Global Warming, God, and
American Complacency
By David Ray Griffin
February 18, 2015 "ICH"
- The headline of a 2013 Washington Post
article said, “Americans Are Less Worried
about Climate Change than Almost Anyone
Else.” According to a Pew poll of that year,
only 33% of the American public consider
global warming a “very serious” problem, and
only 28% think that it should be a “top
priority” for the politicians in Washington.
Of the 21 issues tested, moreover, global
warming was at the bottom of the priority
list.2
1. Supernaturalism
and Climate Complacency
One of the main reasons
for this attitude is theism – not simply
theism understood broadly as “belief in
God,” but belief in a particular conception
of God, which is shared by a large number of
Americans. Belief in God in this sense is
exemplified by many of our political leaders
in Washington.
For example, in a book
called The Greatest Hoax,
Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma
explained why people should not be worried
about climate change by citing Genesis 8:22
– “As long as the earth remains there will
be seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
winter and summer, day and night.” Saying
that this passage shows that God promised
long ago that “cold and heat should not
cease,” Inhofe said: “This is what a lot of
alarmists forget. God is still up there, and
He promised to maintain the seasons.” It is
arrogant, said Inhofe, to “think that we,
human beings, would be able to change what
He is doing in the climate.”3
Likewise, Republican
Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois, using
the same verse from Genesis, said: “I
believe that’s the infallible word of God,
and that’s the way it’s going to be for his
creation. . . . The Earth will end only when
God declares it’s time to be over.”4
In the same vein,
talk-show host Rush Limbaugh took issue with
Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement
that climate change is “a challenge to our
responsibilities as the guardians . . . of
God’s creation.” Limbaugh replied: “If you
believe in God, then intellectually you
cannot believe in manmade global warming.”
To worry about human-caused global warming,
Limbaugh said, is to imply that “we are so .
. . omnipotent that we can . . . destroy the
climate.”5
To believe in God,
according to these three men, is to believe
that the world is under the complete control
of an omnipotent deity. The traditional
doctrine of divine omnipotence is the idea
that God can unilaterally bring about
anything (except perhaps for logical
impossibilities – God cannot create round
squares). Nothing can come about, therefore,
unless God causes or at least permits it.
This conception of the
world is called “supernaturalism,” because
God is said not to be limited by the world’s
natural laws. God may allow the world
generally to run according to the natural
laws – such as the laws of physics,
chemistry, and biology – but God can at will
interrupt or override them.
This worldview has been
stated with special clarity by Evangelical
theologian Millard Erickson, who says that
his faith community “operates with a
definite supernaturalism – God resides
outside the world and intervenes
periodically within the natural processes
through miracles.” Nature, Erickson says,
“is under God’s control; and while it
ordinarily functions in uniform and
predictable ways in obedience to the laws he
has structured into it, he can and does also
act within it in ways which contravene these
normal patterns (miracles).”6
This supernaturalistic
worldview is exemplified by Calvin Beisner,
the spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for
the Stewardship of Creation, which put out
an “Evangelical Declaration on Global
Warming,” which says: “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.”7 In other
words, the world is in the hands of a good
and omnipotent deity, so we need not worry
about global warming.
Holding that the great
threat to civilization is not global warming
but environmentalism, Beisner says that, in
light of the omnipotence, omniscience, and
faithfulness of God, to believe that global
warming could lead to catastrophe would be
“an insult to God.”8
One common feature of
Christian supernaturalism is belief in “the
Second Coming of Jesus Christ,” according to
which Jesus will return at the end of the
world. A 2013 article published in the
Political Research Quarterly found that
“believers in Christian end-times theology
are less likely to support policies designed
to curb global warming than are other
Americans.” Whereas most other Americans
“support preserving the Earth for future
generations,” the “end-times believers would
rationally perceive such efforts to be
ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised.”9
Another common feature of
Christian supernaturalism is the conception
of extreme weather events as “acts of God.”
For example, when end-times preacher John
Hagee, who heads a megachurch in San
Antonio, was asked whether he believed
Hurricane Katrina to be divine punishment
for immorality, he replied: “All hurricanes
are acts of God, because God controls the
heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a
level of sin that was offensive to God. . .
