather than subtracting from it. There is pretty well universal agreement that, without feedbacks, doubling effective CO₂ concentration would cause about 2.16˚F (1.2˚C) of warming.[35] The IPCC’s mid-range model projections call for about 5.4˚F (3˚C) of warming from doubled CO₂. But to get that much warming, overall feedbacks must increase greenhouse warming by 150 percent. To get a feel for how unlikely that is, think what it would mean for the temperature gain from the natural greenhouse effect. Instead of decreasing it by 58 percent from 140˚F (77˚C) to 59˚F (32˚C), climate feedbacks would increase it by 150 percent to 350˚F (177˚C).

But greenhouse gases are greenhouse gases, whatever their origin, and climate feedbacks are climate feedbacks. It is immensely unlikely, and there is no empirical evidence, that the feedbacks would be overwhelmingly net negative on greenhouse warming up to one level, and then overwhelmingly net positive on it above that level. On the contrary, what climate feedbacks’ overall effect on natural greenhouse warming leads us to expect is that feedbacks will eliminate about 58 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse warming as well. And if that is so, then the 2.16˚F (1.2˚C) of pre-feedback warming would not be increased to 5.4˚F (3˚C) but decreased to 0.9˚F (0.5˚C).

This big-picture way of calculating climate sensitivity is increasingly confirmed by research into the actual effect of the most important feedback effect, which is how clouds respond to changes in surface temperature. The IPCC’s models assume clouds are a strong positive feedback. But research by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi,[36] by Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou, and Arthur Y. Hou,[37] by Stephen Schwartz,[38] by Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, John Christy, and Justin Hnilo,[39] and by Spencer and Braswell[40] has all pointed in the same direction, climate sensitivity of about 0.9˚F (0.5˚C). This is simply not enough to justify any fears of dangerous impacts. Indeed, as William Nordhaus argues in A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies,[41] most of the economic and ecological modeling finds that warming in this range, or even two or three times as much, would be quite beneficial to Earth’s ecosystems and human economies—raising agricultural yields, shrinking deserts, expanding habitat ranges for all kinds of plants and animals.

The Bible teaches something that strongly favors the low-sensitivity view. The high-sensitivity view depends on the assumption that Earth’s climate system is highly unstable, fragile, subject to catastrophic changes prompted by minuscule causes. When we speak of doubling atmospheric CO₂ content, we’re speaking of going from pre-industrial concentration of about 270 to about 540 parts per million by volume—that is, from about 27 to 54 thousandths of one percent of the atmosphere. So far, we have reached about 39 parts per million—about 39 thousandths of a percent. Does such an assumption make sense in light of Biblical theism, of the Biblical doctrine that an infinitely wise God designed, and a perfectly faithful and infinitely powerful God sustains, the Earth and its climate system? What would anyone think of an architect who designed a building so that all its feedback mechanisms magnified any stress, so that if someone leaned on one wall, the whole building collapsed? Would we say the building displayed wisdom and power? I think not. Neither does Biblical teaching support belief in the fragile climate system assumed by global warming activists. The low-sensitivity view recognizes Earth’s climate system to be robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting—just what we would expect from its intelligent and powerful Creator.

Although these and similar findings have stunning implications for the ongoing debate about global warming, their more important effect should be to prompt Christians to praise God for the way in which Earth, like the human body, is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). In some senses Earth, like the eye, may be fragile, but overall it is, by God’s wise design, more resilient than many fearful environmentalists can imagine.

Consequently, fear of manmade global warming is questionable not only scientifically but also theologically. The Bible teaches that God did not create the world and walk away from it but actively sustains it so that His purposes will be achieved. It teaches that God is sovereign, so that it seems unlikely that man can thwart His purposes. Consequently, it seems to imply that there is no need to adopt anti-global warming policies, especially if, as the economics section of this document argues, they will consign our poorest neighbors to additional decades or generations of grinding poverty.

