Creationism and Climate Change
It has become unfashionable to emphasize the role of religion in dooming the human race to its imminent environmental destruction, but its unique opposition to scientific progress is damning.
But if researchers are still teasing out the many authors of the Late Devonian destruction, one obstacle to progress in our knowledge of this transitional period of life on earth has been, amazingly, a lack of interest.
“The Devonian research community is a little anemic, frankly,” said Thomas Algeo. “It’s hard to get enough people together for meetings. We tried to do a special issue on the Devonian and didn’t get enough papers to make it fly. There aren’t enough people actively working on it.”
Depressingly, while research on the pivotal Devonian period languishes, only a few miles from Algeo’s office is the Creation Museum, a bizarre evangelical funhouse where glassy-eyed schoolchildren are told that the Earth isn’t much older than the pyramids and shown dioramas of tyrannosaurs boarding Noah’s Ark. Awash in donor money—and even state tax breaks—the Creation Museum is expanding.
From The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen (page 98)
Among those who keep up with climate change news and analysis, there is a growing acceptance that the time for worthwhile, effective action regarding the salvation of our earthly abode has long since passed. Exactly when the point of no return occurred is a matter of some debate and may never be pinpointed (more likely, a range of possible time periods and correlating severity of contemporary inaction exist), but it is likely that the moment during which even a concerted effort to reduce emissions and curb environmental destruction was no longer sufficient took place during the last 50 years. Scientists have known about the effects of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere since the 19th century, and under no circumstances were most of us ever able to believably claim ignorance about the deadly ramifications of our negligence. Now, warming is locked in to at least 1.5C (previously thought of as a point of no return), seas are becoming acrid and inhospitable, the planetary ecosystem is already reeling as biodiversity and natural abundance plummet, and food and water are becoming increasingly expensive and scarce.
How did it come to this?
To be sure, free market capitalism and short-sighted avarice in general played a significant role in our collective inability to come together save our home. Big polluters spent vast sums of money for half a century to propagandize the public about the deadly poison their industry was spewing:
Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research. …
Since then [1988], Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”
The propaganda created by companies like Exxon was intended to sow doubt in the science of global climate change, and to lend its efforts an air of respectability, it mostly stuck to pseudoscientific testimony from false experts and political arguments about environmental regulations weakening the United States in comparison to other countries. It did not typically rely on explicitly religious arguments, though exceptions occurred then and have since:
In June, ThinkProgress published an exclusive investigation into the Cornwall Alliance — a corporate front designed to deceive evangelicals into doubting the science underpinning climate change. Today, Fox News hate-talker Glenn Beck brought on a representative from the group to tout Cornwall’s new DVD, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” which claims the climate change movement is a “false religion,” and a nefarious conspiracy to empower eugenicists and create a “global government.” The DVD, which Cornwall is distributing to evangelical churches around the country, seems to be designed perfectly for Beck’s world view, and unsurprisingly, the Cornwall guest and Beck exchanged bizarre conspiracy theories.
There is also the confused position of prominent climate change denialist Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who has argued God would call human-driven climate change a hoax:
When Whitehouse first introduced this amendment a couple days ago, he made clear that by “climate change,” he was referring to “what our carbon pollution…is doing to our atmosphere and what it is doing to our oceans.” But the amendment didn’t literally say that, and the Senate’s most outspoken climate science denier saw this as an opportunity. James Inhofe—an Oklahoma Republican who has previously pointed to the Bible as evidence that human-caused global warming is a hoax—urged his fellow senators to support the amendment.
Addressing his Senate colleagues before the vote, Inhofe once again cited the Bible to argue that the climate does indeed change but that humans aren’t the cause. “Climate is changing, and climate has always changed,” said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. “There’s archeological evidence of that. There’s biblical evidence of that. There’s historic evidence of that.” He continued: “The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful, they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.” You can watch the back-and-forth above.