. [T]here was to be a homosexual parade
there on the Monday that the Katrina came. .
. . And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina
was, in fact, the judgment of God against
the city of New Orleans.”10
David Crowe, the executive
director of Restore America, also spoke to
the question of why Hurricane Katrina
occurred: “The answer,” he explained, “is
found in understanding that man is not in
control. God is! Everything in the sky, the
sea and on earth is subject to His control.”
Saying that Katrina was “God’s judgment on
America,” Crowe referred to the upcoming
“gay, lesbian and transgender ‘Southern
Decadence’ Labor Day gala.”11
Given this perspective,
extra-deadly hurricanes (as well as
droughts, floods, tornadoes, and heat waves)
are to be explained in terms of divine
policies, not in terms of human energy
policies. To be sure, extreme weather events
are the fault of human beings, but because
of sexual sins, not because of burning too
much coal, oil, and natural gas.
The belief in divine
omnipotence is very dangerous, because of
the climate complacency it encourages. It is
especially dangerous when it is held by
people in positions of power in the most
powerful nation on Earth, such as Senator
Inhofe, Representative Shimkus, and
Congressman Ralph Hall of Texas, who chaired
the House of Representative’s Science,
Space, and Technology Committee. With regard
to climate change, he said: “I don’t think
we can control what God controls.”12
This attitude can also
influence the business world. For example,
with respect to the concern that the
planet’s temperature is becoming too warm,
Peter Brabeck, the chairman of the Nestlé
corporation, said: “Are we God to say the
climate, as it is today, is the one we have
to keep? That’s the way it’s going to be? We
are not God.”13
The supernaturalistic
worldview has been used to support many
beliefs that tend to promote ethically
destructive beliefs, one of which is climate
complacency.14 But can it be
called clearly false?
2. Supernaturalism as
Anti-Scientific
The supernaturalistic
worldview, as exemplified by theists such as
Erickson, Inhofe, Shimkus, Limbaugh, and
Beisner, can be called false insofar as
anti-scientific beliefs must be considered
false. There are at least four ways in which
the supernaturalistic beliefs cited above
are anti-scientific.
Infallible
Scriptures
As John Shimkus showed in
the statement quoted above, he regards the
Bible as “the infallible word of God.”
According to this belief, everything in the
Bible is true, because it was infallibly
(technically, “inerrantly”) inspired, so
that whatever the Bible says about the
future “is the way it’s going to be for
[God’s] creation.”
However, this view is
contradicted by the scientific (or
“critical”) study of the Bible, which began
in earnest in the 17th century.15
Beginning with simply pointing out hundreds
of false assertions in the Old and New
Testaments, the scholars then pointed out
that the various books of the Bible
expressed very different beliefs, showing
that it could not have simply been written
by a single author (God), or even
fact-checked by an omniscient proof-reader.16
The idea of infallible
inspiration presupposes the belief in
supernatural interruption: The normal way in
which human beings arrive at their beliefs
is an extremely fallible process, in which
false beliefs can enter in through
prejudice, wishful thinking, party spirit,
the limited information available at a given
time and place, and countless other factors.
The belief that the ideas put forth by some
particular human writers were infallible and
inerrant, guaranteed to be devoid of error,
presupposes that in these writers, the
normal human processes of belief-formation,
with their fallibility and tendency to
error, have been supernaturally overruled,
so that pure, unadulterated truth came
forth. But the scientific study of the Bible
has been showing since the late 17th
century that this view of the Bible is
untrue.
To settle the truth about
global warming by appeal to the Bible, while
ignoring the results of the scientific study
of this collection of writings, would be
analogous to using the writings of René
Descartes (1596-1650), along with those of
Plato and Aristotle, to explain the truth
about physics, chemistry, biology, and
cosmology.
Miraculous
Interventions
As shown above, Millard
Erickson says that his faith-community’s
supernaturalism affirms miracles, and not
simply in the sense that astounding things
sometimes happen, but that, whereas nature
“ordinarily functions in uniform” ways, God
sometimes acts “in ways which contravene
these normal patterns.” This is, in fact,
the definition of supernaturalism, and this
is the worldview that modern science has
wholly rejected, at least since the middle
of the 19th century.