Divine Promises and Creation Stewardship. The Bible teaches that God’s plans are reflected in His promises, which human sin cannot nullify. Among those promises are two that are particularly relevant to the discussion of manmade global warming: (1) that the natural cycles necessary for human and ecosystem thriving (summer and winter, planting and harvest, cold and heat, day and night) will continue as long as Heaven and Earth endure (Genesis 8:22), and (2) that flood waters will never again cover the Earth (Genesis 9:11–12, 15–16; Psalm 104:9; Jeremiah 5:22).

Consider Genesis 8:22, a brief bit of poetry:

While the earth remains,

Seedtime and harvest,

And cold and heat,

And summer and winter,

And day and night

Shall not cease.

This passage suggests that God ensures, by His all-powerful providence, that major disruption of natural cycles on which people and other living things depend will not occur. The poetic device in which one or a few things represent all in a class or all their subsets (called merism) appears here. By naming several pairs of opposite extremes on different cycles, the Hebrew writer conveys that not just these four cycles but all others necessary for life to flourish will continue. The seasons, the annual and daily alternation of cold and heat, and with them the functioning of the water cycle (precipitation, flow, evaporation, precipitation) will continue as long as Heaven and Earth endure.

The other passages are difficult to reconcile with fears of catastrophic sea level rise. While there is evidence that sea level was once much higher than it now is, many evangelicals believe that evidence is best interpreted in light of the flood of Noah’s day—a never-to-be-repeated, cataclysmic judgment of God that would have been followed by a sudden ice age (accompanied by much reduced sea level as water was stored in vast ice sheets on land) as the atmosphere lost its high water vapor content and so cooled rapidly, and then a gradual recovery as temperatures rose and water vapor rose to approximately their present levels (accompanied by a gradual sea level rise to present levels as the continental glaciers melted and ocean waters expanded as they warmed). Although these verses do not guarantee that no local floods will occur or even that no sea level rise will, nonetheless since they were given as assurance against devastating judgment (before the last judgment; 2 Peter 3:1–13) similar to that of the great flood of Noah’s day, they are hard to reconcile with the kind of catastrophic sea level rise envisioned by global warming alarmists.

This does not mean that sea level cannot rise (and likewise fall) gradually and within certain boundaries over long periods as Earth warms and cools through natural cycles. But catastrophic sea level rise depends not only on its being of large magnitude but also on its occurring too quickly for human adaptation—and that is simply not in the offing. Just as the vast majority of all human settlements and structures within 10 or 20 meters in altitude from the sea were created during just the last century, so they can, if necessary, be replaced and added to in the coming century by an increasingly wealthy world. But it is extremely unlikely that it will be necessary. The most credible forecasts of sea level rise suggest no more than about 8 inches, not 10 or 20 meters, in this century—a rate no faster than has prevailed for many centuries—and possibly none.[42] Recent data from sea level monitoring stations around the southwest Pacific confirm that sea level rise during the last thirty years, despite widespread claims to the contrary and (what turned out to be unwarranted) widespread fears of the impending submersion of island nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati, has been slight to nonexistent and certainly not significantly greater than its long-term rate.[43] Despite their comparative poverty, human beings have adjusted successfully to sea level rise for centuries. Their increasing prosperity will enable them to do so even more successfully in the future.

The Root of Irrational Fears of Environmental Catastrophe. Jeremiah 5:21–25 is one passage that should bring evangelical DAGW alarmists up short:

Declare this in the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah, saying, “Now hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see; who have ears but do not hear. Do you not fear Me?” declares the Lord. “Do you not tremble in My presence? For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, an eternal decree, so it cannot cross over it. Though the waves toss, yet they cannot prevail; though they roar, yet they cannot cross over it. But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and departed. They do not say in their heart, ‘Let us now fear the Lord our God, who gives rain in its season, both the autumn rain and the spring rain, who keeps for us the appointed weeks of the harvest.’ Your iniquities have turned these away, And your sins have withheld good from you.”

The full impact of this text stems from the contrast drawn between the sea, which, though it has neither eyes nor ears, still stays within the boundaries God has set for it, and the “foolish and senseless people,” who, though they have eyes and ears, neither see nor hear God and therefore transgress the boundaries He has set for them. And what lies at the root of their blindness and transgression? It is their lack of the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10). The real root of irrational fears of natural catastrophes is the absence of the fear of the Lord, manifested in persistent sins like those named so frequently throughout Jeremiah.[44] It is precisely because the people of Judah do not fear God (and so practice all kinds of sin) that they come to fear that the spring and autumn rains will fail.

Fear of environmental catastrophe grows out of lack of the fear of God. That, Jeremiah teaches, is the real root of the many false or exaggerated environmental scares that have plagued the modern world. And such fears will continue—with or without scientific basis—until people repent and fear God. “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord. … Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is in the Lord. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit” (Jeremiah 17:5, 7–8). Since the Bible teaches also that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10; 9:10) and knowledge (Proverbs 1:7), it follows that those who do not fear God are vulnerable to irrational fears stemming from a flight from reason.

These and similar passages suggest that the Bible teaches that God’s wisdom, power, and faithfulness justify confidence that Earth’s ecosystems are robust and will by God’s providence accomplish His purposes for them.

Climate Fears, Post-Normal Science, and the Rise of Irrationalism. Historians and philosophers of science have often pointed out the crucial role that the Biblical world view played in the development of science and technology in Western civilization.[45] Belief in an orderly world created by a rational God who imparted His rationality to human beings made in His image (Genesis 1:26; John 1:1–9), not the chaotic world of materialistic chance or the unpredictable world of animism, enabled the Christianized Western civilization to develop the experimental method as well as the institutions of private property, limited and accountable government, and personal liberty that were indispensable to the Industrial Revolution and later economic development. But the early Enlightenment, much shaped by such Christian thought, was supplanted first in the France of the philosophes and then elsewhere by a naturalistic Enlightenment that rejected the insights of theism.  This in turn gave way first to the soft irrationalism of existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard, for whom faith was a blind leap against reason and who was followed by Friedrich Nietsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, and then to the more thorough-going irrationalism of postmodernists and deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard, for whom statements cannot actually communicate truth or meaning, and indeed aren’t normally even intended to do so, but are mere exertions of power, the attempt to impose particular paradigms or meta-narratives on others.[46]

The natural sciences, with their traditional commitment to external evidence, were more resistant to the flight from reason than the humanities. From its start, however, the ecological and environmental movement has had a strong mystical, irrationalist strain. In America, its roots are in the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whose thought shaped the nature theology of John Muir. Muir’s mysticism appears in, for example, his saying that “no amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains,” though one encountering them directly would discover that “the pure in heart shall see God.”[47] In Germany, “The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections. In 1867, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecology’ and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment.”[48] It was embodied in the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) movement promoted especially by German philosopher Ludwig Klages, whose essay “Man and Earth” (1913) diagnosed all of modern society’s ills in terms of Geist, a term meaning mind or intellect that Klages used idiosyncratically “to denounce not only hyperrationalism or instrumental reason, but rational thought itself.”[49] It gave rise in Nazism to a “religion of nature” that was “a volatile admixture of primitive teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land.”[50] By the late twentieth century, a great deal of the environmental movement was dominated by New Age, revised Gnostic, and neo-pagan ideas. One finds them, for example, in feminist theologian and animal rights activist Carol J. Adams’s protest, “Science’s insistence on being tough, rigorous, rational, impersonal, and unemotional is intertwined with men’s gender identities,”[51] or in Norwegian “ecosopher” Arne Naess’s (who coined the term deep ecology) assertion that most of his work consists not “of philosophical or logical argumentation” but is “primarily intuitions.”[52] They dominate the thought of eco-feminist theologian Sally McFague’s The Body of God and other works.[53]

The irrationality of environmentalist thought has been formalized. Taking their cue from postmodernism, with its relativism and deconstructionism, which sees communication not as conveying truth but as exerting power, many leading environmentalists, especially some at the center of global warming alarmism, have embraced something called “post-normal science,” a practice first defined and promoted in the 1960s primarily by philosophers of science Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz.

Eva Kunseler, of the Environment and Public Health Department of the Finnish National Public Health Institute and a proponent of post-normal science, defined “normal science” this way:[54]

[Normal] Science is a logic inductive process leading to theory formulation, while all the way put through critical tests that have been deductively derived from the theory. . . . The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of the Mertonian [named for philosopher of science Robert K. Merton] CUDOS [C-U-D-O-S] norms of science. They include:

(C)ommunalism—the common ownership of scientific discoveries, according to which scientists give up intellectual property rights in exchange for recognition and esteem;

(U)niversalism—according to which claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal or value-free criteria;

(D)isinterestedness—according to which scientists are rewarded for acting in ways that appear to be selfless;

(O)rganized (S)kepticism—all ideas must be tested and are subject to structured community scrutiny.

Kunseler then described post-normal science in contrast:

The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of goal orientation [emphasis added] where scientific goals are controlled by political or societal actors . . . . Scientists’ integrity lies not in disinterestedness but in their behavior as stakeholders. Normal science made the world believe that scientists should and could provide certain, objective factual information. … The guiding principle of normal science—the goal of achievement of factual knowledge—must be modified to fit the post-normal principle. . . . For this purpose, post-normal scientists should be capable of establishing extended peer communities and allow for ‘extended facts’ from non-scientific experts. … In post-normal science, the maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than the establishment of factual knowledge, is the key task of scientists ….

People at the top of alarmist climate-change “scientists” know exactly what they’re doing—post-normal science, not real science.

Consider self-professed socialist Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre and Professor (not of climate, but) of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, home of the Climatic Research Unit, of Climategate infamy.[55] The author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity, Hulme prepared climate-change scenarios and reports for the British government, the European Commission, the United Nations Environment Program, the United Nations Population Division, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (as a lead author for the chapter on “Climate scenario development” for the 2001 Assessment Report and a contributing author on several other chapters), and the World Wildlife Fund. In other words, you can’t get any closer to the top of the heap among climate scientists. Says Hulme of “post-normal” science:[56]

Climate change seems to fall in this category. … The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.

Within a capitalist world order [which Hulme wants to replace with socialism], climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow. … exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.

… “self-evidently” dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking. … [S]cientists—and politicians—must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy. …

The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. … It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change—the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals—to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.

… climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences. … climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes. … climate change has become “the mother of all issues,” the key narrative within which all environmental politics—from global to local—is now framed. … Rather than asking “how do we solve climate change?” we need to turn the question around and ask: “how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations …?”

In other words, “post-normal science,” shorn of the commitments of “normal science” to transparency, disinterestedness, falsifiability, and skepticism, is the guise under which climate change and any other issue can become the vehicle for promoting predetermined social and political goals.

The warfare between post-normal science and real science is important not just in the debate over “climate change,” but in all kinds of issues in which science interfaces with policy. Like the pseudo-Christian cults that borrow vocabulary from Christianity but redefine all the terms, post-normal science is the application of rhetoric borrowed from the sciences to policy debates, cloaking one particular policy preference with the authority of “science” and labeling anything contrary “pseudo-science.” Its proponents can be successful at doing so only to the extent that policy makers and the public are ignorant of the fact that post-normal science isn’t science at all. In the final analysis it is no different from what physicist Richard Feynman in 1974 called “cargo cult science,” that is, “work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing ‘a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.’”[57]

Conclusion

Why should all of this be of particular interest to evangelical theologians and pastors discussing climate change? Because the Biblical world view that bequeathed the understanding of the world as the ordered creation of a rational God, a creation that can be known by His rational creatures made in His image and invested with logos (Genesis 1:26; John 1:1, 9), stands diametrically opposed to post-normal science’s irrationalist rejection of objective truth and its substitution of power projection for reasoned argument and truth telling. Post-normal science has come to characterize the inner circle of climate alarmist scientists, as a close reading of the Climategate emails[58] reveals. Christians, followers of the One who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), of Jahweh who is “God of truth” (Psalm 31:5), whose mind is the source of logic and whose Word, the Bible, implicitly affirms the laws of logic throughout (e.g., the law of contradiction implicit in Isaiah 5:20, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”)[59] and is truth (John 17:17)—Christians of all people should recognize post-normal science for what it is and, recognizing it to be such and to play such a crucial role in promoting DAGW, should reject it and the irrational fears it promotes. The failure to do so explains why some evangelicals remain on the DAGW alarmist bandwagon.

 

^[1]Benjamin B. Phillips, “Evangelicals and Global Warming,” Acton Commentary, June 23, 2010, online at http://www.acton.org/commentary/594_evangelicals_global_warming.php, accessed June 25, 2010. This article was based on a longer one by Phillips, “Getting Into Hot Water: Evangelicals and Global Warming,” Markets & Morality 12:2 (Fall, 2009), 315–336.

^[2]Evangelical Climate Initiative, “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” January, 2006, online at http://christiansandclimate.org/learn/call-to-action/ (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[3]At the time it was known as the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. It changed its name in early 2007 to avoid confusion with a similarly named group and to bring its name into closer association with its foundation document, “The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship,” online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/the-cornwall-declaration-on-environmental-stewardship.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[4]E. Calvin Beisner, Paul K. Driessen, Ross McKitrick, and Roy W. Spencer, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming (Burke, VA: Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, August, 2006), online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/a-call-to-truth-prudence-and-protection-of-the-poor.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010). A current list of signers is online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/an-open-letter-to-the-signers-of-climate-change-an-evangelical-call-to-action-and-others-concerned-about-global-warming.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[5]Footnote in the original Call to Truth:

See, as examples of studies supporting such conclusions, the following papers by environmental policy analyst Indur M. Goklany: “Comments to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,” March 17, 2006, at http://members.cox.net/goklany/Stern%202.pdf; “Evidence for the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,” December 9, 2005, http://members.cox.net/goklany/Goklany-%20Evidence%20for%20Stern%20Review.pdf; “Integrated Strategies to Reduce Vulnerability and Advance Adaptation, Mitigation, and Sustainable Development,” http://members.cox.net/igoklany/Goklany-Integrating_A&M_preprint.pdf; “A Climate Policy for the Short and Medium Term: Stabilization or Adaptation?”, Energy & Environment 16:3&4 (2005), http://members.cox.net/igoklany/EEv16_Stab_or_Adaptation.pdf; “Evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs on Aspects of the Economics of Climate Change,” Energy & Environment 16:3&4 (2005), http://members.cox.net/igoklany/EEv16-3+4_GoklanyHoL_Evidence.pdf.

^[6]Moyers on America program transcript, Is God Green?, online at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/print/isgodgreen_transcript_print.html (accessed June 19, 2010).

^[7]Juliet Eilperin, “Warming Draws Evangelicals into Environmentalist Fold,” Washington Post, August 8, 2007; online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/07/AR2007080701910_pf.html (accessed June 19, 2010).

^[8]The first of the two points (the other is the doctrine of the Trinity) of the doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Theological Society, with over 4,000 members the nation’s largest society of evangelical theologians and Biblical scholars, is “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs” (http://www.etsjets.org/about/constitution#A3, accessed June 25, 2010).

^[9]Written by leading American conservative theologians and Bible scholars, the essays were gathered and published in various editions. Selections from them are now in print as The Fundamentals: The Classic Sourcebook of Foundational Biblical Truths, edited by R. A. Torrey and Charles Feinberg (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 1990).

^[10]National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), “What Is the Partnership?—History,” online at http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/founding_intro01.htm#top (accessed June 19, 2010); “Preserving and Cherishing the Earth: An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion,” online at http://earthrenewal.org/Open_letter_to_the_religious_.htm (accessed June 19, 2010).

^[11]Stephen E. Schwartz, “Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of Earth’s climate system,” Journal of Geophysical Research, 112 (November 2, 2007); online at http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-79148-2007-JA.pdf (accessed June 19, 2010). Posted online at http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf with minor typographical errors corrected (accessed June 19, 2010).

