It
impacts our view of God
The Bible tells us that creation reveals
God’s glory (Psalm 19:1) and this includes his eternal power and divine nature
(Romans 1:20). In other words, as we look at how creation functions and how
man, created in God’s image, is able to use its resources in ingenious ways to
solve problems and to help humans flourish more (Gen. 1:26-28; Ps. 8:5-7), we
should see God’s greatness and wisdom in how he has created and how he provides
for humans, as well as in the strong resilient world he created (Gen. 8:22).Yet, if current climate change doctrine is correct, this would call into question what we should glean about God from creation, and so it calls into question our very view of God.
It impacts our view of Scripture
This is related to our first reason. Current climate change doctrine not only calls into question the biblical view of God, it potentially calls into question key assertions Scripture makes. For example: Humans are to reflect God’s glory by bringing order into the world and using its resources (including fossil fuels) to help humans flourish (Gen. 1:26-28; Gen. 8:5-7); God has promised that creation will continue to function in its basic weather cycles throughout this current age and until such a time as Christ returns and God restores creation (Gen. 8:22; 2 Peter 3:10-13; Rev. 21:3-7); God has given his creation to humans as something good (1 Tim. 4:4), including carbon fuels, and for his enjoyment (1 Tim. 6:17). If all these realities are not true, then we not only doubt the veracity of God’s Word, but God himself.
Not only do the first two reasons hang together and both address our trust in God, they prepare us for the third reason.
It Has Impact Upon Our View Of The Bible’s Relevance For Today
There are few things that have captured the attention of the media and our culture as much as current climate change doctrine. If we are silent on this issue, it gives the impression that the Bible simply has nothing to say about key issues of our day.
What is more, when people discover what the Bible reveals about God’s creation and how this refutes current cultural doctrine, it not only can bring comfort, but also wisdom to how we can care for the creation around us at the same time we care for other people in a stout way. Such a biblical approach also leads us to give God thanks and praise for his resources and goodness. Such a biblical approach can also encourage Christians to stand solid on Scripture and to trust in what it teaches.
It Impacts Pre-Evangelism
This fourth reason is related to the third. If we can demonstrate the trustworthiness of Scripture and the biblical worldview, not only does it encourage Christians to trust in Scripture, it also can encourage non-Christians to see the validity of the biblical worldview. Therefore, rather than seeing it as irrelevant at best or dangerous at worst, this can serve as pre-evangelism. In other words, it can prepare hearts to be introduced to the fuller truth about this God who has created such an amazing world, gifted us with such great resources, and revealed such helpful wisdom in his Word for how to care for it. Maybe we should listen to what God has revealed in the Scriptures!
It Impacts Our Gratitude To God
We are to praise and thank God for his goodness and provision in creation (Psalms 92:1-4; 100; Col. 4:2; 1 Thes. 5:18; 1 Tim. 4:4; 6:17; James 1:17). Yet, current climate change doctrine can move us away from an appreciation for God’s wisdom and provision in creation to an opposite reaction, namely that something God provided in creation (carbon fuels developed through man’s ingenuity) is innately bad and destructive. Such a movement of heart is at the core of sin. Consider what Paul reveals about the movement away from the worship and honoring of God for what we know of him through creation (Rom. 1:21-23): “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (emphasis added)
Current climate change doctrine moves us away from gratitude for and praise of God to gratitude for and praise of the creation itself and a repudiation of aspects of that creation God has given for human benefit and his glory!
It Impacts Our View Of The Creation Mandate[1]
Current climate change doctrine implies that creation is better off in its pristine, untouched form, that a resource (carbon fuels) discovered and developed from within creation is more of a poison than a gift, and that humanity’s very development of that resource has been a bad thing for the world. Such thinking can easily lead us to call into question the first divine command recorded in the Bible, the creation mandate, in which God tells humans (Gen. 1:28): “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over [it]….” As we demonstrated in an earlier blog post, this involves bringing order to the world and working in it, along with its resources, to help humans and all of creation flourish.
Without realizing it, inventors, researchers, and countless others through history have obeyed God’s command here and demonstrated that God has gifted humans, created in his image, with the ingenuity to discover and invent and accomplish incredible feats throughout history.[2]
One of the most impactful areas of discovery and development among humans has to do with carbon fuels. Columnist Andre Seu Peterson captured this when she wrote the following:
Consider fossil
fuels. What comes to mind by that phrase? Filth? Pollution? Fossil fuels are
caches of living things long dead that God, in His thoughtfulness, saved for us
till we should learn to tap their benefit for man…. The fossil fuel industry
needs better PR. It supplies 80 percent of the world’s power, and makes life
bearable and climate-proofed on this rock for large swaths of humanity, yet
seems embarrassed about it.
…no other energy
source has figured out how to generate electricity, heating, and transportation
as cheaply and abundantly and on a worldwide scale. Far from causing
climate-related deaths, the fossil fuel industry has protected us from
climate-related deaths. It is the industry that powers all other industries. It
turned black liquid decay into prosperity for 4 billion people. We need more of
it, not less of it, to reach the other 3 billion.[3]
Peterson then adds:
Look around your
room. Most things in it were made with hydrocarbons (fossil fuels)— your pen,
the ink on your paper, the buttons on your shirt, your hair products, all
coatings on furniture, the fertilizer that grew your clothes, the trucks that
brought them to market, your air conditioner or heater. There is no wind or
solar way to replace a combine harvester. Outlaw the fossil fuel industry, and
you and I will not be inconvenienced: We will be dead.