Since then, the scientific
world’s most basic presupposition has been
naturalism, understood simply as the denial
of supernatural interruptions of the world’s
causal processes. In his famous Science
and the Modern World, written after he
came to Harvard, mathematician and
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that
the scientific mentality “instinctively
holds that all things great and small are
conceivable as exemplifications of general
principles which reign throughout the
natural order,” so that “every detailed
occurrence can be correlated with its
antecedents in a perfectly definite manner,
exemplifying general principles.”17
Scientific naturalism, in
other words, is simply the view that the
world’s causal web, with its general causal
principles, cannot be interrupted from time
to time. Unfortunately, the term
“naturalism” has also come to be used for a
much more restrictive view, according to
which naturalism involves both materialism
and atheism. That view, however, is only a
particular version of naturalism, which is
not entailed by science. Science requires
naturalism only in the sense that the normal
patterns of the world are never violated.
An example of a scientist
who has failed to recognize this distinction
is Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin. In a
review of a book by Carl Sagan, which had a
materialistic standpoint, Lewontin said that
explanations of phenomena on the basis of
such a standpoint sometimes result in
“patent absurdity.” Nevertheless, Lewontin
said, science has “a prior commitment to
materialism” that is “absolute,” because “we
cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. . .
. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to
allow that at any moment the regularities of
nature may be ruptured, that miracles may
happen.”18
Lewontin evidently did not
know that since the 18th-century
Enlightenment there have been ideas of deity
that rule out omnipotence in the sense of
allowing the regularities of nature to be
ruptured. Whitehead himself, in fact, came
to affirm such an idea.19
In any case, although
belief in God as such does not necessarily
lead to climate complacency, the
supernaturalistic idea of God tends to do
so.
Young Earth
Supernaturalism also
allows people to endorse an alternative to
science’s evolutionary worldview, according
to which humans and other mammals developed
through millions of years of biological
evolution, built upon billions of years of
cosmic and geological evolution.
Supernaturalism, with its omnipotent deity,
allows people to accept the idea that our
world came about only a few thousand years
ago.
Although the type of
theism that Whitehead developed holds that
God influences the evolutionary process, he
said that God did not have the kind of power
that could bring about developments in the
world unilaterally and hence suddenly.
Saying that all the entities of which the
world is composed have their own power,
Whitehead regarded divine power as
persuasive rather than coercive. He held,
accordingly, that God could have brought the
world to its present state only by means of
a very long, slow, step-by-step process.
By contrast,
supernaturalistic theism, holding that the
world has no power of its own vis-à-vis
God with which it could resist the divine
will, holds that God did not need to employ
a long evolutionary process. Indeed, 46% of
Americans, according to a 2012 Gallup poll,
say that God actually did create our world
within the past 10,000 years.20
Given this view, combined
with the end-times belief that the world
will not last much longer, it is no surprise
that Evangelicals are less concerned about
global warming than Americans in general.
From the supernaturalistic point of view,
even if God does not use omnipotent power to
prevent global warming from destroying
civilization, our planet’s becoming unfit
for human life would not be much of a
tragedy, because God could, if desired,
simply create a new one.
This idea that our world
is only about 10,000 years old undermines
the basis for realizing the full seriousness
of global warming for civilization – that it
is taking us out of the Holocene era, which,
coming after a 100,000-year ice age, was
warm enough and stable enough for
civilization to emerge and endure. Because
civilization has always existed in the
Holocene era, we have no evidence that it
can survive if this era is left behind.
