This is a backgrounder to the lecture which is to take place in Glen Eira City Hall Wednesday 11th November.

 

To book to attend this event click Environment, Science, and values

The standpoint of Torah, as of the Noahide laws, the universal ethics given for all humanity at Sinai, is that a person may not act destructively towards the environment. The environment - all of nature's resources - was given by G-d to the human being, to utilize in the service of G-d, that is to say in the pursuit of a moral and purposeful existence. Not only should a person thereby not cause harm, whether directly or indirectly to another, but he or she should not also wantonly destroy useful natural resources. This, does not, however, mean that the person is a "servant" of nature. To the contrary, nature is there to help the human being in his or her Divinely mandated activities (of which work, productivity and gain to support an ethical life, is one), and thereby nature is also brought to its purpose and  elevation. 

To fulfil this human mandate, the person is not required to make cosmic prognoses about nature and to serve these prognoses. Rather he or she is to act now, prudently, in the present and largely short term scheme of things in a way which is productive and not wantonly destructive. That is all. Religiously informed humanity has always known that there is a Creator, and that the world's continuation and guidance from moment to moment is His work. He is not bound by any set of rules (which we call and construe as "nature" and describe through "science"), other than, and for the duration, of His desire that they be so. This does not mean that the human being has no effect on the order of things. To the contrary, G-d has built free choice into the human being, allowing him or her to improve or harm the state of things, but also to elicit, through prayer and merit, G-d's intervention in the creation, to bring the rain, success to crops and so forth. The expectation of rain was not and is not understood solely as a deterministic meteorology; humanity prayed for it. "Nature" is an alterable default, which never made human prayer and merit superfluous.

Traditional religion respects the immense practical accomplishments of science. Science, however, is not the same thing as truth, it has not laid its finger on the metaphysical essence of things. Science deals practically with the data before it, using its presently efficacious "laws". When it projects mechanistically ahead into time, or when it projects back in time, in neither of which zones, past or present, where it has no data, it actually usurps the role of religion - of belief - in which it has no authority. Its "laws" might suggest consequences for the past and future, but it must be wary of anticipating "G-d's hand". Science plays on the surface of nature, it is pragmatic and provisional. The dogmatic science of the cosmic future would have to be the science of G-d, of Whom there is no "science". Science should be wary of becoming scientism, science made religion.

In our own lifetimes, we have lived through scientific projections of global cooling and global warming. I do not propose, nor am I equipped, to enter the present scientific discussion of the future - for or against "global warming". Human beings have lived through plenty of changes, "natural" and human-made. If people are in the present acting non-destructively and with reasonable short term prudence in the immediate context of nature (not apparitions of the cosmic future) that is all that is asked of them. Their merit will ultimately (notwithstanding short term difficulties) bring the "rains in their season", and bounty from G-d's Hand.

The attempt to "sew up" the future by science takes science out of its empirical range, and makes the remote apparition of a cosmic process an idol or a beast, which must be served and appeased. Traditional religious values enjoin us not to harm here and now and prepare for the future in the visible, practically appraisable short term. Do our carbon emissions harm here and now, and if so, how could they be cleaned up? If not, let them be. But in anticipation of a "scientifically" captured future, to bring in an  Emissions Trading Scheme, which threatens all kinds of dislocation and harm to jobs and livelihood delivers a far more certain and present harm than our present carbon emissions. Were it successful (unlike the failed European scheme which actually saw an increase in carbon emissions) it could become the centralized and globalized administration of the future by those who certainly possess no power of prophecy.