What should we do about the environment? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Something I note about Longman’s book is that many times, I don’t disagree with what he says, until he gets outside of the area of Old Testament studies and gets into personal application. Here, he normally does not look at both sides of the matter and speaks on topics he is not informed on. If he wanted to write on the subject, he would have been far better presenting just what the Bible says or when looking at the issues in application saying something like “Some people think X and here’s why, and others think Y and here’s why.”
So it should not be a shock that when we get to an end of a chapter on the environment, what is brought up is climate change. Longman brings up that this is the settled science so we should accept it. Sorry, but after Covid, many of us are not so quick to accept the “accepted science.”
For instance, here is the settled science from 1978:
Now let us suppose that in that time we had said, “Dang! We have to stop this! We have to take steps to heat the Earth!” Where exactly would we be now if we had done that according to the climate change alarmists? At this rate, we would be well underwater due to the ice caps melting and everything else.
But this was the settled science.
When Covid came, we were being given all these alarmist policies and told about how many people would die if we didn’t do this. Now we look back and many people now see what those of us who actually thought about the data then saw, that this was not the case. The precautions we took were highly unnecessary. I realize this is anecdotal, but I went about my business as usual, only wore a mask when I had to do my job, and never got a vaccine.
I have also never had Covid to this day.
Also, color us suspicious when every time that there is a “crisis” the solution is always along the lines of “government intervention” which usually leads to communism or socialism. Generally, I have made it a policy to not take national “panics” seriously. So far, this has worked well in my life.
Longman didn’t go to a site ever like the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. I find this strange since if one is an evangelical writing for an evangelical audience, you would think that you would, I don’t know, go to an evangelical environmental association. Could it be he just doesn’t want to hear the other side?
He also brings up the argument of religion vs science, but notice that in all of what I said above about climate change, I did not make it a point about religion. It is not religion vs science, but scientific models vs other scientific models. To bring up the argument of religion vs science in the climate change debate is a red herring.
So in the end, I still say what I said at the beginning. I wish that Longman had largely just provided the biblical data and then if he had to go with application, at least give both sides of the issue.
Next time, we’ll talk about poverty.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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