Good review of Edward O. Wilson’s new book on environmentalism, by an evangelical writer.
An excerpt.
September 10, 2006
God Is Green
By MATTHEW SCULLY
In the academic habitat of evolutionary scientists, religious sympathies are weeded out over time, and the fittest survive to pass along their traits through haughty books and lectures examining the “delusion” and purely biological origins of faith. So when an eminent evolutionary biologist breaks from the pack to address religious folk in warm and respectful terms, this is what’s known in the field as “punctuated” change — a sudden and, in this case, pleasant variation.
There is good reason for the friendlier tone, explains Edward O. Wilson in this engaging and gracious book. A renowned entomologist and Harvard professor emeritus, Wilson has warned for years, in books like “The Future of Life” (2002), of global warming, mass extinction and other troubles of humanity’s own making. But these works were addressed largely to fellow environmentalists, and that approach will get you only so far.
More out of habit than considered judgment, Wilson believes, many religious people and especially conservative Christians tend to brush off environmental causes as liberal alarmism, vaguely subversive, and in any case no concern of theirs. Wilson’s book is a polite but firm challenge to this mind-set, seeking to ally religion and science — “the two most powerful forces in the world today” — in an ethic of “honorable” self-restraint toward the natural world.
In learned and congenial prose (I understand now how a book called “The Ants” could win a Pulitzer Prize), Wilson casts his appeal as a letter to an imaginary Baptist minister from the South. As a boy in Alabama, Wilson recalls, he too “answered the altar call,” and though today a “secular humanist” he proposes to the pastor that as gentlemen and Southerners they lay aside principled disagreements about evolution and intelligent design. We do not need to answer or agree upon every mystery of the universe to confront problems that are, by any account, serious and urgent. Some will see in the natural world a divine creation, and the Lord of Life who makes nothing in vain. Enough for others “living Nature,” every plant or animal a “masterpiece of biology,” as Wilson writes. “Does this difference in worldview separate us in all things?” he asks. “It does not. ... Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share.”
And a good review on the review here: http://www.firstthings.com/ :
John Rose writes:
Christians look at creation and see the handiwork of the Lord. Nonreligious environmentalists marvel at what natural selection has produced. Despite their differences, the two can agree we have a moral responsibility to care for our earth. Such is the truce E.O. Wilson calls for in his new book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save the Earth . “Does this difference in worldview separate us in all things? It does not,” says Wilson. “Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share.”
Or are we meeting on the far side of metaphysics? Stephen Barr’s review of the book will appear in the next issue of First Things. Meanwhile, reviewing Wilson in the New York Times, the evangelical conservationist Matthew Scully, author of the interesting book Dominion , asks about origins of Wilson’s green ethic.
“In his own defense, however, the pastor might reasonably wonder just how Wilson managed to wring all of these praiseworthy moral sentiments from evolutionary biology. The “universal values,” sense of “honor” and “inborn sense of decency” to which Wilson appeals are of no traceable origin in the blindly amoral operations of natural selection. And grandiose attempts to explain conscience and reason in purely biological and material terms still leave us with little in the way of moral guidance—without a firm obligation to care for the earth and for our fellow creatures. It may be, the good pastor could reply, that Judeo-Christian thought itself is a kind of moral biosphere from which this and all good causes continue to draw, with or without acknowledgment, and that more deference is due from scientists on that account alone.”
