Some Remarks on Global Warming

I appreciate the balancing act Dr. Mohler is doing on global warming. He says there is middle ground, and acknowledges Christians’ dual responsibilities of dominion and stewardship. That’s good, as far as it goes. But he makes several points that lean against taking global warming seriously and concludes with skepticism about our ability to combat it. I respond:

Dr. Mohler seems to believe that global warming claims require a very long record of weather data, and thus rely very heavily on “retroactively created” weather conditions from before measurements were made, and such reconstructions are not “beyond dispute”. It’s true that a great deal of effort has gone into reconstructing past climate conditions using many different sources of evidence, from tree rings to ice cores. But these efforts are by no means the only support for the theory. The measurements we do have, going back decades, from all over the globe, are used to test computer models of the oceans and atmosphere. These models incorporate everything we know about the physics of the air and oceans. The better the models get, the more accurately they reproduce the recorded observations – the patterns of changes in the winds and currents and temperatures over time from all over the globe. And these models are only able to fit the actual patterns observed when human generated greenhouse gases are included in the models. You can see a graph here, comparing the global temperature record with model simulations that include greenhouse gases emitted by humans and ones that don’t. (At least you can today. There’s no telling what the EPA under Pruitt will be able to show in the future.)

Dr. Mohler also mentioned an “unexpected pause” in global warming which was “inexplicable”. He took this to be “a humbling reminder, of how little we actually know and how little perhaps we can actually do about the larger question of the climate.” This is a very unfortunate lesson to take away. And as a matter of fact, Dr. Mohler’s information is outdated. More recent work has shown that the ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ never happened. It was an artifact of a shift in the source of measurements from ocean temperatures taken in ships to ones taken by buoys. The buoy measurements were colder than those made in ships’ engine rooms, so a shift to reliance on buoys pushed the data lower over time. When this bias was corrected for, the hiatus went away.  2016 was the third year in a row to set a new record for global average surface temperatures.

Dr. Mohler says the controversy is not only over facts, but worldviews. What seems to trouble him most about environmentalists is their past advocacy of population control:

“The existence of human beings, certainly of more human beings, on the planet is seen to be a problem. Now, again, that is a direct refutation of the Christian biblical worldview that understands that every single human being is an image bearer of God and reminds us that in Genesis 1, God gave to the human creatures made in his image, male and female, a dominion to go forth and to multiply and to fill the earth.”

I don’t think there is any conflict between concern about population growth and a view of human beings as image bearers. If God commanded us to “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth”, that implies that the earth can be filled. Surely once it is filled, the command to increase in number has been fulfilled. God did not add, “and once it is filled, go on increasing until there is not place to stand nor bread to eat.” At some point, there will be enough people, and the earth will be filled. How many more doublings of population size must occur before we decide that time has come? However many it is, it will be a small number. – But that is a separate question from what we must do in the near future to really stall global warming.

One more point. Dr. Mohler affirms that “the market is likely to resolve these issues.” Markets are powerful shapers of human activity, and there are market forces driving a move to natural gas and renewable energy. But will they be enough to do the job? That is a question for people who actually do the math. And we should remember that markets are only “wise” if all the costs are priced into the market. If there is a price for pollution, the market will find a way not to pollute. But if there isn’t, polluting ways will continue, profiting some, while possibly imposing very great costs on us all. A carbon tax is one way to ensure that the market works the way it should – for the greater good.

The Principle of Subsidiarity Abused

In the 3-28-17 Briefing, in the section titled "Does the secular European project have a future?" Dr. Mohler gets his point about the principle of subsidiarity wrong in three different ways:

1) He accuses the European Union of pursuing “the idolatry of globalism”, contrary to “the principle of subsidiarity.” That principle holds that “matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority.” (Wikipedia) I had never heard of the principle apart from Dr. Mohler’s occasionally mentioning it. When I looked it up just now, I was surprised to find:

“Subsidiarity is perhaps presently best known as a general principle of European Union law. According to this principle, the EU may only act (i.e. make laws) where action of individual countries is insufficient. The principle was established in the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht.” (Wikipedia).

So, far from opposing the principle, the EU practices it, and has even written it into law!

