Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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My own answer, which is that something quite different from global capitalism must be created if the web of life on this planet is to be preserved, is not really important here. I am, rather, simply indicating that this is a problem which must eventually be confronted by religious environmentalists. Interestingly, as this issue takes its place on the agenda, religious environmentalists will have to turn not to theology or scripture, but to the history of social movements in general and the left in particular for inspiration and example. This is, to say the least, no small irony.

Finally, in some ways at the opposite end of the spectrum from religion’s confrontation with capitalism is its confrontation with the values which govern its own internal functioning. Consider the place of the lay leadership in religious institutions. Virtually every religion has its version of what Jews often call the “big givers,” i.e. wealthy, interested and therefore influential members of the lay religious community who by virtue of their financial contributions end up in positions of leadership. But not just any rich donor can get a leadership position. If a well-known producer of hard-core pornography, no matter what the size of his bankroll was, endeavored to use his money to become a Deacon, a member of the board of Trustees, or a lay leader, chances are pretty good that he would be refused. Such a person, it would be said, is not the kind of leader we want.

But what if the case concerns not the psychic pollution of porn, but the physical pollution of toxic waste? Would a church refuse an important position to a wealthy CEO of a polluting chemical company? Or a lumber company prone to clear cutting? Or the head of a public relations firm that specializes in “greenwashing” dangerous power plants?

This is a particularly thorny problem because all the members of the church in question – no less than myself and virtually everyone quoted in this essay – also bear some responsibility for the environmental crisis. We all plug into the same grid, drive our cars, dispose of our old cell phones, and enjoy the cheap food produced by chemicalized, industrial agriculture.

While this problem has not yet really surfaced as yet, I have no doubt it will, probably reasonably soon. As the confrontation with capitalism raises issues of reform and revolution, so this one leads to a struggle between compassion and judgment, self-criticism and the need to draw moral boundaries, loving the sinner while hating the sin and saying, “No, this is simply not acceptable.” This is a very old religious problem, and in the context of the environmental crisis it will be enormously interesting to see how the world’s vibrant and diverse religious communities try to resolve it.1

Note

Many thanks to John Hinnells for valuable editorial suggestions.

Bibliography

Bartholomew, I. (2004) Address of His Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Environmental Symposium, Santa Barbara, CA, November 8, 1997 in Gottlieb 2004.

Berry, Thomas (1988) Dream of the Earth, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Cobb, John B., Jr., (2004) “Protestant Theology and Deep Ecology,” in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., This Sacred Earth, Second Edition, New York: Routledge.

Commission for Racial Justice (1987) Toxic Wastes in the United States, New York: United Church of Christ.

Daneel, Martinus L. (2001) African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

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Enkhbayar, Narayan n/d “Prime Minister of Mongolia to be first International President of ARC,” Alliance of Religion and Conservation Website: http://www.arcworld.org/news.asp?pageID=6.

Fields, Leslie (2003) Friends of the Earth, Vol. 33, #3, Fall.

Gottlieb, Roger S. (2003) A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth,

Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Gottlieb, Roger S. (2004) This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, second edition, New York: Routledge.

Gottlieb, Roger S. (2006a) A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet’s Future, New York: Oxford University Press.

Gottlieb, Roger S. (2006b) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hadassah (1993) Judaism and Ecology, a Study Guide, New York: Hadassah

Harrison, Peter (1998) The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, John (2004) What are they Saying about Environmental Theology? NY: Paulist Press. Hart, John (2006) “Catholicism,” in Gottlieb (2006b).

John Paul II (2000) “Nature is our Sister,” Catholic Conservation Website, http://conservation.catholic. org/pope_john_paul_ii.htm.

Kaza, Stephanie (2000) “To Save all Beings: Buddhist Environmental Activism,” in Christopher S. Queen ed. Engaged Buddhism in the West, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.

Kaza, Stephanie (2003) Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume, Boston: Shambala.

Kaza, Stephanie and Kraft, Kenneth (2000) Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, Boston: Shambala.

McFague, Sallie (2001) Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Macy, Joanna (1991) World as Lover, World as Self, Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.

Miller, Vincent (2003) Consuming Religion: Christian Faith in a Consumer Culture, London: Continuum. Murphy, Charles (1989) At Home on Earth: Foundations for a Catholic Ethic of the Environment, NY:

Crossroad.

Palmer, Martin (2003) Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religion and the Environment,

Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Schorsch, Ismar (1991) “Tending to our Cosmic Oasis,” Luminaries website: http://learn.jtsa.edu/ topics/luminaries/monograph/tendingto.shtml.

Sorrell, Roger (1988) St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes Toward the Environment, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Steger, Manfred B. (2001) Globalism: The New Market Ideology, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: Norton.

Taylor, Sarah MacFarland (2006) Sisters of Earth, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Troster, Lawrence (2001) “Created in the Image of God,” in Martin Yaffe, ed. Judaism and Environmental Ethics” A Reader, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

World Council of Churches (2003): http://www(2.wcc-coe.org/pressReleasesen.nsf/09c9d(2(2d54ad7a 37c1(256d0a004ebd7d/c0cc4cb160ebf5b6c1(256da40051b7(2f?OpenDocument.

Suggested reading

Berry, Thomas (1987) Dream of the Earth, San Francisco: Sierra Books. Perhaps the single most influential work of ecotheology.

Gottlieb, Roger S. ed. (2004) This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, second edition, New York: Routledge.

Updated version of first comprehensive collection on the topic, includes scripture, essays, institutional pronouncements, news articles, prayers, poetry.

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Gottlieb, Roger S. ed. (2006) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, New York: Oxford University Press.

