Yesterday I began a multi-part critique of a recent blog post by Evangelical Environmental Network board chairman Scott Rodin titled “As a Conservative, Evangelical Republican, Why Climate Change Can’t Be True (Even Though It Is).” In that piece I pointed out that scientific data point the opposite direction from where Rodin thinks they do. I also mentioned that Rodin was using logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks to precondition readers to accept his conclusions despite his lack of sound data and logical inferences.

I concluded yesterday’s post with comments on this paragraph by Rodin:

What is the conclusion that I drew from the combination of my passion for stewardship plus a basic trust in science? I was an adamant climate change denier. Yup, 1+1 = 3. Global warming was a hoax. Environmentalism was a word you said with a sneer on your lips. I cared for God’s creation and held science in the highest regard, all while sitting at home watching Whale Wars and rooting for the Japanese whaling ships (seriously). For some unknown reason I lived comfortably with this irreconcilable internal contradiction.

He followed that up by writing:

Finally, this absurdity became intolerable, forcing me to question how I got here, and why it had been so easy to establish and remain in such a paradox for so long. I have come to the conclusion that for me, and perhaps for far too many of us in the evangelical church, the answer can be summed up in one word; conditioning.

Webster defines conditioning as ‘a gradual training process, learning behavior over time.’ I realized that over my lifetime I had been conditioned to think about environmentalists through the lens of five significant perspectives.

As I pointed out yesterday, conditioning can also be accomplished by logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks, and that Rodin had used some of these. But now let’s look at the “five significant perspectives” he says “conditioned” him to conclude, “Global warming was a hoax.” Will our being alerted to these perspectives free us from being similarly conditioned?

1. Conditioning: People who care about the environment are left-wing, socialist, former hippies who have no job and hate those who do.

This is of course an instance of overgeneralization. But notice how raising it functions both as a straw man to tar anyone who questions Rodin’s conclusions (“Ah, that person must overgeneralize this way, too!”) and as a psychological hint that if some environmentalists aren’t Left-wing socialist hippies, none can be. Yet there is overwhelming documentary evidence that indeed many (not all!) are.

2. Conditioning: People who care about the environment are liberal Democrats who favor big government, crushing regulations and higher taxes, who kill jobs, run up deficits, don’t care about small businesses and ruin the economy.

Ditto the last comment. This caricatures the thinking not only of the environmentalists but also of their critics. Caricature is, of course, psychologically effective, but it isn’t the stuff of real rational argument.

3. Conditioning: People who care about the environment are alarmist, scare-mongering activists who chain themselves to trees and always think the world is coming to an end.

Ditto.

4. Conditioning: People who care about the environment are shame peddlers, always wanting to make everyone feel guilty for the way we live, what we drive, how much money we spend and for not caring about the rain forest, polar bears and, yes, spotted owls.

Ditto.

But one also wonders if Rodin has ever stopped to ponder why these stereotypes arose. Stereotypes usually arise because they are tolerably accurate descriptions of a tolerably representative slice of people. That doesn’t make them perfectly accurate even for that slice, let alone for all the people in the category in question, but it does suggest that there might be some validity regarding some of them.

5. Conditioning: People who care about the environment are atheists who worship nature, hate Christians and believe humans are intruders on the earth. If the first four conditioning agents didn’t seal the deal, this was the game-changer. Simply put, environmentalists were atheists. They dismissed any idea of God and deeply disliked the idea that human beings had any real right to be on the earth. They worshiped trees, idolized mother Gaia, saw the Earth as sacred and considered humanity a deeply flawed polluter on an otherwise perfect planet. As a conservative Christian, if you even hinted at ‘caring’ for creation, you were already heading down the slippery slope of pantheism. We prayed for such wayward brothers and sisters!

More overgeneralization and caricature. But I can’t help wondering what evangelical community Rodin grew up in. This certainly doesn’t describe the ones in which I grew up. It seems to me Rodin’s transferring to all critics of some environmentalists (or some environmentalism) the attitudes of this particular (clearly intellectually unhealthy) community in which he grew up, but that’s not legitimate.

So, Rodin chalks up his former belief that global warming was a hoax (a belief he mistakenly pins on most or perhaps all skeptics of dangerous manmade global warming) to psychological conditioning. He writes,

Could it be that those I held in contempt may actually have unwittingly been acting more biblically than I had? Could it be that decades of conditioning had calloused me from any serious engagement with this issue, and that disengagement bore witness to my disobedience to God? I had to confess that for me, it had, and it was time to speak the truth and repent.

That may well explain his former belief, and what prompted him to repent of it. But that doesn’t, of course, mean it explains anyone else’s or shows that anyone else is wrong for not coming to agree with his new belief in dangerous manmade global warming. Is it just possible that others believe, not that global warming is a hoax, but that the best scientific evidence doesn’t support belief in dangerous manmade warming, not because of such conditioning but because they really think the scientific evidence points to that conclusion?

Rodin doesn’t think so, but in his entire post he never offers so much as a single piece of what he calls “the unquestionable scientific evidence that became impossible to ignore,” and calling any scientific evidence “unquestionable” is not exactly a very scientific way to talk. One of the hallmarks of science is its readiness to abandon any idea if even so much as a single datum is found to be irreconcilable with it. Recall the quote I used yesterday from Feynman:

In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

The next post in this series will interact with Rodin’s description of his new attitudes, and here, I’m thankful to say, I find much with which to agree.