Another disclaimer: this is somewhat disjointed, as I'm typing out a quick unpolished reflection. I may revisit it later to polish it up as a separate post.
I was recently greatly disappointed by a recent foray into political commentary by a prominent priest, specifically on the issue of climate change, so I am going to offer some of my thoughts on a few of these issues. The rhetoric used was bland and predictable movement conservative tripe: climate change is a political matter rather than scientific, there is not any science or scientific discussion about the matter currently (it is all now politics), the scientists are not trustworthy on the issue, and that discussing efforts to mitigate the coming harms in any kind of moral terms is mistaken because the real evil is in the human heart. My main problem with this is the deeply and personally insulting view he takes of scientists performing climate research and the profoundly and intentionally ignorant view of the science he has which he pushes from his personal pulpit. There is a lot I could take issue with in regard to the politics, but that is not going to be my main concern - it's not insulting and informed people of good will can come to different conclusions.
I would strongly suggest that anybody who wants to comment on the science of climate change, the motivations of climate scientists, or other scientific issues in general, consider answering a few of these questions before opining. Below, "paper" should be understood to be a peer reviewed scientific paper published in a science journal, and conference is a scientific conference.
- Do you have a degree in a science?
- Are you a scientist?
- Have you ever taken a course on the climate or climate change in particular?
- Have you ever read a paper on climate change?
- Have you read more than a dozen papers on climate change?
- Do you make an effort to keep abreast of the literature in some aspect of climate science?
- Have you ever attended a conference on the science of climate change, or a session dedicated to the science of climate change at some scientific conference?
- Have you ever published a paper on climate change?
- Do you know any climate scientists? (merely making acquaintance counts)
- Do you know more than 5 climate scientists?
What makes this more problematic to me is that priests are, for whatever reason, seen as somehow trustworthy on "moral" matters, and this trust carries an undue influence even when speaking outside their expertise. Therefore, this Know-Nothing and baseless discourse on the science of climate change and its intersection with morality carries a weight that it ought not to with his not-inconsiderable following. This is a problem.
This is also a problem when they comment on politics without taking much care, as there are definitely a wide number of issues in politics that are a matter on which Christians of good will can disagree, and careless discussion of these things can imply to others that the Church teaches one specific thing and that to go against it is to go against God, whether or not that is what you intended to get out. This is true even if you take a "Dostoevskian" perspective.
This sort of spiritualizing arrogance pops up in many other places. Clergy have been irrationally dismissive at times of scholarship in several areas (though I would note that not all of these are equal and some are definitely more "political" than others): evolution, archaeology, paleontology, textual criticism, psychology, economics... In some of these, they may have the training to engage critically with the scholarship, whereas in others they may not. There are real harms to this in that clergy are given more credence in areas outside of their expertise, especially when they put a moral or spiritual flavor on it, than they otherwise should be. Therefore, their suggestions are going to poison other discourse on those issues with their mistaken notions.
Even worse, these kinds of digressions can alienate people from the Church - either people within the Church who are now under the impression that their perfectly reasonable and even true views are somehow opposed by the Church or those outside the Church who get the impression that the Church is opposed to truth. As I have mentioned before, there is a a strain of discourse within modern movement conservatism that opposes "Science" and "Religion", as if science is intrinsically hostile to the faith. There is a counterpart movement among liberalists that also tries to use "Science" as a bludgeon against "Religion", as if investigations into natural phenomena can somehow debunk Christianity.
Disappointingly, many in the Church have taken up that conservative rhetoric and lump all the scientists - or even those who simply value scientific contributions to knowledge about the world - in with the liberalists. This kind of rhetoric may score points with movement conservatives and feel good (after all, you're defending Religion against those New Atheists), at comes at the expense of truth and those in the "middle ground" that the Church needs to be courting: those who are faithful to the Church while investigating the natural world. We cannot have a Christian approach to science if we actively alienate Christians doing science. As long as we do that, the New Atheists and liberalists are right: the Church is hostile to reasoned inquiry into the world.
There are some further things to say about the moral content of politics (namely, that there is some and it should not be dismissed entirely, especially as people doing that are typically, despite their protestations, doing it in a rather one-sided way, namely, to quash "liberal" discourse), but I will leave it out of this post, in accordance with my statements above.
1 comment:
There is a fundamental irony about people who lament that climate change has become a matter of politics and not science, but then reject the science of climate change because of their politics.
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