The Real Creation Model

Most people, including most readers of this blog, think that creationism is the belief that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago.

But that is only part of the creationist creed. There is another part, which they do not openly proclaim, but which they believe.

We all know there is a political correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmentalism. I merely maintain that is correlation is real, not accidental. There is a reason for it.

The full statement of the creation model is that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago for us to use up now.

Creationists believe that the Earth will come to an end soon, so we might as well go ahead and use up all the natural resources, like coal and fish and trees, as fast as we can. Why preserve them, only to have them burned up in Armageddon? Why preserve them, only to leave them behind in the Rapture and let damned sinners have them? Why have a livable Earth in 2100, if the end of the world will already have occurred?

A creationist said to me, several decades ago, that the basis of his belief was time. (That’s funny; I would have expected it to be God.) We know that Jesus is coming soon, he said, therefore just as the future is short so must the past be short. I thought this was rather strange, but now it makes perfect sense.

So when you look at the full statement of creationism, their opposition to both evolution and environmentalism makes perfect sense.

If you are, or know, an environmentalist creationist, all I can say is, glad to hear it. And I could have a respectful conversation with such a person. But this is clearly the exception to the rule. If anything, conservative creationists probably hate environmentalist creationists even worse than they hate evolutionists. An environmentalist creationist is embracing a burden of frustration.

The political correlation between anti-evolutionism and anti-environmentalism is real, not accidental. I believe the reason is that creationists think God made the Earth for us to use up right now. If you have a different explanation, please feel free to post a comment. If your argument makes sense, I would be glad to acknowledge it.

Christianity and the Environment, part 3

We considered, in two preceding blog entries, how conservative Christianity has defined the nonhuman world as creation and therefore as something expendable by humans. Other religious traditions consider the Earth to be nature, from which humans evolved and of which humans are a part, just like every other species. Some of these religions are polytheistic, such as Buddhism and paganism, while others are more akin to spiritual philosophies, such as Taoism. There is even a little of this viewpoint in the Bible. The 104th psalm describes a world of creatures, of which humans are depicted as merely one component. Although these religions have not led their adherents on a deliberate conquest of the Earth, the homelands of these religions have suffered their share of environmental problems. The natives of North and South America experienced collapsed civilizations just like the Europeans.

The person most responsible for the emergence of environmental ethics based upon ecology was Aldo Leopold. As mentioned previously, Leopold made a pragmatic argument for the preservation of biodiversity. But he also promoted what he called the “land ethic,” and championed what he called “thinking like a mountain.” Humans, rather than rulers or even stewards, would be merely “plain member and citizen” of the world of species. Right and wrong were defined as those actions that contributed to or detracted from the health of nature. His essays in A Sand County Almanac remain a classic, even though they do not develop a complete ethical system. More recently, writer Wendell Berry has called for an ecological humility as the proper ethical system for humans. Biologist Wes Jackson promoted a very pragmatic view of the stewardship of natural resources, particularly soil, in New Roots for Agriculture and by founding The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Like Leopold, Jackson then went beyond pragmatism and calls for humans to recognize their membership in the world of interacting species.

Attention is now being given to evolution, as well as ecology, as a foundation for environmental ethics. Humans are one of several million species and, like the rest of them, evolved by natural selection; humans therefore have no rights not possessed by the other species. Some thinkers have gone so far as to develop a viewpoint known as Deep Ecology, in which the human species has become a disease upon the Earth, and needs to be brought into control.

Most environmentalists seek peaceful and orderly solutions to environmental problems—for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. A few organizations, however, use violent tactics to gain attention, even though they have little hope of actually counteracting the economic forces behind environmental destruction. These tactics usually take the form of arson on resorts that are closed for the season. Although no one has yet died from what conservatives call “environmental terrorism,” Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that these organizations were the greatest threat of domestic terrorism in the United States. He said this even though Oklahoma was the site of the largest act of domestic terrorism that has ever occurred in the United States—the Oklahoma City bombing, which had nothing to do with environmentalism. Conservatives conveniently ignore acts of violence carried out by extremists on the political right (again, without deaths) against government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, whose charge is to protect natural areas.

