Climate resurrection is not a question of belief – yet religious dogma is holding the world back from taking decisive action. “We can’t wait for Jesus”, says Climate Science Commentator Charles Nagy.

I often hear the question: “do you believe in global warming?”. My answer is: “wrong question”. Science is not about belief. If you step off the Empire State building gravity (and impact) will kill you – guaranteed. Whether you believe in it or not, gravity doesn’t care. Science doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not. It is not religion, it does not require your belief for it to work for you. This is why I am often amused when climate change sceptics accuse scientists of being the ‘high priests’ of the ‘religion of global warming’. This single, simplistic assertion shows their total and embarrassing lack of understanding about the nature of science.

Religion relies on claims of absolute truths, usually conveyed by prophets, who gained this knowledge by supernatural ‘revelation’. Revelations that cannot be questioned, proved or disproved.

Science, on the other hand, is the study of the natural world via observation and hypothesis, which can either be proven true or not by conducting experiments to check the validity of a hypothesis.

Most religions cannot tolerate the questioning of their ‘truths’, whereas for science, inquiry is paramount.

Try walking into a prayer meeting with a room full of evangelicals and ask whether Jesus really rose from the dead. Or question whether Jesus will come back soon to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven. While seemingly a harmless relic from an ancient religion, many evangelicals still do believe it.

It’s also why evangelicals are uninterested in climate change. To them, it is a non-issue since – even if it turns out to be a huge problem – Jesus will be back soon to fix it anyway. Despite Jesus clearly being wrong in predicting his own return, the resurrection remains a core Christian belief. According to the New Testament, what he said to his disciples was this: ”Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” – Matthew 16:28.

Jesus basically said that he would return within the lifetime of at least some of his followers who were then listening to him. If this was a scientific hypothesis, then it would have been discarded sometime in the first century AD, when the last of his immediate disciples had died and he still had not returned.
Instead, millions of followers – including the Catholic Church – still believe that ‘He’ will return.

Climate resurrection cannot wait!

Yet this is not merely a harmless theoretical question. Millions of evangelicals, despite the manifest failure of this prediction, voted for a President who seems utterly hell bent on destroying the only hospitable planet we have within hundreds of light-years, and his supporters don’t care. Because? Well because, God will fix it!

Despite 2000 years of fruitlessly scanning the skies for portents of a returning saviour who never came, these faithful still believe in his imminent return – which should happen any day now.

It is difficult to conceive of a more fatuous and dangerous notion than this. Tens of millions of people in the country most responsible for what is potentially a civilisation ending crisis, fail to see the need for taking any action whatsoever. On the grounds that a supernatural deity will intervene to save us from ourselves.

When I boarded my first Jumbo jet I marvelled as to how this behemoth, weighing nigh on 300 metric tons could get off the ground. How could it be supported by the thin air I can pass my hand through? Surely, this would indeed have been miraculous to any first century denizen, as it still seems miraculous to me.

However, I never doubted this modern marvel being airborne, because the physics and aerodynamics had been worked out over many years of design and testing, plus the calculations were based on absolutely ironclad science. There was no need for belief.
Unlike the resurrection, if the science is solid, it will just happen.

References:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_and_claims_for_the_Second_Coming_of_Christ
cleantechnica.com/2018/04/05/why-white-evangelicals-dont-care-about-climate-change/
huffingtonpost.com/g-elijah-dann/christians-climate-change_b_3668179.html

Climate resurrection

 

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