WASHINGTON (ABP) — Leading up to the major United Nations summit on climate change, a conservative Christian group released a report questioning the science, economics and theology surrounding calls to counteract global warming.
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a four-year-old organization of clergy, scientists and academics, claimed Dec. 3 that reducing reliance on fossil fuels would have negligible impact on global temperatures and that increased energy costs would disproportionately hurt the world's poor.
"We believe global-warming alarmism fails the tests of science, economics, and theology," Calvin Beisner, national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance, said in a press statement announcing the release of An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming.
Beisner, a former professor at Knox Theological Seminary now on the pastoral staff at Holy Trinity Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said the whole notion of dangerous climate change rests on poor science and ignores the costs and exaggerates the benefits of reducing levels of atmospheric gases like CO2.
He said "global-warming alarmism" also rests on "poor theology, with a worldview of the Earth and its climate system contrary to that taught in the Bible."
Beisner said Dec. 5 on the Richard Land Live radio program that theology is often overlooked in the debate over climate change.
"Scientists are just as much shaped by their worldviews as anybody else," Beisner said. "It's not just a matter of taking measurements. It's a matter of interpreting those measurements, and your theological worldview will determine largely how you do that."
Calvin Beisner is national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a group skeptical about global-warming claims based on religious convictions.
|
Beisner said "pretty much all of the scientists" warning about the dangers of global warming are "secular Darwinists" who believe the Earth came about by random chance. Because of that, he said, they view the world's climate system as "very fragile, not resilient" and that "a tiny little bit of an influence on it could throw the whole thing into utter collapse."
Beisner called that "a fundamentally anti-Christian worldview."
"The biblical worldview tells us instead that this Earth is the product of God's wise, intelligent design, and in Genesis 1:31 we read at the end of all creation God saw all that he had made and, behold, it was very good," Beisner told Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
He reasoned that assigning catastrophic results to small shifts in atmospheric chemistry "assumes a fragile Earth instead of the well-designed Earth."
"The biblical worldview tells us that the Earth and its climate system — all its ecosystems — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, self-correcting, so that these tiny changes cannot cause disaster, and that's what the science is bearing out," he said.
Along with a brief statement calling on politicians to "adopt policies that protect human liberty, make energy more affordable, and free the poor to rise out of poverty, while abandoning fruitless, indeed harmful policies to control global temperature," the Cornwall Alliance issued a 76-page document titled A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming.
Craig Mitchell, an assistant professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is lead author of an opening chapter on theology.
"God did not create the world and walk away from it, but actively sustains it so that his purposes will be achieved," he wrote."God is sovereign, and it seems unlikely that man can thwart his purposes. Consequently there is no need to adopt anti-global-warming policies, especially if, as the economics chapter argues, they will consign our poorest neighbors to additional decades or generations of grinding poverty."
Mitchell said environmentalists view people mainly as consumers and polluters, rather than as created in the image of God and commanded to be stewards and producers. Fears that overpopulation threatens the environment conflict with the Bible's command to multiply and fill the Earth, he added.
Mitchell said the fact that God has given humanity dominion over the Earth implies that humankind has property rights. He also cited promises like, in Gen. 8:22, that natural cycles like summer and winter, planting and harvest, will continue "as long as heaven and Earth endure." Those promises contradict doomsday scenarios related to global warming, he said.
Beisner told Land he plans to attend part of a two-week conference on climate change that began Dec. 7 in Copenhagen, Denmark. While there he will seek to counter religious arguments for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by fellow evangelicals including Richard Cizik, former vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Jim Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network.
Ball, an ordained Baptist minster and alumnus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declined Dec. 7 to comment on the new Cornwall Alliance statement. Ball said his aim in Copenhagen would be to focus attention on the need for funding for "adaptation" programs that help communities across the world adapt to changing weather conditions through methods such as growing drought-resistant crops, storing food for lean times and installing severe-weather-alert systems.
"We hope to influence U.S. policymakers to strengthen the U.S. commitment to helping the poor," Ball said.
-30-
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.