Large collection with essays by leading scholars on every aspect of religious environmentalism.

Gottlieb, Roger S. (2006) A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet’s Future, New York: Oxford University Press.

Study of theological, institutional, political, and social aspects of religious environmentalism.

Grim, John ed. (2001) Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmos and Community,

Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Excellent collection of articles.

Hart, John (2006) Sacramental Commons, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Short, focused book from Catholic viewpoint by important scholar and writer for the church.

Izzi Dien, Mawil W. (2000) The Environmental Dimensions of Islam, Cambridge: Lutterworth. Study of Islam on this topic by leading commentator.

Kaza, Stephanie ed. (2000) Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume, Boston: Shambala.

Using Buddhism to help understand and overcome consumerism.

Palmer, Martin (2003) Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religion and Environment, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Filled with wonderful accounts of practical connections between religion and environmental activism.

Tirosh-Samuelson, Havah (2002) Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word, Cambridge: Harvard Divinity School.

Wide-ranging collection on Jewish theology and history on the topic.

Wallace, Mark (2001) Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation, New York: Trinity Press.

Evocative and poetic Christian ecotheology.

Chapter 30

Religion and science

Thomas Dixon

Introduction: the two books

From one point of view, religion and science simply have nothing to do with each other. Religions are concerned with scriptural traditions and rituals, with which all members of a community engage, in order to give themselves a sense of identity, history, moral values and spirituality; they are practised by billions of people worldwide, from the most to the least educated, richest to poorest. Science, in contrast, is an elite, educated, professional activity involving expensive high-tech instruments and complex mathematics; it is engaged in by a group of intellectual, expert researchers and theoreticians who push back the frontiers of human knowledge and discover the true nature of the universe. On this view, studying ‘religion and science’ might seem like studying ‘football chants and electronic engineering’ or ‘modern dance and nuclear physics’ – an absurd attempt to bring together and compare two totally unrelated subjects.

In fact, of course, religion and science have much more in common than this initial caricature suggests. Specifically, religion and science share an interest in the same fundamental questions about the origins and nature of the physical universe in general, and of human beings in particular. It is when religion and science have found themselves giving different answers to these questions, whether in Renaissance Italy or in modern-day America, that conflicts have arisen. Since modern science was born into a European culture in which the Christian Church and its teachings held considerable political and intellectual influence, it has largely been in Christian countries that conflicts between scripture and science have been keenly felt and contested. As a result, in this section and the one that follows, although I talk about ‘religion’ and science, the examples I use are cases of interaction specifically between Christian religion and science; I will discuss the problems this raises in the third section, on criticisms of the ‘dialogue’ project.

For some, the whole history of modern thought can be summarised as a battle between religion and science, which science has won. One of the most famous proponents of this idea was Thomas Huxley. Huxley was the archetypical Victorian agnostic and man of science. His determined assaults on Christian theology in the name of evolution earned him the nickname ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. In his review of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Huxley wrote:

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have

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been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

(Huxley 1893: 52)

It is not difficult to think of examples that seem to substantiate this idea of the history of religion and science as a perpetual battleground. We might think of Galileo’s condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. In this case, the Bible taught that the earth was stationary and the sun orbited around it. For example, the book of Joshua (10: 12–14) stated that God made the sun stand still in the middle of the sky until Joshua and his troops were victorious in battle against the Amorites. This seemed to contradict the claim of the new Copernican astronomy, that the sun was static at the centre of the cosmos, while the earth and the other planets orbited around it. If the scriptures were the word of an omniscient God, and it was true that the earth orbited round the sun, then surely the book of Joshua should have stated that God had made the earth stand still to prolong the day, rather than that he had made the sun stand still. Either the religious text or the scientific theory must be wrong.

Or we might think about a conflict that has been hotly contested in modern America, namely that between the Bible and the theory of evolution. The first chapter of Genesis says that God made all the creatures of the sea, the birds, the wild animals, the livestock and the creatures that move along the ground, each ‘according to their kinds’, and that he created human beings in his own likeness to rule over them. This picture of the separate creation of many distinct kinds is directly contradicted by the Darwinian claim that all living things, including we humans, are descended from a common ancestor, only gradually evolving into the myriad species we now see around us.

Studying ‘religion and science’, then, could seem to involve thinking about a long list of conflicts: Galileo versus the Church; Darwinism versus Creationism; Bible versus science; superstition versus rationality; dogma versus empirical evidence; and so on. Certainly, any serious attempt to think about this subject must involve some account of the true nature and causes of these apparent conflicts. However, equally, any such attempt would not rest content with such a simplistically polarised account. Historical studies reveal that more complicated issues were at stake, often to do not only with the interpretation of scripture, but also with the question of the relative authority of Church and state over science and education. Struggles over the relationship between religion and science have often been political, as well as intellectual. Knowledge is a form of power, and there is much at stake, for both Church and state, in settling what sorts of knowledge should be taught in schools and universities, and by whom.

The main focus of any book or university course on ‘religion and science’ is likely to be the modern period (from around the seventeenth century onwards), since it is that period that saw the birth of the institutions, methods and theories that are representative of modern ‘science’. However, the fundamental questions at issue are ancient and enduring. Perhaps the most fundamental of all is the question of the relationship between the observable and the unobservable. The Nicene Creed states that God made ‘all that is, seen and unseen’. The Apostle Paul wrote, in his letter to the Romans, that ‘since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made’ (Romans 1: 20). But what exactly can the observable world tell us about the unobservable? The desire to answer this question motivates the whole immense variety of enterprises that might come under the umbrella of ‘religion and science’.