2) Dr. Mohler said “the doctrine of subsidiarity ... points out that the closer we are to where life is lived the more allegiance there is not only due but also the more allegiance that is felt by those who are a part of that community.” This is not the principle of subsidiarity. It may be natural to feel this way, but is this worthy of a normative principle? Do we truly owe more allegiance to our city than to our state, and to our state than to the United States? Is the higher level any less important than the lower? By this logic, you should feel least allegiance to the King of Kings.

Dr. Mohler applied his principle to a different object: “there are peoples who are held together by a common culture, most often by a common language, by a common conception of nations, and there is a proper patriotism, a proper national identity.” He claimed that the biblical worldview, through the principle of subsidiarity, dictates that we should be more loyal to the group with whom we share our language and culture than to society or humanity at large – or rather, he said it of Europeans. Is that really a Christian message? Nationalism is a fact. And many Christians are nationalists. But is nationalism really Christian – a consequence of the Christian worldview?

3) That is my third point. Dr. Mohler attributes his faulty version of the principle of subsidiarity to “the biblical worldview.” But neither the actual principle of subsidiarity nor Dr. Mohler’s version of it is found in the Bible. The principle of subsidiarity is a nineteenth century idea, as is the concept of nationalism Dr. Mohler expressed, by the way.

Subsidiarity was invented by Catholic theologians as part of Catholic social doctrine in response to the clash between the modern ideologies of laissez faire capitalism and socialism.  It was part of an attempt to steer a middle way. Later it was used to meet the challenges of totalitarian communism and Nazism. It was promulgated in papal encyclicals in 1891 and 1931. Even Dr. Mohler, in a Washington Times column, described the principle as emerging “out of natural law theory”. Natural law theory is a product of Catholic philosophy, but according to the theory itself, natural law is accessible to natural reason without the need for revelation, so it is not supposed to be uniquely Christian, let alone biblical.  Its source is not Scripture but reason and human nature, by way of Aristotle and Aquinas. As such, our knowledge of natural law is as fallible as any human philosophy, although certain formulations of it may have authority for Catholics. My guess is that the very idea of stating general normative principles of social organization like subsidiarity would probably not have been possible before the development of political theory during the Enlightenment.

My broader point is that Dr. Mohler, although he often takes an historical perspective as he did here, ignores the historical origins of his own ideas, and worse, he claims they are biblical when many are the products of the very Enlightenment he execrates, or of later historical ideological developments, like nationalism or economic and political conservativism.

Universal human rights were the invention of the Enlightenment. The very idea of rights does not occur in the Bible (as far as I know). Dr. Mohler says, “Without a theological foundation, human rights and human dignity in secular terms become merely political abstractions.” I would amend: they become political and moral abstractions. And what’s so “mere” about that? Such abstractions are what our country was founded on. Their theological foundations were added as an afterthought, by reading them back into the Bible. Our form of government, representative democracy, is a product of the Enlightenment. So are our ideals of human equality and equal dignity, freedom of speech and freedom of worship. (Just think of the long history of the Christian West before the Enlightenment. Where were these ideals then?)

Dr. Mohler seems to think that, because he is a Christian, everything he believes stems from Christianity, but he is a creature of his time and place, as we all are, and what we believe emerged in history from many different sources, some Christian, many decidedly not.  By describing all his political, economic and moral positions as belonging to a Christian or biblical worldview, he clothes them with misappropriated authority.

Churchill, Kant and Extraterrestrial Life

Response to 2/27/17 Briefing, Part I

Dr. Mohler and I are interested in many of the same subjects, although we come at them from very different perspectives. In February 27’s podcast he discussed exoplanets, extraterrestrial life, space travel, the discovery of a surprising essay by Churchill on these subjects, what Kant had to say about the starry heavens and the world within, and, last but not least, prenatal language-learning and the distinction between babies and fetuses. I have some bones to pick, but also some points of historical interest to add along the way. The part about babies and fetuses is taking me longer to write, so I’ll post this first, on the subjects related to outer space.

Here’s a bit of a coincidence: Dr. Mohler, discussing Churchill’s newly discovered essay, “Are We Alone in Space,” said, “Here you’re talking about a scientific layman, but he had identified two of the most crucial issues in terms of the question as to whether or not there might be life on other planets.” Later in the podcast, Dr. Mohler referred to Kant’s quote about “the starry heavens above and the moral life within.” (Kant, being Kant, actually said, “the moral law within.”) But something Dr. Mohler may not be aware of is that Kant, though a philosopher, not an astronomer or physicist, also wrote with great insight and originality about goings on in outer space. It was in his early work, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or An Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles  – a much more serious effort than Churchill’s 11-page manuscript. In it he proposed two important theories that later turned out to be true:

The first, his “nebular hypothesis”, held that a vast spinning cloud of gas flattened and then condensed into spinning stars and planets by the operation of Newton’s universal law of gravitation, forming the Milky Way and planetary systems that compose it, including our own solar system. Of course, no other solar systems had then been observed, nor had the rotation of the Milky Way.

