Christian ethics and the environment
future is unbelievably great. Furthermore, the Christian belief in 'God's plan' – that everything is part of God's wider intention in the journey towards judgement day – seems to be particularly problematic. Firstly, because people refuse to take action on a global scale, seeing such actions as against the will of God and his grand design. Secondly, and perhaps more damagingly, the belief that God's plan involves Judgement Day means that the fact that the destruction of the environment is harming the Earth is not necessarily a bad thing for Christian instincts, as they neither believe nor want to believe that humans have the power to allay the end of the earth. Crucially, according to Revelation , Judgement Day is when 'he shall come to judge the quick and the dead' and raise the faithful 'to a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first Earth had passed away', while sinners were left behind to the torment of the destruction of the earth. The fact that many Christians look forward to Judgement Day as the final fulfilment of Jesus' freeing of humanity from sin means they are even less likely to take ethical stock in the defence of the climate. Perhaps even more problematic has been Christianity's 'parameter setting' influence on western society's view of the environment. Whether or not we believe in the Christian god, the way in which Christianity frames what the important questions are about the climate would seem deeply troubling. The very idea that we see the world as something given to us to use rather than independent and needy in its own right seems to be deeply rooted in the Christian vision of the creation of the earth. Why is this the case? I think this is because most of literature that we consume is coloured by a deeply Christian worldview. This feeds into wider societal narrative assumptions used to simplify the complexity of our role in nature and the uncertainty of right and wrong in the world. The Bible provides us with a convenient condensation of a homocentric worldview that values only the most powerful species who are able to impose their will on the environment rather than attempting to assess life on an even footing. In this way, Christianity has contributed very greatly to our human centric value system that is in many ways the cause of our great harms to the environment, as we view ourselves as privileged over the rest of nature, even though it is necessarily greatly powerful over us, e.g. extreme weather events would seem to greatly debilitate us. Christianity allows this trumped-up view of the value of humans above all else to persist and thus it creates what is in fact an anti-environmentally ethical argument. Even if we accept the argument that there are some distinctive Christian ethical justifications here, they fail to offer 'a distinctive justification', in that the conflict between the view of man as caretaker and the importance of repenting for man's sin, on the one hand, and the passive wish of Jesus and his followers to accept miserable conditions without fighting for justice and retribution, on the other, is so great that no cohesive distinctive justification can be found. Failure to act on one’s ethics is much the same as having no ethics at all. It is not justified to witness harm and fail to act any more than it is justified not to call help for someone drowning. The unique power asymmetry Christianity and its followers exert mean that, if anything, there should be an even greater ethical onus on them Finally, when it comes to a comparative calculation, having examined the strongest bases on which Christianity can be said to have a distinctive justification for environmental ethics, we must say that there is indeed very little material that is in its fundamental nature distinct from say humanist atheists, for example. Taking Christians at their very best and assuming they are acting completely ethically not selfishly, it still seems to be that humanists are concerned for the world because at its best it is a truly wonderful thing worth saving. Furthermore, the justification of human responsibility on the basis of
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