Fundamentalist
Christians insist that, since God controls the seasons and the weather, there
is nothing that we can do to alter it. This is the basis for their insistence
that, no matter how much carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere, global
warming will not occur unless God wants it to. That is, if God has decided that
global warming will occur, then it will occur even if we totally cease all
carbon emissions; and if God has decided it will not occur, then we can pour
all the carbon we want to into the air and nothing bad will happen.
The
fundamentalists base this belief upon Genesis 8:22, in which God tells Noah
right after the big Flood, “While the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold
and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” This verse does
not say that global warming will not occur, so long as the seasons continue.
There are no scientists who say that global warming will cause seasonal and
geographical differences to cease to exist. But to fundamentalists, this verse
means that God is in charge of climate and seasons, and that whatever happens
on Earth is whatever God has already planned. We cannot reduce global warming
by driving smaller cars, nor can a rich televangelist make global warming worse
by flying around in a private jet.
This
would be a laughably trivial matter except that it is the principle upon which
the Republicans who are largely ruling America believe. The most famous global
warming denier, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, has said that, because “God’s
still up there,” the “arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would
be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
But
the Bible also suggests in several places that God is also in charge of your
lifespan. God has already decided how many days you are going to live, and
there is nothing you can do about it. The verse that says this most clearly is
Psalm 139:16, in which the psalmist records words he attributes to God: “Your
eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”
Fundamentalists usually use this verse to prove that an “unformed substance”
(an embryo) is fully human (“my” unformed substance). Almost in passing, they
acknowledge that this means our days are numbered.
Elsewhere,
Jesus says that the hairs of our head are numbered. I remember listening to
evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong on the radio telling us all that his hair was
falling out, and that if he counted them, he could calculate the exact date on
which he would become bald. He seems to have been unaware that, in most cases,
when a hair falls out of a follicle, a new one grows back.
Perhaps
“numbered” just means “limited”? The hairs of our head, and the days of our
lives, are finite, and we should be mindful that we will not live forever, and
we had better get our lives in shape before it is too late. This is a good
interpretation, but is not a fundamentalist one. The psalm says, regarding “the
days that were formed for me,” every one
of them. Each day of our future was written individually in God’s advance
plan. In another psalm, the psalmist said that our lifespan was limited to 70
years (or, he concedes, maybe 80). I knew someone who literally believed he
would drop dead on his 70th birthday. But most fundamentalists would
say that only God knows how many days we will live, and each one of us has a
different number of days. This assertion is scientifically untestable (how
could you ever prove that someone died on a day different than the one written
on God’s secret list) but seems to be a straightforward literal interpretation
of Psalm 139:16.
If
fundamentalists then took this verse one step further, they would have to
conclude that your number of days is predetermined, no matter what you do. Don’t
bother with eating healthy food; go ahead and drink and smoke; don’t worry about
hiking or walking, just go ahead and sit on the couch and listen to
televangelists and Fox News all day, because it won’t make any difference.
Eating vegetables will not make you live any more, and eating fat and sugar
will not make you live any fewer, days. Fundamentalists generally do NOT take
this interpretation. Instead they say that God made your body and you should
take care of it, at least a little bit.
If
God is in charge of the climate, and He is also in charge of your lifespan, why
do fundamentalists tell us there is no point in working toward planetary
health, but that it is important to work toward personal health? I think there
is only one possible reason: they are using Genesis 8:22 as an excuse to
ignore, or even be hostile toward, the science of climate change. Their
fundamental beliefs therefore appear to be, “God is in charge of everything
except when He isn’t,” and, “God’s truth is whatever the Republican Party says
that it is.”
God
is the tool of the fundamentalists. You would think that one advantage of being
God is that you are in charge. But, poor little God; He has to do whatever the fundamentalists
tell Him to do.