Kant also proposed that those smudges in the sky which astronomers called “foggy stars” were actually other “island universes” like our Milky Way. We now call them galaxies. That theory expanded the visible universe into something much huger than previously imagined. It was not confirmed until 1924 with Edwin Hubble’s observations of the Andromeda galaxy.

Kant’s nebular hypothesis was not just astronomy. It was cosmology and cosmogony – a theory of the emergence of the grand structure of the universe out of chaos by natural means – and, for Kant, it was also natural theology, the combination of laws and matter that could give rise to such beauty and harmony being testimony of God’s intention:

“The nebular hypothesis exemplified Kant’s envisioned union of Newtonian mechanics and immanent teleology. The mechanical forces acting on matter are sufficient to account for the well-ordered organization of the solar system. Whereas Newton thought it necessary to summon the hand of God in order to explain the arrangement of planets around an ecliptic plane extending from the sun’s equator, Kant showed that mere physical forces alone are the final vehicles responsible for the ecliptic arrangement.” (The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project by Martin Schonfeld, p. 114.)

By “immanent teleology” is meant Kant’s idea that (in his words) “God has set in the forces of nature a hidden art of developing a perfect world order out of chaos on their own.” Had Kant known of Darwinian evolution, he might have made the same claim of divine intention worked out by natural means for biology as he did for astronomy, with Darwin in the place of Newton.

Here’s another point of historical interest. Dr. Mohler characterized fascination with the possibility of life on newly discovered exoplanets as over-excitement. He said,

“So long as the Christian understanding of the creation of the world by God and God’s special creation of human beings ... held sway, there really wasn’t that much interest in whether or not there just might be life on some other planet light-years ... away from us. But now that there is the eclipse of the Christian worldview, there seems to be a particular urgency to the human imagination in the secular age, trying to figure out if we are alone.”

I think an historical perspective provides a different view.

In the ancient earth-centered universe, there was no other place to live for beings like us but earth, the realm of change, the sublunary world. Above it – according to Aristotle and Ptolemy -- circled only perfect heavenly bodies affixed to transparent celestial spheres. They were not even made of a familiar substance, but of an “exalted” substance whose natural motion was circular and whose “superior glory” was “proportionate to its distance from this world of ours.” Beyond those spheres perhaps, for Christians, lay heaven itself (Dante’s Empyrean).

The one ancient exception I knew which portrayed the planets as habitable was a fantastic and irreverent tale of travel to the moon I read long ago, by the second century Roman satirist Lucian. It told of a ship blown off course to the moon, and of war between the moon and sun kings over colonization of Venus. It was anything but serious. However, while writing this I discovered that there are other ancient references to “moon-dwellers.” One especially of interest here (and possibly a target of Lucian's satire) is a dialogue by the first century Greek author Plutarch called “Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon”.

The moon’s mottled surface, you see, posed a problem for Aristotle’s theory of celestial perfection. Characters in Plutarch’s dialogue have serious astronomical and physical arguments over the nature of the moon, and conclude that it is earth-like: “just as our earth has certain great gulfs, so that earth [the moon] yawns with great depths and clefts which contain water or murky air; the interior of these the light of the sun does not plumb or even touch, but it fails and the reflection which it sends back here is discontinuous." But here is where it get’s interesting for worldview fans. The character Theon says:

“I should like ... to hear about the beings that are said to dwell on the moon — not whether any really do inhabit it but whether habitation there is possible. If it is not possible, the assertion that the moon is an earth is itself absurd, for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither bringing forth fruit nor providing for men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purposes for which this earth of ours came into being....”

This is a pagan work, but purpose – with man its focus – pervaded that world like the Christian one. And this view of a purpose-filled world inclined men to believe that, if there were other habitable worlds, they would be inhabited by beings like us. Otherwise, what would be the point? There followed in the dialogue considerations of whether moon-dwellers would fall off, and whether the moon would be too hot or too dry, and it was pointed out that not all places on the earth are good for dwelling, but they serve other purposes, and so might it be for an earth-like moon.

