| FORTY YEARS AGO, an article appeared in the journal Science that caused a stir in both scientific and religious circles. It was entitled: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”. The author, Professor Lynn White, suggested that, while all forms of life make their mark on the environment, the human race was now inflicting ecological disaster on planet Earth.
This was due, in part, to modern technology, but also to Christian faith. Christianity was a carrier of arrogant and exploitative attitudes towards the natural world which had decisively shaped the thinking and practice of people in the West. The root of these offending attitudes lay in the Bible, specifically Genesis and the first creation story: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth’” (Genesis 1.26).
THE ARTICLE sent biblical scholars scurrying back to the texts. They emerged to say that “having dominion over” did not mean “exploiting” but “taking care of”. It was about being good stewards of the natural world.
But 2000 years of history are not so easily undone. Wherever you look in the Christian past, you find attitudes towards the creation which distress modern sensibilities.
This is not to say that there were not exceptions. In the Middle Ages, there was St Francis with his wonderful Canticle to the Sun (1224). In the 18th century, there was Humphry Primatt. If the name is unfamiliar, that is because his cause — treating animals humanely — was rejected by most people in his day.
More recently there has been Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) and his ethic of “reverence for life”: “The ethical (person) tears no leaf from a tree, plucks no flower, and takes care to crush no insect. . . If he comes across an insect which has fallen in a puddle, he stops a moment in order to hold out a leaf or a stalk on which it can save itself.”
But these are untypical. Most Christians have taken their cue from St Thomas Aquinas. He was very clear what the biblical texts meant: the natural creation was there to serve human beings. As he said of animals: “For by divine providence they are intended for man’s use in the natural order. Hence it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any way whatever.”
And if anyone worried about animal suffering, they could always take comfort from an observation of René Descartes (1596-1650) that animals were not sentient creatures, but more like machines. Their apparent cries of pain were but the creaking of machinery. As Lynn White wrote: “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.”
BUT a problem remains as long as the Genesis story is allowed the central place in Christian thinking about the natural world. This is because, in Genesis, humanity is the reason for creation: it assumes that the natural world was brought into being for us and to serve us.
Modern science has revealed the insignificance of Earth in the vastness of the universe, and the fact that human beings have evolved by natural selection over a long period of time. In the light of that, this aspect of the biblical legacy ought to have been seen off.
Yet it lingers on in the way that both religious and secular people continue to talk about humanity as if we were the point of everything. Mark Twain said this was like saying that if the Eiffel Tower represents the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob represents man’s share of that age, and anyone could see that the skin was what the tower was built for.
I recently heard a presentation on global warming inspired by Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. The speaker said we had 20 years to save the planet. He meant, we had 20 years to save the human race, which is not the same. The planet goes on even if we make it uncongenial for human life.
ALL MIGHT yet change. According to a more recent article in Science, astronomers may be on the brink of discovering, beyond our solar system, planets that resemble Earth. If they do, this would raise the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the universe, — perhaps intelligent life. If this were to happen, the theology derived from the Genesis creation stories would need a rapid overhaul. We would have to revise fundamentally our understanding of the relationship of God to the world and humanity.
We ought to have done that long ago, because Genesis is not the only place where the scriptures speak about the universe and our place in it. In at least one other book — Job — there is a strikingly different perspective.
After Job has finished complaining about the unfairness of the world, God decides to put him in his place (for Job, read: all human beings). “Where were you”, God says, “when I laid the foundations of the earth?” He then gives Job a David Attenborough tour of the creation in all its variety and vastness. Job knows nothing of these things; but God knows everything intimately and, moreover, delights in it.
In other words, God brought all of this into being and took pleasure from it long before human life made its appearance.
We are not at the centre of the world, and it has not evolved for our exclusive benefit. Human beings are not the only reason for the creation. This is sobering stuff.
Too much contemporary talk about the environment is actually the same old talk that has humanity at the centre. We need to think differently about our place in the scheme of things. Otherwise, one distant day, we may take these same exploitative attitudes to some other wayside planet.
Canon Dr Alan Billings is Director of the Centre for Ethics and Religion at Lancaster University. |
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