What exact relationship does religious worship have with climate change denialism, beyond its popularity as a chestnut to trot out in service of virtually any position imaginable, no matter how tenuously related? Religion and its defenders argue that like any other ideology it is capable of motivating both good and evil, and Pew Research found in 2015 that religious affiliation does not have a particularly strong influence on one’s attitudes toward climate change, with some exceptions:
Previous Pew Research Center studies have found only a modest effect of religion on attitudes about environmental protection. For example, a 2010 Pew Research Center telephone survey of U.S. adults found 81% of all adults, including strong majorities of all major religious traditions, favored “stronger laws and regulations to protect the environment,” while 14% opposed them. While 47% of those who attend worship services at least once or twice a month said their clergy speak out on the environment, few adults described religion’s influence as most important in shaping their thinking on environmental protection. Just 6% of U.S. adults in the 2010 survey said religious beliefs have had the biggest influence on what they think about “tougher laws to protect the environment.” More said the biggest influence on their views has been education (28%), the media (24%), personal experience (18%), or something else (11%). Another 6% said friends or family had the biggest influence on their views.
When it comes to people’s beliefs about climate change, it is the religiously unaffiliated, not those who identify with a religious tradition, who are particularly likely to say the Earth is warming due to human activity. Hispanic Catholics, like Hispanics in general, are more likely to say the Earth is warming due to human activity. White evangelical Protestants stand out as least likely to have this view. However, in multivariate statistical modeling, the major religious affiliation groups did not differ from the religiously unaffiliated in views about climate change. Political party identification and race and ethnicity are stronger predictors of views about climate change beliefs than are religious identity or observance.
The Pope recently called on Catholics to act as stewards of the earth, a seemingly-encouraging proclamation discussed in the following article by Center for American Progress which also notes that aside from white evangelical Protestants, major religious groups by and large now agree that climate change is caused my human activity:
Pope Francis, who attended the Earth Day summit, encouraged the leaders of the world’s largest economies to “take charge of the care of nature, of this gift that we have received and that we have to heal, guard, and carry forward.” These words are increasingly significant because of the challenge the world faces in the postpandemic era. As the pope said, “We need to keep moving forward and we know that one doesn’t come out of a crisis the same way one entered. We come out either better or worse. Our concern is to see that the environment is cleaner, purer, and preserved. We must take care of nature so that it takes care of us.”
The majority of religious Americans share Pope Francis’ and President Biden’s concern for taking urgent action on climate change. Sixty percent of Christians and 79 percent of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims believe that “passing a bill to address climate change and its effects” should be a top or an important priority for Congress, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted in April 2021. The broad support for Congress to take action on the climate crisis includes 57 percent of evangelical Americans, who tend to be the most conservative of the United States’ religious blocs.
These polls are reflective of a general sea change in the American political consciousness, which religious groups cannot entirely escape. Just as young earth creationism has only recently fallen out of fashion in all but the most extremist religious viewpoints, environmentalist attitudes among the religious were nowhere to be seen in the era when climate action would have mattered but are becoming fashionable in recent years. America in the middle and late 21st century was an intensely evangelical, anti-science place, with Satanic panics dominating news cycles, the emergence of hidebound culture warrior groups such as Focus on the Family, and a President who famously scheduled meetings based around astrology. Even now, fully a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical Protestants.
Now that many of the more apocalyptically-minded religionists are convinced that we are no longer capable of saving the planet and meaningful action can be dismissed as futile, religious groups are free to pay lip service to environmental concerns—doing so will no longer carry the inconvenient expectation of actions matching words or rich donors possibly pulling funding. The religionist’s assumed dominion over nature remains, it is only now more fatalist and apocalyptic in nature and only calls for environmental action as a window dressing, a fact proven by two major incongruities: 1) religion is strongly tied to higher birthrates and reduced family planning even as education and healthcare access reduce fertility in the world (see also access to abortion services and the abandonment of Roe v. Wade in the US), a stark issue when refusal to procreate is the one major action an individual can take to mitigate their part in the degradation of the environment; 2) the religious are overwhelmingly against a fully green socialist revolution (Christian socialism being a fringe category), the only meaningful hope in averting total civilizational collapse in 2022.