Fast-forward to the turn of the 17th century. The New World had been discovered, so people’s worldviews had been opened to the possibility of new, yet-undiscovered worlds. Copernicus had proposed the unsettling theory that the earth was not stationary, but that it twirled, and orbited the sun. Giordano Bruno had used that as a starting point, and philosophized, "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds," and then inaugurated the new century by being burned at the stake. True, he had been heretical in other ways, but his belief in the plurality of worlds had figured in his trial. Then in 1610 Galileo pointed his telescope at the sky and published sketches of the craggy surface of the moon in “The Starry Messenger”, and it finally became clear that earth was a planet, and the moons and planets were not stars, or perfect heavenly orbs, but other earths.

People immediately started speculating about what or who might live there. A common opinion was that God would not create all these worlds for no reason, but would populate them. So this interest had nothing to do with the eclipse of Christianity. It was the discovery of a huge new realm of possibilities that excited imagination and curiosity.

In fact, Kant himself, in an appendix to the work cited above, speculated on the inhabitants of other planets. He considered the question of whether other planets must be inhabited, given that everything is created for a purpose, and like Plutarch, decided in the negative. But nonetheless he concluded “most of the planets are certainly inhabited.” Since the other planets in our solar system would be so much hotter or colder than earth, he surmised that their inhabitants would have to be made of different stuff, and this would lead to differences in their spiritual capacities: “The excellence of their thinking natures, the speed of their imaginations, the clarity and vivacity of their ideas... are more excellent and more complete in proportion to the distance of their dwelling places from the sun.” The minds of those living on Jupiter and Saturn exceed ours, as ours do those of Mercurians and Venutians. All this was written before Kant discovered Hume, took on the challenge of answering Hume’s skepticism, and radically upped his game.

This work of Kant’s was little known. A much more famous work (and really a quite delightful one) – popular especially among women readers – was Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. It introduced the new Copernican system of the world to readers by way of a light-hearted dialogue between a philosopher and a noble lady. It features great flights of fancy to help the reader vividly imagine this new world view. The Marchionesse inquires about the inhabitants of the moon: “I should be very glad if I could find out ... [their characters], for really, one feels a painful degree of curiosity in knowing that there are beings in the moon we see yonder, and not having the means to discover what they are.” The philosopher pleads ignorance, but argues that someday we may travel there and find out, or they might travel here. For this the Marchionesse calls him crazy, and he professes to have been only testing her good sense. If only Bruno had had such a light touch.

For centuries we learned nothing about whether these distant worlds were inhabited. There was a brief frenzy over canals falsely spotted on Mars. Then came growing knowledge that our planetary neighbors were not hospitable to life like ours. Dr. Mohler describes the “Goldilocks zone” idea. Earth seemed special, perhaps uniquely so; the other planets, barren. We visited the moon, but it was as dry as dust, and airless. As a result, speculations about extraterrestrial life were relegated mainly to science fiction, although NASA set off on its expeditions and SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) was initiated. So far their life-searches have been fruitless, but there is still hope for oceans under the ice on moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

But now, finally, after centuries, we are beginning to find and actually observe other planets like ours enough to – just possibly – support life similar to life on earth. That is exciting – maybe not as revolutionary as discovering a new continent, but still.... Men and women have wondered about this ever since they realized it was a possibility.

Dr. Mohler makes two unsupported claims about the practical significance of the recent discoveries of possibly earth-like exoplanets: “There’s no way ... that in any foreseeable future we would even know whether these planets might be hospitable to human life, much less available for life.” And “That’s a trip we’re not going to make.”

Regarding the first claim, there are some prospects of getting a closer look in the not too distant future.  Not only are new telescopes in the works, but, surprisingly, there’s a nascent plan for sending tiny probes at great speeds on the journey to the nearest stars to do some scouting: www.scientificamerican.com/article/100-million-plan-will-send-probes-to-the-nearest-star1/ .

As for ever making the trip ourselves, perhaps whether this seems possible to you or not depends on how long you think the human future may be. Is it measured in centuries? In millennia? If we learn how to survive and get along, could our descendants be around in a hundred thousand years? A million? A billion?  Or is Jesus coming the day after tomorrow, bringing a new heaven and a new earth? If so, human horizons in this world drastically contract, and it becomes easy to say what will never be.