It's not easy being green: the contradictions of atheistic environmentalism
This time of pandemic is a mixed blessing for those committed to the cause of environmentalism. On the one hand, reduced air travel and factory production has meant cleaner skies and clearer air. On the other hand, as Dominic Lawson has pointed out in his article Hail the plastic-maker, the unexpected heroes of the fight against Covid-19 are petrochemical companies who are rapidly manufacturing the single-use plastics of PPE.
On the face of it, concern for the environment is self-evidently A Good Thing. Who wants to argue against cleaner air and plastic-free seas? Who wants to be on the side of the cigar-chomping, rainforest-despoiling, capitalist fatcat against the fluffy bunnies? Certainly not me. But then again, I'm a Christian. The Bible gives me a coherent worldview from which I can contend for environmental issues without idolising the world, as we'll see as we go along.
But what if you're an atheist? We might think that makes no difference - fluffy bunnies are still fluffy bunnies, after all. But as we'll see, atheistic environmentalism runs into some show-stopping contradictions pretty early on.
(Just a note on method: for now, we'll limit ourselves just to thinking from the perspective of the Christian doctrine of creation. There's much more to be said by considering the Fall, the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the promise of the new creation. We may get there one day, but there's plenty to go on already.)
Purpose: why should we save the dolphins?
We turn on the nature documentary and see the dolphin lying stranded and dead on the beach. A post-mortem reveals that its stomach is full of plastic pellets and discarded balloons. Our hearts lurch and our fists clench, and we feel a tremendous sense of wrongness. This should not be. It is not right.
But why?
If nature is teleological... we are morally obligated to treat people in a way which helps them fulfil their purpose.
Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body
Nancy Pearcey here is talking specifically about treating people according to their purpose, in order to explore how we have completely failed to do this in the areas of sexuality, gender, and the sanctity of life. But her point is more broadly true of the the whole of creation. If nature is created by a personal, purposeful God, then it has inherent purpose and meaning. The world is for something - at the very least, it is for the glory of God (Psalm 19:1, Isaiah 55:12).
That means that as we live in and use created things, we are both observing and revealing the purposes given to them by God. Observing, because as creatures of a Creator God we long to look into the other things he has created, to see how they enact the purposes God has given them, and to be thankful for it. This is the foundation of science as it is meant to be:
"Real science means exploring and adventuring... And from time to time, after a long, exhausting climb, we catch a breathtaking glimpse of the glory of God."
Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science, 11
Revealing, because as we creatively put created things to use, we find that they have properties which we would never know otherwise, but which intrinsically belong to them as befits their purpose:
To use the grasses of the field for grain to nourish us, to use the force and flow of accumulated water for energy, these undertakings reveal goods that belong essentially to grass and flowing water - not the only one in either case (what of the loveliness of waving grass in the evening breeze, the musical chuckle of the stream over stones?) but real and immanent goods, to be ignorant of which would be to be ignorant of grass and water.
Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking, 75
To be sure, it is possible to abuse created goods - to make them do something they are not meant to do. But that is because they are meant to do something. If there is no intrinsic purpose to a dolphin or to the petrochemicals which make up the plastic pellets, then we cannot say that the pellets are not meant to be in the dolphin's stomach.
We might bridle at this. If the pellets cause the dolphin to die, then surely we can infer - without needlessly introducing God into the argument - that the dolphin isn't meant to eat them? But if we really do believe in a purposeless universe - in the Darwinian view that "DNA just is, and we dance to its music" (to quote Richard Dawkins) - then why do we think dolphins are meant to live? What purpose do they serve?
Perhaps we think they should live because they are beautiful? But that is to say that beauty is an inherent purpose of the dolphin - quite an anthropocentric one at that. (By the by, this is clearly the unstated and perhaps unconscious motivation for quite a lot of environmental action, which is why pandas tend to get a lot of money and effort thrown at their preservation, but no-one minds much that the Saint Helena giant earwig is now extinct).
All right, but what if we say that dolphins form part of an ecosystem that supports the life of hundreds of other creatures? But that just kicks the problem down the road - why should we care about the other creatures that are threatened? What is their purpose?
So perhaps we try another tack - that the ecosystem which is partially upheld by the dolphin also supports us. That is at least intellectually honest - we admit that we really want to preserve the environment because we want to preserve ourselves. That's not a bad reason to want to do something; but again, why should we care about the survival of the human species? Do we serve any purpose, really, or is this just mindless self-preservation? And if we're talking about the future of the race - that is, our great-grandchildren - then why should we care about them? They won't remember us, and they'll die eventually anyway. Why not simply maximise my comfort now, with the help of plastic pellets if need be? "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
Finally, then, what about the suggestion that we preserve life because life itself is inherently good - that we do not want anything to suffer or die because to do so would be intrinsically bad? That is a very fine sentiment - but on what is it based? In the cold and brutal logic of Darwinism, if something has not survived then it wasn't fit to. Indeed, life is not inherently better than life at all - it just is. Something's either alive, or it's dead. It doesn't matter to the universe. If you care, you care in spite of the realities of the cosmos, not because of it.