Religion is in fact closely tied to the rise of free market systems in the West and its general muddling of thought positions it as the most uniquely effective technique for maintaining the hegemony of capitalism. Non-religious arguments for these environmentally-unfriendly ideologies do exist of course (see those put forth by Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, or countless other college-educated economists for example) but these are at least based on secular reasoning and are therefore easier to debunk, though their adherents tend to treat their arguments with a religious reverence. Insofar as the ideologies of the free market rely on non-rational thinking, they resemble a religion and carry all its attendant shortcomings; insofar as they do not, they are vulnerable to argumentation and therefore mostly held and championed by those with a more self-serving interest in seeing them maintained (rich capitalists, whose propaganda extends far beyond climate science denialism) and the easily-led, often sociopathic thinkers who lap up the former’s propaganda. “Randroids” are called this for a good reason.
Without the widespread adherence to religious belief, especially young earth creationism and other anti-science variants, an intellectually empowered public could have more easily rejected the polluters’ disinformation campaigns, as we have mostly done now, though far too late. The seed of doubt in climate science was sown by religious non-thought and watered by rich capitalists who saw in its irrational doubts an opportunity to deny inconvenient truths. From The Guardian:
The truth behind the ads: Instead of warning the public about global heating or taking action, fossil fuel companies stayed silent as long as they could. In the late 1980s, however, the world woke up to the climate crisis, marking what Exxon called a “critical event”. The fossil fuel industry’s PR apparatus swung into action, implementing a strategy straight out of big tobacco’s playbook: to weaponize science against itself.
A 1991 memo by Informed Citizens for the Environment made that strategy explicit: “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
Mobil and ExxonMobil ran one of the most comprehensive climate denial campaigns of all time, with a foray in the 1980s, a blitz in the 1990s and continued messaging through the late 2000s. Their climate “advertorials” – advertisements disguised as editorials – appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and other newspapers and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America”.
This propaganda campaign has not ended, as the article notes, only shifted its goalposts and become digital:
The truth behind the ad: Put “emphasis on costs/political realities”, instructed a 1989 Exxon strategy memo. Just as the fossil fuel industry funded contrarian scientists to deny climate science, it also touted the flawed economic analyses of industry-funded economists.
The best predictors of fossil fuel industry ad spending are media scrutiny and political activity. Today, economic scaremongering has gone digital, with huge spikes in television and social media ad spending by oil lobbies each time climate regulations loom. In the runup to the 2018-20 US midterm and presidential elections, ExxonMobil spent more on political advertising on Facebook and Instagram than any other company in the world (except Facebook itself).
The repositioning of global warming as a “theory (not fact)” mentioned in the above article might bring to mind the (now mostly abandoned) creationist questioning of the theory of evolution, which built upon a popular misunderstanding of the word “theory” as something more akin to a hypothesis. Though religious dogma is a self-contained belief system that should position it as wholly independent of scientific criticism, its purveyors have always known that such arguments would only ever convince the already-devout and so have made clumsy, disingenuous forays into secular modes of argument, trying to dispel carbon dating or claiming to have found physical evidence of Noah’s flood. Only when the age of the earth became overwhelmingly obvious did mainstream religionists abandon that particular hoodwink, and now only when anthropogenic climate change has become overwhelmingly obvious do some of them begin to preach its certitude. It is always, conveniently, too little and too late to amount to much, and the dark money and politics behind US evangelicism can continue to operate freely. The shadowy nature of religious influence on public debate is no accident: it is best used as an implication or unspoken assumption, or in political backroom dealing, rather than an explicit argument, at least in a putatively pluralistic society that often frowns on one religion asserting its dominance over other beliefs.