The approach that considers the ecological world to be nature, rather than creation, is largely—but not entirely—separate from Christian theology. You can derive environmental stewardship from Christianity, but it is not easy. Christian environmentalists such as Cal DeWitt, Fred Van Dyke, Joe Sheldon, Dick Wright, Tony Campolo, and Jeff Greenburg are trying very hard to do so. But the great mass of evangelical Christianity is solidly centered on materialism, on getting whatever we can from the Earth before Armageddon destroys it all anyway. I wish my Christian environmentalist friends all the luck in the world, but I do not foresee any hope for the ecosystem services, upon which millions of the world’s poorest people depend, coming from Christianity.

This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.

Christianity and the Environment, Part 2

Even though many evangelical Christians criticized the 1967 paper by Lynn White, Jr. (see previous blog entry), he was right in his conclusion that conservative Christianity has encouraged a brutal conquest of nature. One reason is that the Bible is not a book. It is a collection of books, written by many people over many centuries, and it does not have a single coherent message. Most of the biblical books are themselves the product of editorial redaction from different primordial traditions. The first chapter of Genesis, correctly interpreted by White, presents a different view of creation from the second chapter, which was originally written by a different person. Each part of the Bible potentially contradicts every other part. An adherent of Christianity may choose to accept a Biblical image of conquering the Earth, or a Biblical image of taking care of it. It all depends on which passage is chosen. Adherents of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam can, however, force these passages into harmony, and in this way they can use the second chapter of Genesis to ameliorate the first.

White was right for another reason. Christian theologians have forced all the Biblical passages into harmony, and the climax of this harmonized Bible is the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is the only example of an entire style of literature, popular in the Mediterranean world about 100 C.E., which is familiar to most modern readers. In this book, the entire biosphere of the Earth is destroyed during cosmic battles between good and evil, and those who are saved live in Heaven. The Heavenly City there described is the antithesis of biodiversity, and contains virtually nothing of the original creation. There is a river and a single tree. Everything else is gold and jewels—an utterly artificial environment. If this is, as about half of Americans believe, the future of the universe, what is the point of saving species and ecosystems? (See earlier blog entries for more on this idea.) For this reason also, if Christians are to participate in the rescue of the environment, they must look beyond the Bible and perhaps, as White suggests, emulate St. Francis.

The extreme popularity of apocalyptic Christianity meant that Christians, as a whole, were a feeble source of support for environmental protection. Their main passion was to support the politically conservative George W. Bush Administration, which rejected the evidence of global warming and paid little attention to environmental protection. In fact, after the end of the Bush administration, the full extent of conservative neglect for even the most basic environmental protection became obvious. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior was supposed to license fossil fuel extraction on federal lands with due consideration of the impact that this extraction would have on natural habitats. Instead, they gave licenses to corporations in return for bribes and sexual favors. When President Bush left the 2007 economic summit, he said, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” making environmental ethics into what he considered to be a joke.

Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the world’s leading defender of biodiversity, wrote a book that was addressed to an unnamed Baptist minister. Wilson said that a conservative Christian could find common ground with even a secular humanist like himself by defending the Earth, which Wilson called the Creation. Wilson, however, wrote this book only after originally considering the Christian environmental movement to be a hopeless cause.

With the end of the Bush Administration and the disgrace of several leading Christian anti-environmentalists, a tide of opinion has turned towards Christian environmentalism. Despite this, many conservative Christians still consider the Earth to be unworthy of serious attention. They focus their attention instead on fighting against evolutionary science. When Edward O. Wilson visited Oklahoma in March 2009, a group of creationists disputed him about whether Charles Darwin did or did not believe in a Creator, and in the process Wilson’s impassioned plea for saving the Earth’s biodiversity was largely obscured. The view of the Earth that many conservative Christians have can be summarized in this way: “It’s okay to spit on it, to drive a truck over it, to spill oil on it, to chop it down, or to shoot it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved!”