The only coherent basis on which to make any effort at all towards the preservation of the environment - beyond making my own private patch of it as comfortable as possible for myself - is to recognise that the Creator God who stands behind creation has imbued it with purpose. He thinks life is better than death; he thinks suffering is a problem; he has given each creature a place in his world which fits with what it actually is.
This conclusion is not nullified by the presence in the world of creatures which seem to inflict suffering on other creatures, including humans. A full-orbed response to that objection would fall beyond the scope of this blog post (and would include the doctrine of the Fall), but suffice it to say that the very fact that we raise this point - with its baseline assumption that the purposes of the things in nature ought to work together for good - shows that, deep down, we agree with God about his world. As Peter Kreeft puts it, "to judgeEarth as inadequately Edenic is to know Eden" (Christianity for Modern Pagans, 60).
And because, deep down, we know Eden, that means that we have a scientific drive to learn the purpose of created things; and an ecological drive to preserve them in that purpose, even (as Pearcey suggests) to truly love them by treating them in a way that helps them fulfil that purpose. But if we want to do that while also claiming that things fundamentally have no purpose at all - that we are part of an unfeeling and irrational universe - then we have cut off the very branch we are sitting on. We might as well be cruel to creation; what does it matter? Or if you want to be kind to creation because it makes you happy, that's fine - why do you think anyone else has to?
On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger... But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws. If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Responsibility: why should we save the dolphins?
That brings us to the second contradiction of atheistic environmentalism, which we'll deal with much more briefly. We've asked the question: we should we care? Now let's ask: why should we care? Why is it mankind's responsibility to deal with environmental issues?
The answer immediately comes back - "because we caused them!" Granted. But so what? If survival of the fittest really is the only law in this world, and (for example) the use of plastics makes us fitter, stronger, and more comfortable, then who cares? Let the dolphins sort out the problem for themselves. They should adapt.
But perhaps this uncaring attitude (uncaring, of course, from the standpoint of Christian ethics, but never mind that for now) leads us to conclude that humans themselves are a problem. We are a parasite, or (as David Attenborough thinks) a plague on earth; and we've seen in the past few months what we need to do with plagues. We must destroy them.
At the very least, says Attenborough, we ought to severely reduce our procreation levels and drastically lower the human population. He has launched the Population Matters charity, which aims for exactly this goal, through encouraging people to have smaller families and providing support for family planning clinics which provide abortions. The irony is, of course, that saving the planet from the human plague is the responsibility of humans. Humans must curb their Darwinian urges - have fewer children - in order to help other creatures fulfil their Darwinian urges. As O'Donovan perceptively notes:
Even ecologists of the deepest green dye, returning from their searching visions of nature in which humans are more of an irritant than a decoration, come to rest in urgent appeals for the reconstruction of human attitudes.
Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking, 70.
But if we are just a part of nature - just another species among many - why should we curb our desires just to save something else, especially something that grants us no immediate benefit? That is Matthew Parris's point in a recent Spectator article, arguing against "rewilding":
Here, then, lies the heresy of many of the most convinced environmentalists. They seek to deny that human beings are a species of animal along with all the other species. Denying that we are part of nature, therefore they think we can ‘spoil’ nature. But unless we are divine we are just another animal, an incredibly successful species, like rats, or locusts...
Humans can trigger catastrophic shifts, but so can elephants. All this is ‘nature’. Species extinction is ‘nature’. Our messing up our planet’s climate is ‘nature’...
Matthew Parris
So what is Parris's solution? Eat, drink, and be merry? Spoil nature all we like, because we are nature? Of course not:
Man as an animal has acquired the greatest mastery of Earth’s environment that our planet has known. We cannot abdicate responsibility for outcome. This planet is our garden... It is for us to debate, decide — and even design.
Matthew Parris
But why? Why do we have a responsibility we "cannot abdicate"? The language is telling. Abdication is what a king does when he gives up his throne. Parris thus makes mankind kings. His argument appears to be that we are kings by might, not right - we have "acquired mastery" of the environment, and thus we have a responsibility to help it be beautiful and functional. But if we have only acquired responsibility, then surely it is within our purview to abdicate it if we like?
But what if this responsibility is not acquired, but assigned by a Creator God who has the authority to do so? What if it is part of our purpose, part of our very nature (Gen 1:26-28)? Then we would expect all of us to have the urge to treat nature with respect, to do it good; and it would behove all of us to take responsibility to manage it well: to "debate, decide - and even design."