Whereas evolution has long
been rejected by a large number of
Americans, Republicans have increasingly
been introducing bills in state houses that
would rule out, or at least provide
alternatives to, both climate science and
evolutionary science. In response to this
twofold attack on science, the National
Center for Science Education expanded its
mission: Having been founded in 1981, it was
originally devoted to “defending the
teaching of evolution.” But since 2012, it
has been devoted to “defending the teaching
of evolution & climate science.”21
The fact that
climate-science-denial is now joined at the
hip in Republican politics with
evolution-denial shows that the rejection of
this consensus reached by climate scientists
is an anti-science position. Indeed, bills
with this combination are sometimes referred
to simply as “anti-science” bills. This
two-fold denial was illustrated by the fact
that, just as all the Republican
presidential candidates in 2012 except Jon
Huntsman rejected climate science, they also
would not profess belief in evolution. That
this double denial had become the norm was
driven home by Huntsman’s 2011 tweet, “I
believe in evolution and trust scientists on
global warming. Call me crazy.”22
The Problem of
Evil
A fourth basis for
rejecting supernaturalistic theism as
anti-rational is its problem of evil. Trying
to show the consistency between the world’s
evil and the power and goodness of the
world’s creator has been called “theodicy,”
meaning “justifying the ways of God.” But
this has proved impossible within the
framework of supernaturalistic theism.
The seventeenth-century
philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
recognized that, if God is perfectly good as
well as both omniscient and omnipotent,
there could be no genuine evil. The
traditional argument goes: “God is perfectly
omniscient and omnipotent, so God could
prevent all evil. God is perfectly good, so
God would want to prevent all evil; but evil
exists; therefore, God does not exist.”
Leibniz avoided this conclusion by denying
that evil exists, saying, notoriously that
our world is “the best of all possible
worlds.” But eighteenth-century
philosophe Voltaire parodied this view
in Candide, illustrating that no
one could consistently believe that nothing
genuinely evil ever happens.
Nowadays, it is for the
most part simply assumed by philosophers and
other intellectuals that the problem of evil
disproves the existence of God. For example,
former Oxford philosopher John Mackie wrote
a book called The Miracle of Theism:
Arguments for and against the Existence
of God, in which he concluded that the
reasons against belief in God, especially
the problem of evil, are decisive. Mackie’s
argument did not really refute the
rationality of theism as such, because he
limited his treatment to
supernaturalistic theism, according to
which God is “able to do everything (i.e.
omnipotent).” Mackie admitted that one who
believes in a deity that is “though
powerful, not quite omnipotent, will not be
embarrassed by this difficulty.”23
However, the idea of a
divine being who is omnipotent as well as
perfectly good cannot be salvaged, so
supernaturalistic theism does not have a
self-consistent conception of God.24
This form of theism is anti-rational, hence
anti-scientific.
Conclusion
Climate complacency has
been encouraged by several features of
supernaturalistic Christian theism,
including infallible scriptures, miraculous
interventions, anti-evolutionary Young Earth
beliefs, end-times beliefs, and the idea
that the world’s creator can be both
omnipotent and perfectly good. Because
Evangelicals largely endorse these ideas, it
is no wonder that self-identified
Evangelicals are less likely than Americans
in general to be very concerned about global
warming. And given the high percentage of
Americans who are self-identified
Evangelicals, this form of theism goes far
to explain why Americans are “less worried
about climate change than almost anyone
else.” But just as the government and the
media generally do not allow anti-rational
beliefs to shape public policy, they should
not allow anti-scientific religious beliefs
to play a role in shaping policies.
David Ray
Griffin is
emeritus professor at Claremont Theology
School and Claremont Graduate University.
His most recent book is Unprecedented: Can
Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis? (Clarity
Press, 2015).
Notes
1. This essay is an adaptation of a chapter
entitled “Religious Challenge” in
Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the
CO2 Crisis?
(Clarity Press, 2015).
2. Max Fisher, “Americans Are Less Worried
about Climate Change than Almost Anyone
Else,” Washington Post, 27
September 2013; Climate Change: Key Data
Points from Pew Research,” Pew Research
Center, 2 April 2013.
3. Senator James Inhofe, The Greatest
Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy
Threatens Your Future (Washington, WND
Books, 2012), 70-71; Brian Tashman, “James
Inhofe Says the Bible Refutes Climate
Change,” Right Wing Watch, 3 August 2012.
4. “God Won’t Allow Global Warming,
Congressman Seeking to Head Energy Committee
Says,” Raw Story, 11 November 2010.
5. David Edwards, “Limbaugh: Christians
‘Cannot Believe in Manmade Global Warming,’”
Raw Story, 14 August 2013.
6. Millard J. Erickson, Christian
Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 1985), 304, 54.