This essay is based on the entry “Environmental ethics” in my forthcoming Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.

How Christianity is Destroying the Earth

The topic of why Christianity is wrong is of no mere academic interest. It is perhaps the most important topic in the world today. The majority of people in the United States adhere to a form of Christianity that leads, consciously and unconsciously, to the destruction of the Earth. And the United States is the leading consumer in the world; if we act destructively toward the Earth, it will be destroyed, and no bleeding-heart environmentalists in Norway can stop it.

I realized this as I began to read Bart Ehrman’s book from eight years ago—Lost Christianities. Ehrman is an excellent Biblical scholar, but I am an evolutionary scientist, so I read the first part of his book with different eyes than he used while writing it. I saw the evolution of Christianity as an example of cultural evolution—in particular, of one branch of Christianity that forced other branches into extinction, often violently, by decreeing them to be heretics. “Orthodox” Christianity suppressed the other branches, sometimes completely into extinction, but otherwise into such obscurity that only the luckiest of archaeological finds have revealed them. This is what happened when the church stopped being a haven for women and slaves and started turning into a political force with a hierarchy.

The “orthodox” Christianity that prevailed got to dictate which books would be in the Bible. There are lots of other gospels, epistles, acts, and apocalypses that they tried to destroy. But one of the books that they made sure was in the Bible was Revelation, written by somebody named John, whom most churchgoers assume was the Apostle John, though the author nowhere claims this to be the case.

It had been awhile since I had looked at Revelation, though I have read it carefully twice. Those previous times, however, I read it through the eyes of faith, assuming it to be divine revelation. This time I could see it for what it really was. Previously, I had tried my hardest to interpret it in a loving fashion. But now I could see the hatred that seethes from it. In a later entry, I will summarize it. But for now I just point out that it—presented in the form of a vision—is actually a nightmare of blood and gore and hatred. The author must have gotten some bad hash from Damascus.

First, you will not recognize the Jesus who is in Revelation. He is a conqueror, with a sword coming out of his mouth, and making the earth to apparently flow fathoms deep in human blood. Second, you will not recognize God the Creator of the Good Green Earth. Every few verses there is another disaster, both human and ecological—the Earth seems to get destroyed about fifteen times in that book. If one green sprig survives, it is sure to get pummeled and poisoned a few verses later. The disasters are concatenated: as soon as you think it is about over, another series erupts—within the Seventh Seal were seven trumpets, but within the seventh trumpet were three protracted woes, within which were crammed seven plagues. And so on. A cavalry of 200 million supernatural horses. People believe this stuff.

And at the end, when there is supposedly a heavenly city that takes over all of the universe, what do you have? A city consisting entirely of gold and jewels. The animals in that world are creepy monstrosities that look like Dr. Moreau invented them. And there is one tree—just one—left standing. This is the conservative Christian view of eternity—one in which everything that they claim God created has been destroyed and replaced with a total artificiality. You can bet your bottom ribosome that the “glassy sea” has no phytoplankton in it.

That is what conservative Christians want to have happen to the world—they look forward to God bringing plagues and destruction upon it, and then to have all of its biodiversity and greenness destroyed. Many Christians take a highly figurative interpretation of Revelation, and they are (as I was) frankly embarrassed by that book. But conservative Christians relish in the thought that environmental destruction will come upon Earth as part of a horrific suffering inflicted upon the human race. At least subconsciously, they will go along with and contribute to activities that will bring environmental destruction to pass.

And that is exactly why we need to discredit and disempower “Bible-believing Christians” in every way we can. If they actually believed in Jesus, the peaceful man who would go out on the hillsides and preach sermons about wildflowers, they might be a positive force. But they hate the Jesus of the Gospels. They revere only the Warlord of the Book of Revelation, and they want to do their part to make all of those ghastly images become reality.

I am developing these ideas into a book—Last Tree Standing: How Conservative Christianity is Destroying the Earth. Here is your chance to make comments that may help form the book, including comments that will prevent me from making errors that you may see in my ideas.