7.1: Science and Religion- A New Alliance Needed

While climate action on a significant scale is still lacking, one way forward is to see climate change as an issue that brings science and religion together as never before. We need both scientific knowledge and environmental ethics to confront this massive problem. The challenge is, How can we break through scientific complexity to the moral insight that gives rise to social and political change?

But first there are problems with science and with religion that we need to identify. Clearly a tension between science and religion exists in universities and schools and in churches, synagogues, and mosques across the United States. This is one reason that the moral dimensions of climate change are still invisible, both in academia and in society at large. There are many reasons for this: namely, that religion and ethics are marginalized in secular academia, that schools of theology have not made ecological issues and environmental ethics central to their curricula, and that religion and ecology is still a new field in academia. Yet it is fair to say that this field has significant potential for encouraging a moral environmental force in society. Indeed, grassroots religious environmentalism is growing significantly. The Pope’s 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, has done much to encourage this by making action on climate change a moral imperative. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church has also led the way in highlighting the sacredness of creation and in hosting religion, science, and environment symposia focused on water. He speaks of the degradation of nature as “crimes against creation” and “ecological sin.”

Linking spirituality and ecology is not wholly new, of course. Indigenous people’s worldviews have been based on this understanding for millennia. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, John Muir fought to preserve the Sierra Nevada in California by representing the wilderness as a temple in his writings. He helped to establish Yosemite and fought to preserve Glen Canyon for its aesthetic and spiritual merit. His feeling for the spiritual dimensions of nature makes him one of the most widely read and admired environmentalists of all time (Figure 7.1.1). This sense of spiritual ecology was an inspiration for him in forming the Sierra Club, which has become the largest environmental group in the United States.

Figure 7.1.1 John Muir advocated environmental preservation, in part because he saw nature as sacred. This portrait of him was taken in about 1902. Reproduced from Wikipedia.