7. “An Evangelical Declaration on Global
Warming,” Cornwall Alliance for the
Stewardship of Creation. The full title of
the declaration is“A Renewed Call to Truth,
Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An
Evangelical Examination of the Theology,
Science, and Economics of Global Warming.”
8. Meredith Bennett-Smith, “Calvin Beisner,
Evangelical Christian, Claims
Environmentalism Great Threat to
Civilization,” Huffington Post, 21 March
2013.
9. David C. Barker and David H. Bearce,
“End-Times Theology, the Shadow of the
Future, and Public Resistance to Addressing
Global Climate Change,” Political
Research Quarterly, June 2013.
10. K.C. Boyd, “The End-Times Politics of
Pastor John Hagee,” AlterNet, 29 January
2013; Ryan Chiachiere and Kathleen Henehan,
“Will MSNBC Devote as Much Coverage to
McCain’s Embrace of Hagee’s Support as It
Did to Obama’s Rejection of Farrakhan?”
Media Matters, 28 February 2008.
11. David Crowe, “Katrina: God’s Judgment on
America,” Beliefnet, September 2005.
12. Jeffrey Mervis, “Ralph Hall Speaks Out
on Climate Change,” National Journal,
14 December 2011.
13. Jo Confino, “Peter Brabeck courts
controversy by claiming climate change is
largely down to natural cycles and society
should focus on adaptation,” Guardian,
31 January 2014.
14. Although supernaturalism “tends to
promote” climate complacency, it does not do
so necessarily: There are Evangelical
Christians, such as Katherine Hayhoe and
Richard Cizik, who are fully involved in
work to prevent climate disruption; see
Chapter 15 in Griffin, Unprecedented:
Can Civilization Survive the CO2
Crisis.
15. Although there is a tendency today to
equate “science” with the natural sciences,
there are also the social sciences, among
which history is arguably the most
successful, in the sense that it exemplifies
the main criterion of a genuine science,
namely, making progress. “Scientific
historiography” can be defined as “the study
of past events that generates probable
knowledge” (as opposed to historiography
that does other things, such as offering
interpretations or providing narratives);
see Harold Kincaid, “Scientific
Historiography and the Philosophy of Science”
(History and Theory, February
2006, 124-33). The historical study of the
Bible, moreover, is arguably one of the
disciplines in which the most progress has
been made.
16. See Mark S. Gignilliat, A Brief
History of Old Testament Criticism: From
Benedict Spinoza to Brevard Childs (Zondervan,
2012); Edward Farley and Peter Hodgson,
“Scripture and Tradition,” in Christian
Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions
and Tasks, ed. Peter C. Hodgson and
Robert H. King, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1985), 61-87.
17. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and
the Modern World (1925; Free Press,
1967), 5, 12.
18. Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions
of Demons,” New York Review of Books,
9 January 1997: 28-32, at 31.
19. Only after working on philosophy in his
60s did Whitehead give up his atheism or at
least agnosticism for (a non-traditional
form of) theism; see David Ray Griffin,
Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A
Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001), Chap. 1.
20. Frank Newport, “In U.S., 46% Hold
Creationist View of Human Origins,” Gallup,
1 June 2012.
21. Stephen D. Foster Jr., “Oklahoma GOP
Introduces Bill that Attacks Evolution and
Climate Change,” Addicting Info, 22 January
2012; Katherine Stewart, “The New
Anti-Science Assault on US Schools,”
Guardian, 12 February 2012;
“Anti-Evolution and Anti-Climate Science
Legislation Scorecard: 2013,” National
Center for Science Education, 20 May 2013;
“Frequently Asked Questions about NCSE,”
National Center for Science Education.
22. Levy and Evan McMorris-Santoro,
“Creationism Controversies: The Norm Among
Potential Republican 2016 Contenders,”
Talking Points Memo, 20 November 2012;
Justin Sink, “Huntsman: ‘Call Me Crazy,’ I
Believe in Evolution, Global Warming,” E2
Wire, The Hill, 18 August 2011.
23. John Mackie, The Miracle of Theism:
Arguments for and against the Existence of
God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 1, 151.
24. David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and
Evil: A Process Theodicy (1976;
Westminster John Knox, 2004).