This is an endeavor to address that hot topic with a cool head. Are changes in temperatures, precipitation and other climate phenomena caused by human activity? "Cloud seeding" might be able to increase rain or snow, reduce hail or clear fog on the local level. It's effectiveness is debatable. What will be addressed here is grand scale climate change. Think Al Gore. Think Greta Thornberg, the "how dare you!" girl.
First, and only for the sake of argument, let us grant that catastrophic climate change can be caused by human industry. Only for the sake of argument, let us assume the wild claims are true. We're told that our production of energy, the emission of "green house gases," etc. are dramatically changing the climate of the Earth. According to some, humanity must act NOW to "save the planet." We must all go green or face global gangrene, so to speak.
There are two groups of people yours truly invites to think through the implications of this generous assumption. Others are welcome as observers.
The first group consists of Biblical creationists, usually the object of the ridicule of the second group. We believe that the earth itself is only thousands, not billions of years old. We believe that the Creator formed all life including human life within days of the initial creation of the cosmos as a whole. And while affirming that the Creator equipped His amazingly diverse and wondrous biological marvels with a capacity for limited adaptation, we absolutely deny the never observed claims of Darwinistic evolution.
We also believe that immediately after the global flood so well evidenced by the fossil record, reflected in the ancient folklore of nations all over the world, and accurately documented in the same Bible from which we derive our cosmogony, God gave all mankind a very specific promise about the earth and its climate. This promise can be found at Genesis 8:21,22:
"…the LORD said in His heart, 'I will never again curse the ground for man's sake, although the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done. While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.' "
The second group consists of those who are sophistic naturalists. According to them, the galaxies with their innumerable stars, all the planets and other celestial bodies are merely the detritus of some big bang. And as Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang about us humans, "We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon."
According to this world view, life arose when natural forces and inanimate matter interacted on one tiny piece of the big bang's detritus, earth. All life observed today has evolved by chance after, in some proposed primordial pond, lightning sparked a hypothetical reaction which neither Victor Frankenstein nor any real scientist can duplicate in the laboratory. Molecules to man summarizes billions of years of prehistory...goo to you by way of the zoo. *
So these folk obviously and vigorously deny divine creation and the existence of supernatural or spiritual realities. Some of them grudgingly admit that a supernatural realm might exist, but just as vigorously insist that any claim to knowledge of it has no place in the labors of what they consider to be enlightened science. As renowned geneticist and evolutionary biologist Professor R. Lewontin puts it, "...we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." **
...to be continued next week in "Theology Thursday"* title of a book by Harold Hill
* * nybooks.com/articles/1997/01/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons/