Here at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation we try to answer email questions in detail as often as we can. That’s not to say we have the time to answer every single question that way, but we do try. This week Dr. Beisner received the following question from a staff member of a college apologetics ministry. (We do not include the names of those who ask questions when we share the information with our readers.)

What are your thoughts on the critical claim that organizations such as the Cornwall Alliance takes positions with an opinion made up before investigating the scientific facts? Is the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming a case-in-point in terms of a clear-cut cognitive bias? Some say such musings by members of similar Christian organizations are typically ignored by the scientific community at large and put into a box of irrelevance because of this clear-cut cognitive bias, based on one’s preconceived Christian beliefs.

So, as Christians, do we use motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, especially when we delve into scientific areas? What’re your thoughts?

Here, with slight edits, is Dr. Beisner’s answer:

I have no doubt that some people do reach conclusions—on all sides of all kinds of issues, including global warming—because of cognitive bias. That’s a weakness all humans must resist and tame by disciplined attention to facts and logic. Indeed, on the issue of global warming, I’ve met Christians who have taken the Cornwall Alliance’s position without thinking it through very carefully—and I’ve met Christians who have taken the opposite position without thinking it through very carefully.

That such things happen is, however, irrelevant to the ultimate question of the truth or falsehood of, and the adequacy or inadequacy of the empirical evidence and logical argumentation for, any given position. Writing off someone’s conclusion as merely the fruit of cognitive bias exemplifies at least two logical fallacies: the motive fallacy and the genetic fallacy. The former fallacy says that if someone’s conclusion on a question is consistent with some motive he has, then there’s no need to refute any arguments he might offer for his conclusion. The latter says that because a conclusion originates from this person or that, or from this historical background or that, therefore there’s no need to refute any arguments for it.

Now let me address your question autobiographically.

I began studying environmental stewardship issues as a tangent of my studies of economics in the 1980s—studies that led to my earning a master’s degree in economic ethics, chairing the economics committee of the Coalition on Revival, which eventually produced a statement on the Christian worldview of economics, and then being asked to write two books for Crossway’s Turning Point Christian Worldview series, Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity (1988), and Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (1990). Some scientists had begun focusing a good bit on global warming by that time, but not a lot, and there were no clear indications that a movement was forming or where it might be heading. I gave it no attention in the first book and very little in the second.

I enlarged my studies on the subject in the early 1990s enough that in my book Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (1997) I was willing to write that I thought the best evidence indicated that the case for dangerous global warming was not strong and that clamor over it would probably subside within a decade. My prediction was quite wrong, obviously, as clamor continues and is much stronger today than it was then!

I continued my studies somewhat during the late 1990s and increasingly into the early 2000s. When several friends and I discussed, in 2005, the possibility of starting what became The Cornwall Alliance with me as its spokesman, I responded that I would have to carefully review the scientific debate about global warming before I’d be willing to take a public position on it.

I began by reading Global Warming: The Complete Briefing, by Sir John Houghton, who had been the Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was a world-renowned climatologist. Houghton, a self-professed evangelical Christian, presented what seemed to me a persuasive case for the IPCC’s prevailing view, which was that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (or its equivalent in infrared-absorption capacity of other “greenhouse” gases) would lead to a 1.5–4.5˚C increase in “global average temperature” (GAT), with a “best estimate” of 3.0˚C, and that this would have many serious negative effects of ecosystems and human wellbeing. I read parts of the First, Second, and Third Assessment Reports of the IPCC, and various other sources supporting its conclusions.

I then read Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, by Patrick J. Michaels, a non-Christian meteorologist, followed by several other books (by now the number of books I’ve read on the science of climate change exceeds 50, and the number of articles, hundreds of them refereed, would surely top several thousand—for well over five years I read an average of 5 articles per day 6 days per week) that presented different conclusions from those of the IPCC. These books persuaded me that Houghton’s reasoning was faulty in several respects. I continued reading various studies pro and con and finally was persuaded that while human emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gases do make the atmosphere somewhat warmer than it otherwise would be, the amount of warming was probably toward the lower end of the IPCC’s estimates, would likely not have negative effects that outweighed positive effects, and could be mitigated (reduced) only at the expense of slowing, stopping, or even reversing economic growth for the two or three billion people in the world who most desperately need it.