^[12]Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment, “Declaration of the ‘Mission to Washington,’” May 12, 1992, online at http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/jointappeal.html (accessed June 19, 2010).

^[13]http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/founding_intro03.htm#top

^[14]http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/founding_intro04.htm#top

^[15]http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/founding_intro06.htm#top

^[16]http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/founding_intro05.htm#top

^[17]http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/founding_intro07.htm#top

^[18]http://www.nrpe.org/whatisthepartnership/board_intro01.htm

^[19]Evangelicals for Social Action/Evangelical Environmental Network press release, November 17, 1993.

^[20]E. Calvin Beisner, “Are God’s resources finite?” World, 8:27 (November 27, 1993), 10–13; reprinted in E. Calvin Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans/Acton Isntitute, 1997), Appendix 4, 161–167.

^[21]Gordon Aeschliman, “Somebody got shot in the head: Creation after the fall,” Prism 1:2 (December/January 1994), 7.

^[22]I critiqued this and numerous other examples of such tactics in chapter 6, “Observations on the Mind of the Evangelical Environmental Movement,” of Where Garden Meets Wilderness.

^[23]Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, “Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship” (2000), online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/articles/read/the-cornwall-declaration-on-environmental-stewardship/ (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[24]A list of signers of the “Cornwall Declaration” is online at http://watch-unto-prayer.org/cornwall-signers.html (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[25]Roy W. Spencer, Paul K. Driessen, and E. Calvin Beisner, An Evangelical Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy (Burke, VA: Cornwall Alliance, 2005), online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/an-examination-of-the-scientific-ethical-and-theological-implications-of-climate-change-policy.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[26]“An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation,” online at http://chge.med.harvard.edu/media/releases/documents/signedstatement.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[27]Southern Baptist Convention, Resolution #5, “On Global Warming,” June, 2007, online at http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/amResolution.asp?ID=1171 (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[28]E. Calvin Beisner, Barrett Duke, Stephen Livesay, et al., The Cornwall Stewardship Agenda (Burke, VA: Cornwall Alliance, 2007), online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/cornwall-stewardship-agenda.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[29]Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change,” online at http://www.baptistcreationcare.org/node/1 (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[30]Neela Banerjee, “Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change,” New York Times, March 10, 2008, online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/us/10baptist.html?_r=1 (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[31]Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission staff, “ERLC President reacts to ‘Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change,’” March 10, 2007, online at http://erlc.com/article/erlc-president-reacts-to-southern-baptist-declaration-on-the-environment-an/ (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[32]Craig Vincent Mitchell, Roy W. Spencer, David Legates, Cornelis van Kooten, Pete Geddes, et al., A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming (Burke, VA: Cornwall Alliance, 2009), online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/docs/a-renewed-call-to-truth-prudence-and-protection-of-the-poor.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[33]Signers are listed online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/blog/item/prominent-signers-of-an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/ (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[34]Martin L. Weitzman, “On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” Department of Economics, Harvard University, February 8, 2008, online at http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/61_Modeling.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[35]Ibid.

^[36]Richard S. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, “On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data,” Geophysical Research Letters 36 (August 26, 2009), online at http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL039628.shtml (accessed June 25, 2010; subscription only) and http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL039628-pip.pdf (posted by the authors in manuscript PDF).

^[37]Richard S. Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou, and Arthur Y. Hou, “Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (2000), online at http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/adinfriris.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[38]Steven E. Schwartz, “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of the Earth’s Climate System,” Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007), online at http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[39]Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, John Christy, and Justin Hnilo, “Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations,” Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007), online at http://www.drroyspencer.com/Spencer_07GRL.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[40]Roy W. Spencer and William D. Braswell, “Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration,” Journal of Climate 21 (2008), online at http://www.drroyspencer.com/Spencer-and-Braswell-08.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[41]William D. Nordhaus, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

^[42]Nils-Axel Mörner, “Estimating future sea level changes from past records,” Global and Planetary Change 40 (2004): 49–54, online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VF0-49C5G0W-2&_user=10&_coverDate=01/31/2004&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f13fd667d130a24ac0f60eadee251f17 (subscription only, accessed June 25, 2010) and http://www.junkscience.com/jan04/nils-morner_1.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[43]Cliff Ollier, “Sea Level in the Southwest Pacific is Stable,” New Concepts in Global Tectonics Newsletter, no. 50 (June 2009), online at http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/paperncgtsealevl.pdf (accessed June 25, 2010).

