T.J. Turnage’s whether to forecast

I’ve been having discussions lately with different people asking me what I thought about global warming. I’ve discussed this subject a bit in a previous post, where I posed the three questions related to the issue that get increasingly controversial. It is a bit controversial to assert warming has been occurring recently (I happen to agree with this particular assertion), more controversial to assert that warming is caused at least in part by human activity, and still more controversial to assert that we can mitigate or even reverse global warming by our future actions.

Let me say outright that my beliefs on the subject are not scientifically based in any way. Instead they are based only on my worldview and Christian beliefs. Namely:

1) God is sovereign.

2) All people, including Christians, are sinful at birth.

3) Part of our sinful nature includes pride, which essentially is an overestimation of what we can control.

4) Therefore, our pride tends to make us underestimate the sovereignty of God.

Regarding point one - I’m not saying we should be apathetic fatalists. I still look both ways before I cross the street. To assume God will take care of us without any effort on our part is putting our Lord to the test (e.g., Matthew 4:5-7). In fact, I’m sure there are many Christians who are on the opposite side of the global warming issue from me who sincerely believe that as God’s stewards of His creation here on earth, we can and should be trying to do something. I don’t claim to know the answers to any of this. I’m just going on my beliefs, and I certainly plan to keep looking at the data and talking to people who are on both sides of the issue about it.

Point three explains why many people believe we can control the earth’s climate, assuming we play a significant role in it in the first place. Again, I am admitting outright that I am completely biased and guided by my worldview and faith. But I also believe that global warming, evolution, and perhaps many other disciplines of science also are shaped by worldviews too, such as naturalism or humanism. Naturalism and humanism do not believe in supernatural processes like my Christian worldview does. However, even a naturalist or humanist must concede that we do not know everything there is to know, and consequently we can only infer exactly what happened in the past and what will happen in the future. In other words, we all have faith about things. In fact, I would say we have to have faith about a lot of things. I don’t know exactly how my car works, or whether it will continue to run tomorrow - but I still assume it will get me to and from the office.

It really has struck me how our worldview shapes our preconceptions about everything. This causes us to perceive the same data differently and to draw different conclusions. For example, a peacock will be interpreted by a theist to be the product of beautiful, intricate design and to an evolutionist to be the product of many years of gradual complex processes taking place. Neither the theist or evolutionist can prove which chain of events led up to the peacock, because neither was around from the beginning. Again, it’s all about faith. In that sense, I maintain that everyone, including a humanist or naturalist, is following a religion just as much as a Christian is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under faith, politics, weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.