Opinion & Commentary
When religion just won't do
Chesterton could well have been describing today’s secular elites.
Those sophisticates, securely ensconced in taxpayer-funded positions at universities and national broadcasters, are among the most strident critics of conventional religion which they dismiss as little more than a series of failed explanations and distasteful taboos.
The irony is that those who preach the gospel of secular tolerance are now among the most religiously intolerant. “Where’s your proof?” the affronted elites cry when confronted by traditional believers.
Not content with living and letting live, the secular elites are intent upon driving out conventional religion altogether because religion can never command scientific standards of truth.
As conventional religion begins to lose its hold on us, the patterns of religious ways of thinking are emerging in a different, secular form.
One of the new ‘secular’ religions to have emerged is the global warming cult, which began as a fringe interest in the 1970s and has since evolved into one of the world’s most powerful religions.
Sure enough, this new religion appears to have its high priests, its temples, and its dogmas – including a concept of original sin: the Carbon Footprint. (Never mind that it is the role of carbon dioxide in climate change, rather than carbon, which is in question.)
And it also offers ‘sinners’ (read human beings) a way to redeem themselves for the offence of existing. Repentance by mortification for ravaging the planet can be bought at the going price of the 21st century indulgence – the Carbon Offset.
When something is compared to religion these days, you can generally be sure that the comparison is not meant to be flattering.
But when it comes to the presumed dangers of anthropogenic climate disruption, the situation changes.
The scientists and intellectuals who claim to set such store by evidence and reason are in the grip of apocalyptic mania. French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, remarks that believers in global warming “use all the elements of traditional religion, especially the theme of the apocalypse.”
The believers warn that immense human folly is dooming the planet to a world-ending catastrophe. Unless we repent immediately and change our ways now, we will suffer unimaginable and unendurable suffering.
The impending horror is inevitable. Bruckner even calls it “a death wish.”
And the more it is talked about, the more fearful everyone becomes. It is, says, Bruckner, “a self-fulfilling prophecy” to the point where even our diligent, feel-good sorting of the recycling will do nothing to avert catastrophe.
Increasingly, it isn’t science but religious emotions, passions and fervour that are driving the climate disruption debate. The problem with this is that religious enthusiasms can, and do, flourish perfectly well without any hard, factual basis.
As Cardinal George Pell observed in his 2011 lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, “the complacent appeal to [the] scientific consensus [of evidence] is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science and philosophy.”
It’s no small irony that those same secular elites who debunk religion as mere superstitions have taken leave of the very methods of science they insisted were so important. It’s the scientists, such as Berkeley professor Richard Muller, who undergo conversion experiences, confess their failures, and call upon the human race to repent of the sin of existing. Meanwhile, it’s the skeptics who question the science, point out scientific error, and are damned by the inquisitorial consensus.
It’s a scenario that calls to mind some dark chapters in human history when medieval religious bigotry conjured up fears of a great evil which had to be hunted down and condemned.
Today it is the global warming zealots and true believers who have built a culture of fear and reverted to doom-saying predictions of the revivalist meeting. Humankind has sinned. It must now atone, or be punished.
But why are proponents of anthropogenic climate disruption resorting to the language of religion when they should be using the language of science? Why are they manipulating us with emotion when they should be appealing to us with reason?
Perhaps it has something to do with the ancient religious archetype embedded deep within us.
The religious instinct impels humankind to frame the world in terms of realms of light and of darkness. It impels us to see human life as a struggle between good and evil.
Where there is failure, we need forgiveness. Where there is defeat, we need hope. Where there is death, we need life. And when all else is lost, we need faith.
Human beings need those religious frames. The great religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam have long provided them.
But these conventions of several millenia will not do for the high priests of the ‘anthropogenic climate disruption’ religion. They say we can live well enough without conventional religion. Yet they also know we can’t live without any religion whatsoever.
Hence, the environmental prophets of doom warn us that the only way to avoid natural catastrophe is to stop humankind from pursuing its foolish and destructive ways. Repent, and you may just survive.
No wonder, as Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg has noted, we stoop over the recycling bins to pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism.
When countries are urged to adopt costly, and possibly pointless, measures such as a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, and when the economic impact of the carbon tax on the Australian economy is likely to be substantial, the least the climate change scientists and advocates can do is base their arguments on scientific evidence rather than on some fashioned consensus of human reason.
Religion has long ceased to have a part to play in government. Now that scientists are claiming a right to influence the economic future of the nation, it is time to apply the rules of their discipline scientifically.
For when it comes to making an intelligent case for global warming, religion just won’t do.
The Reverend Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow with the Religion and the Free Society Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.