Religious belief and the hegemonic place it occupies in the United States provides propagandists with the ever-important shadow of doubt and plausible deniability that all good lies hide behind. It is not sufficient to dismiss the human race as uniquely susceptible to pseudoscientific propaganda—something else must be behind the questioning of scientific fact, something which has been given undue respect and protected from criticism for centuries, something deeply tied to the general community’s identity and ego, something that is itself irrational and non-scientific and therefore above disproof, something like a religion. The cosmic “what if” that fuels Pascal’s Wager is the same one that gnaws at what ought be a sound belief in the science of climate change:
“What if our senses are tricking us in some way and reality isn’t necessarily reflective of what I’ve seen and heard my entire life?” → “What if the Christians are correct and there is a God who punishes non-believers with an eternity of damnation and torture?” → “What if the religion I grew up in or is practiced by my community is correct, and the social benefit of joining it would be worth the time?” → “What if the Earth really is only thousands of years old and fossils were planted by Satan to confuse us?” → “What if the scientists are lying about climate change for their own benefit or some other nefarious reason?” → “What if reducing out consumption of fossil fuels does give competing nations a leg up when they don’t pass similar regulations?” → “What if the only candidates who could actually make a difference are indeed authoritarian socialists bent on destroying a way of life we’re meant to hold sacred?”
Insofar as religions utilize scientific reasoning to convince their followers to care about the earth, this only shows the appeal of such secular, scientific reasoning, which could be had elsewhere more effectively and with less pernicious baggage. For example, the Pope calling for his followers to take care of the earth is objectively a beneficial message that might convince Catholics to adopt a more environmentally conscious political orientation and should be celebrated, except for two things: 1) Where was this messaging when it was needed and could have made more of an actual difference? 2) It is a shame about all the other evils the Catholic church engages itself in, such as shuffling around child-abusing priests and declaring that abortion is murder. If only it was possible to take the useful, consistent, rational parts of a religious person’s argument and abandon the rest. But when this is achieved, the belief is no longer a religion at all, and throughout history reformers have often utilized religious arguments to work toward revolutionary goals any environmentalist would support. The spiritual reverence for nature championed by conservationists such as John Muir, for example, was not uniquely spiritual insofar as it facilitated the creation of parks and other protected reserves, and while his motivations for championing the preservation of the environment may have been closely related to his Christian heritage, his actual arguments and quotations mostly concern the beauty and peaceful calmness of nature which are very secular appeals (also uncompelling and self-serving ones for anyone not personally enamored with the wilderness). If, on the other hand, his religion strongly motivated Muir (or any other religious conservationist) to a great extent, then he was only interested in environmental causes because of what he interpreted as the teachings of the lord, and this would place him on the same level as a would-be murderer who can only stop themselves from killing by imagining the resultant wrath of a god—in other words, a sociopath.
What happens to this murderer who only foregoes killing because of the judgment of god when they have a crisis of faith? What happens to a religiously-motived environmentalist when they no longer believe? Should we not be deemphasizing and ostracizing religious motivations so that these individuals can more readily think of other reasons to do the right thing?
This is an apt summation for religious thought in general: insofar as it can be considered beneficial and should therefore be tolerated by environmentalists, socialists, and secularists, it is not unique and its redeeming factors could be had elsewhere at a much less costly rate. Insofar as it is unique, it is poisonous to the kind of thinking that could have once saved our civilization (and which can still go some distance in mitigating the coming and ongoing disasters). Where religion appears to carry certain benefits, it is incidental, but where it is uniquely dangerous, it is inextricable.
To put it another way: only an extremely charitable reading of religious intrusion into politics would find it acceptable, and this charitable reading renders such a belief something else entirely. If everything that makes religion unique is taken away, then it is no longer religion, but rather a mundane, falsifiable ideology like any other. As the world becomes less and less habitable, the tendency to hide behind pleasant fairytales will increase and religious worship will paradoxically rise alongside the scientific consensus that the earth is experiencing a human-authored great extinction. It is important that we do not forget the lessons of the past and recognize that they have an impact on our future choices that, while sadly limited by past inaction, can still make a difference in our lives. Reject religion and its intrusion into our collective decision-making processes, no matter what these deliberations might look like in the coming future.