^[44]Contrary to the claims of some Christian environmentalists that the judgments visited on Israel and Judah were for their abuse of the land, the actual sins listed by Jeremiah are idolatry (1:16; 2:5; 3:6; 7:9, 18; 8:19; 10:2; 11:10; 16:18; 17:2), forsaking Yahweh and worshiping pagan gods, which God called spiritual adultery (1:16; 2:11, 17, 20; 3:1, 2-3, 9, 20; 5:7, 18; 7:30; 9:2, 13; 11:10, 17; 13:10, 25, 27; 14:10; 15:6; 16:11), prophets speaking in the name of false gods (2:7), absence of the fear of God (2:19), rejecting and killing God’s prophets (2:30), forgetting God (2:32), murder (2:34; 4:31; 7:9), injustice (5:1; 7:5), falsehood and lies (5:1, 12; 6:13; 7:9; 8:8, 10; 9:3), deception (9:8), oppression (5:25–29, 6:6; 7:6; 9:8; 17:11), fraud (5:27), false priests and prophets “and My people love to have it so” (5:30; 14:15), rejection of God’s Word (6:10, 19; 8:9; 9:13; 11:10; 13:10), covetousness (6:13; 8:10), religious formalism and presumption (7:3-4), stealing (7:8–9), sexual adultery (7:9; 9:2), general disobedience to God’s law (7:28), child sacrifice (7:31), worship of nature (8:2), covenant breaking (11:3), general wickedness (12:4), complaint against God (12:8), pride (13:8), trusting in man instead of in God (17:5), and Sabbath breaking (17:21). Never once do the prophets describe the sins for which God punishes them as unsustainable farming practices, pollution, or similar things.

^[45]E.g., J. P. Moreland, Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1989); J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987); J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, The Shaping of Rationality: Toward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Nigel Brush, The Limitations of Scientific Truth: Why Science Can’t Answer Life’s Ultimate Questions (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005); Tim Morris and Donald Petcher, Science and Grace: God’s Reign in the Natural Sciences (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006); Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994); Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005); Stanley L. Jaki, The Savior of Science (reprint edition, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Stanley L. Jaki, Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2004); Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1976).

^[46]Matei Calinescu, The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).

^[47]John Muir, John of the Mountains The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1938 reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 94–95, cited in Robert Nelson, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 151.

^[48]Peter Staudenmeier, “Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents,” in Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons frm the German Experience (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995), 7. The integral role of mystical ecological thought in Nazism has received increasing attention from historians in recent years. Among the works examining it are Karla Poewe’s New Religions and the Nazis (New York: Routledge, 2006); How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, edited by Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cico, and Thomas Zeller (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 2005); and R. Mark Musser, Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrificial Offering of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust (Altamonte Springs, FL: Advantage Books, 2010).

^[49]Staudenmeier, “Fascist Ecology,” 11–12.

^[50]Staudenmeier, “Fascist Ecology,” 14.

^[51]Kim Bartlett, “Of Meat and Men: A Conversation with Carol Adams,” The Animals’ Agenda (October 1990), 13). Adams is author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1991).

^[52]David Rothenberg, “Introduction: Ecosophy T: from intuition to system,” in Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, translated and revised by David Rothenberg (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2.

^[53]Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). See E. Calvin Beisner, “Ecology, Neopaganism & Global Warming,” in On Global Wizardry: Techniques of Pagan Spirituality and a Christian Response, edited by Peter Jones (Escondido, CA: Main Entry Editions, 2010), 171–185, which is a condensed version of “Deep Ecology, Neo-Paganism, and the Irrationalism of Global Warming Hysteria,” an address to the annual CWIPPThink meeting of Christian Witness in a Pagan Planet, Escondido, California, January 21–24, 2008, online at http://ecalvinbeisner.com/freearticles/DeepEcol&GlobalWarming.pdf (accessed June 26, 2010).

^[54]Eva Kunseler, “Towards a New Paradigm of Science in Scientific Policy Advising” (Finland: Kansanterveyslaitos [National Public Health Institute], 2007), online at http://www.nusap.net/downloads/KunselerEssay2007.pdf (accessed June 26, 2010).

^[55]Climategate was the release of thousands of emails, computer codes, and other documents among leading climate alarmist scientists that revealed that they were fabricating, exaggerating, cherry picking, and suppressing data, intimidating dissenting scientists, blackballing journal editors willing to publish the dissenters, corrupting the peer review process, refusing to share data and code with fellow scientists on request even when required to by the journals in which they published, and violating American and British Freedom of Information Acts. Climategate has contributed considerably to the decline in public belief in dangerous manmade global warming. The most thorough discussion of the Climategate emails and other documents to date, putting them into historical context, is Steven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller’s Climategate: The CRUtape Letters (n.p.: CreateSpace, 2010). A. W. Montford treats it helpfully also in The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (London: Stacey International, 2010). An online source is The Climategate Emails, edited by John Costella (Melbourne, Australia: Lavoisier Group, 2010), online at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf (accessed June 26, 2010).

^[56]All cited in [Kevin McGrane], “Climate Change and the Death of Science,” October 31, 2009, online at http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/ (accessed June 26, 2010) from Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding the Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Mike Hulme, “The Appliance of Science,” The Guardian, March 14, 2007, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/mar/14/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange, (accessed June 26, 2010). See also Mike Hulme and Martin Mahony, “Climate Change: What do we know about the IPCC?” April 12, 2010, a review article for Progress in Physical Geography, online at http://www.probeinternational.org/Hulme-Mahony-PiPG%5B1%5D.pdf (accessed June 26, 2010); E. Calvin Beisner, “Wanted for Premeditated Murder: How Post-Normal Science Stabbed Real Science in the Back on the Way to the Illusion of ‘Scientific Consensus’ on Global Warming,” Cornwall Alliance blog, March 26, 2010, online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/blog/item/wanted-for-premeditated-murder-how-post-normal-science-stabbed-real-science-in-the-back-on-the-way-to-the-illusion-of-scientific-consensus-on-global-warming/ (accessed June 26, 2010) and “Climategate: The Dust from the Exposure of Post-Normal Science at Work Just Won’t Settle, No Matter How Much True Believers Wish it Would,” Cornwall Alliance blog, June 22, 2010, online at https://www.cornwallalliance.org/blog/item/climategate-the-dust-from-the-exposure-of-post-normal-science-at-work-just-wont-settle-no-matter-how-much-true-believers-wish-it-would/ (accessed June 26, 2010); and David Theroux, “IPCC Insider Admits Climate Consensus Claim Was a Lie,” The Beacon blog of The Independent Institute, June 18, 2010, online at http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=6645 (accessed June 26, 2010).

^[57]“Cargo cult science,” Wikipedia, online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science (accessed June 26, 2010).

^[58]They are all available online at http://eastangliaemails.com/, http://www.climategateemails.com/, and http://www.climate-gate.org/ (all accessed June 26, 2010), among other places.

^[59]See Gordon H. Clark, The Johannine Logos (Unicoi, TN: Trinity Foundation, 1989), Lord God of Truth and Concerning the Teacher (Trinity Foundation, 1994), Religion, Reason, and Revelation (Trinity Foundation, 1986), An Introduction to Christian Philosophy (Trinity Foundation, 1993), Christian Philosophy (Trinity Foundation, 2004), Logic (Trinity Foundation, 1985), Language and Theology (Trinity Foundation, 1993), and Three Types of Religious Philosophy (Trinity Foundation, 1989).