Ecology and the Bible by Frederic Baudin

Author:Frederic Baudin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: christian life;creation care;environment;environmentalism;what does the bible say about environmentalism;biblical ecology;christianity and creation care;a rocha
ISBN: 9781683073338
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
Published: 2020-05-12T19:15:09+00:00

Philosophical Materialism

Atheistic and materialistic evolutionism accords a prominent place to blind chance and deterministic forces through the sifting process of natural selection, as well as to the progress resulting from the agency of human beings governed by autonomous reason. “Evil” is therefore reduced to the impersonal role of history working itself out, which permits civilization, as if by reaction to world events, to advance toward a greater “good.” But here these two notions of good and evil remain highly relative.

The result of this line of thinking is a strictly mechanistic vision of the world. The task of men and women is thus to fully understand the cause-and-effect relationships of nature, to make them their own, so as to ameliorate the conditions of life here on earth. This understanding remains, to be sure, the basis of all scientific enquiry, a starting point that is not necessarily a bad thing in itself.

Atheistic materialists generally agree that religion is an invention based on moral ideals that grant, at best, access to a sort of higher plane of human and social evolution. This process rests on the notion that the “man-god,” actual or in the process of becoming, is alone master of this earth, which he gradually transforms, if possible, into a comfortable “paradise” for all humanity.

This materialistic trend, grafting at times onto various political movements, might tend eventually to favor significant environmental protection initiatives; but also, the very opposite can be true: totalitarian ideologies, alas, offered shameful examples of the latter in Eastern Europe and in Asia throughout the twentieth century.

The philosophy that drives atheistic materialism can scarcely curb the voraciousness of the human appetite, which has led to the overexploitation of nature for more than a century. When this overexploitation is seconded by unbridled hedonism on a personal level, it can lead to the most harmful excesses. Each individual seeks to “profit” from nature in an entirely self-serving manner. Its benefits are usually reserved, though, for the effete few who have somehow managed to turn the randomness of evolution to their advantage. And whenever a more egalitarian distribution of resources is proposed, it tends to be imposed by force, which means that the former totalizing worldview (i.e., religious) is replaced by another aggressive form of utopianism (i.e., ideological, political, economic, ecological, etc.).

This materialistic bent can also be faulted for a lack of long-term perspective, deleterious for the environment from the time it is appropriated within one or two generations. It should finally be observed that materialism has difficulty providing, unless by imposition, an ethical framework for the populations over which such a philosophy holds sway. Each individual can therefore believe that the mastery of the natural environment is without limit, and thus that all the biological borders can be overstepped for research purposes, especially those in the medical domain, provided it “serves humanity,” as the most idealistic and best-intentioned proponents hope.

This trend is rivaled nowadays by a “spiritualist” movement, in part because materialism has been criticized as a new form of “religiosity,”

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