It was only after those studies that I agreed to start the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA)—which in 2007 we renamed the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. I consulted a variety of evangelical scientists (including some of the world’s leading climate scientists, like Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. David Legates), economists, theologians, political scientists, policy wonks, and others to form an advisory board, and Cornwall Alliance grew from there.

You might find it enlightening to compare this background with the background of Dr. David Gushee, who while he was an ethics professor at Union University drafted what became the statement, “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” promoted by the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a project of the Evangelical Environmental Network, published in 2006. ISA produced a scholarly paper, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming (2006), a critique of the ECI’s “Call to Action,” co-authored by Dr. Spencer, environmental economist Dr. Ross McKitrick, energy and environmental policy expert Paul Driessen, and myself. Some faculty members at Union University arranged for Dr. Gushee and me to debate there in October of 2006. Shortly before we went on stage for what turned out to be a several-hours-long debate, Dr. Gushee told me, “You know, Cal, before I began preparing for this debate I didn’t realize how complex the science of global warming was.” (I quote from memory—that’s the substance of what he said, though I can’t be certain of the exact words.) That suggests that it was the ECI’s “Call to Action” that was more likely than the products of the Cornwall Alliance to be a result primarily of cognitive bias. (You can obtain a DVD of the debate from our online store.)

Over the years our scholars have produced not only hundreds of articles (on our website and in scores of print and online periodicals) but also these six major papers that set forth our reasons for our position on climate change and climate and energy policy:

1. An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy (2005),
2. A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming (2006), endorsed by hundreds of scientists, economists, theologians, and other scholars,
3. The Cornwall Stewardship Agenda (2008),
4. A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming (2010),
5. The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy (2011),
6. A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against Harmful Climate Policies Gets Stronger (2014).
7. An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change, endorsed by hundreds of leading scientists, economists, theologians, ministry leaders, and laymen (2015).

These papers all integrate evidence and reasoning from the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, atmospheric science, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, geology, biology, economics, engineering, political science, theology, philosophy, and ethics in support of our conclusions. Might our conclusions be consistent with some of our cognitive bias? Of course—as may be the case with many scholars’ conclusions about many issues. Whether they are is only minimally related, logically, to whether our conclusions are well justified by the reasons we offer.

One last point before I conclude: You write, “Some say such musings by members of similar Christian organizations are typically ignored by the scientific community at large and put into a box of irrelevance because of this clear-cut cognitive bias, based on one’s preconceived Christian beliefs.” If “the scientific community” (or anyone else) does that to Cornwall Alliance’s major papers, which if they read them they would find to be dominated by scientific and economic reasoning by fully credentialed, widely published, respected scientists and economists, then that shows their own cognitive bias against Christian scholars. They are hoist by their own petard!

As I’ve already said, cognitive bias affects everyone. Now I’ll apply that to this explicit objection to Christian thought. It’s not only Christian thought that has some biases, it’s also every other major thought system. Worldview is inescapable. Atheism/naturalism is as much a worldview, based on presuppositions, as is theism/supernaturalism. If we can write off conclusions simply because they’re consistent with cognitive bias, what privileges atheism/naturalism over theism/supernaturalism?

The cognitive bias objection is the lazy person’s response. The serious thinker tests all things, holds fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

So we would invite those who claim that our Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming—which as a declaration is hardly where one would expect to find detailed, in-depth reasoning (which we provided in our major paper, A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor) but rather only conclusions—is merely the product of cognitive bias both to examine the evidence we offer for its conclusions and to check their own cognitive bias, too.

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