Climate statistician Caleb Rossiter of the CO2 Coalition succinctly made the same point during a congressional hearing on climate change when he argued that: “Fossil fuels have contributed to advances in human health.”[4]
If the most extreme proponents of current climate change doctrine have their way, human flourishing through the outcomes of carbon fuels would cease and most likely we would turn the world backward and hurt the poor, making them even more susceptible to extreme weather conditions that are part of living in this fallen world. Christians have the truth and wisdom to counter this and to encourage the continued ordering and bettering of the world for the benefit of fellow humans and for God’s glory.
It Impacts Our View Of Political Candidates
If the most extreme form of current climate change doctrine were accepted, namely that we face the destruction of climate and the planet as we now know it within the next decade or so, it would then lead some to conclude things such as the following: “I know this candidate is not pro-life and I know they have a distorted view of economics and how to help people flourish, but they are strong on climate change. Therefore, I have to vote for them so we can save the planet! Once this is done, then we can be concerned about these other issues.”
Over the past generation so many have been taught that we are destroying the environment, there is little (if anything) that is more important to them, so much so they will overlook other important issues.
If we believe our leaders’ worldview and philosophy matter, then we must refute current climate change doctrine!
It Impacts Our Freedom
The most extreme proponents of current climate change doctrine are espousing such extreme measures to be forced upon mankind that they would remove much human freedom.[5]
Wayne Grudem rightly explains:
Regulating people’s
use of energy is an incredibly effective way of increasing the control of
central governments over people’s lives. If the government can dictate how far
you drive your car, how much you heat or cool your home, how often you use
electric lights, computers, or TVs, how much energy your factory can use, and
how much jet fuel you can have to fly an airplane, then it can control most of
the society.[6]
As such, those who believe that government should be larger and control more will flock to the radical climate change doctrines. What is more, those committed to radical climate change doctrines will also be drawn to big government or centralized approaches.
Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, said that in his opinion the alarm about global warming and the campaign to reduce carbon dioxide provide the greatest threat to human liberty that has come to the earth since communism. He wrote in the Financial Times that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth verses propaganda problem.” He continued:[7]
As someone who lived
under communism for most of his life, I feel obligated to say that I see the
biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in
ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace
the free and spontaneous [progress] of mankind by a sort of central (now
global) planning.
The environmentalists
ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term
positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress
that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher
the wealth of society, the higher the quality of the environment. They are
Malthusian pessimists. (Grudem, emphasis
added)
It Impacts The Poor
Our ninth and final reason this is an important issue to take up is simply this, if the proponents of the doctrine have their way, it would drastically and negatively impact the poor around the world. Some climate change proponents assert that the poor will be the most hurt by climate change and that climate change will “bring more poverty into the world,”[8] if extreme measures are not taken. However, the opposite is true. If climate-change-doctrine-radical-changes are adopted, more people will be in poverty and those already in poverty will be hurt the most.[9]
Affordable energy leads to more efficient production of food, as well as a better handling of severe temperature and environmental situations (e.g. not having enough water). To reduce the use of carbon dioxide, especially in light of the negligible impact it most likely would have on temperatures should alarm all, but especially those who are truly concerned about the world’s poor. What is more, to divert funds away from energy and also from fighting HIV/AIDS, hunger, and malaria to combating so-called climate change will hurt the poor.[10]
The Cornwall Alliance has also rightly asserted that energy is an important part of bringing the poor out of poverty and so to diminish use of carbon fuels would actually hurt that group of people: “The world’s poor are much better served by enhancing their wealth through economic development than by whatever minute reductions might be achieved in future global warming by reducing CO2 emissions.”[11]
In light of all the evidence we have set forth in these blog posts, the most prudent response to help the poor (including giving them help to deal with extreme weather conditions and natural catastrophes) is not to try (almost certainly unsuccessfully and at enormous cost) to prevent or reduce whatever slight warming might really occur. “It is instead to prepare to adapt by fostering means that will effectively protect humanity–especially the poor–not only from whatever harms might be anticipated from global warming but also from harms that might be fostered by other types of catastrophes, natural or manmade.”[12]
The Cornwall Alliance also helpfully adds:
A thought experiment
might help make our point clearer. Imagine that your city were struck by a heat
wave like the one that killed 700 in Chicago in 1995. Would you be more likely
to survive comfortably and safely if you were wealthy, or if you were poor? If
the answer is as obvious as we believe it is, what moral basis can there be for
adopting an anti-global warming policy that reduces economic development for
the world’s poor and thus prolongs the time during which they cannot afford to
protect themselves from heat–or any other risk?[13]
Joyfully Praising God With You For His Amazing Creation,
Tom
[2] Andree
Seu Peterson, “Gifts For Life: Fossil Fuels Have Brought Prosperity To
Billions,” in Voices, in World,
May 25, 2019: 67, makes this very point. She also adds: “…God meant for earth
to bear a human footprint” rather than remaining in its pristine, untouched
form.
[7] The previous
sentence and the following quote are both taken from Vaclav Klaus, “Freedom,
Not Climate, At Risk, Financial
Times (June 13, 2007), cited in
Grudem, Christian
Ethics, 1162.
[8] Alejandra
Rueda-Zarate, in Mary Robinson, “Losing Ground,” The Rotarian, 197, 10 (April
2019): 38.
[9] This is
seen in the example of a Rotarian, Marshall Saunders, the man who is behind the
Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a man impacted by the highly problematic film by Al
Gore, “An Inconvenient Truth.” He is advocating carbon fees which would ultimately
hurt business and eventually hurt the poor economically. See Geoffrey Johnson, “Friendly
Persuasion,” in The
Rotarian, 197, 10 (April 2019): 42-46.
[11] The
Cornwall Alliance, “A Renewed Call To Truth, Prudence, And Protection Of The
Poor: An Evangelical Examination Of The Theology, Science, And Economics Of
Global Warming.”
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