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>The Review of Politics
>The Bible Made Me Do It: Christianity, Science, and...
The Review of Politics
The Bible Made Me Do It: Christianity, Science, and the Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Ernest L. Fortin
The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to "subdue" the earth and exercise "dominion" over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.
The Review of Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , Spring 1995 , pp. 197 - 224
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1995
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29. The charge of animism leveled at Plato by Foster in the abovementioned articles is based on just such a fundamentalist interpretation of the Platonicmyth.
30. On this score, one does well to remember that the Bible attributes the discovery of the arts and sciences, according to White the instruments of man's callous treatment of nature, to the progeny of the reprobate Cain; cf. Gen. 4:17–22.
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34. Cf. F. Bacon, "Plan of the Great Instauration," toward the middle. The difference between the two forms of induction is stressed by Bacon himself, who writes: "But the greatest change I introduce is in the form itself of induction and the judgment made thereby. For the induction of which the logicians speak, which proceeds by simple enumeration, is a puerile thing, concludes at hazard, is always liable to be upset by a contradictory instance, takes into account only what is known and ordinary, and leads to no result" (ibid., beginning). My interpretation of Bacon's relationship to Christianity accords in the main with that of Faulkner, R., Bacon, pp. 61–65et passim.Google Scholar For a more "pious" interpretation within the context of the contemporary ecological debate, see.Leiss, Wm., The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).Google Scholar
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38. Cf. Physics 2.199a34f.
39. Paleontologists calculate that, of the billions of species that have populated the earth at one time or another over the past three or four billion years, fully 99.9% have disappeared, sometimes as a result of the mass extinctions that have occurred at periodic intervals. See on this subject the recent books by Eldredge, N., The Miner's Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, and Raup, D. M., Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (New York, 1992).Google Scholar
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41. Unlike Kant, Aristotle and his followers did not think it possible to draw in advance a firm line between what the human intellect can or cannot do. All virtue, including intellectual virtue, is demonstrated in its employment. One discovers what reason can do when it does it.
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