HUMILITY, genuine humility, is always a good place to start from. But it is not the disposition most of us probably associate with the world’s major organised religions.
Individual religious persons may be humble but the churches, orders, mosques and so on tend to project pomp and certainty (otherwise they are accused of faithlessness). I was brought up within a peculiar strain of English Roman Catholicism, which, in those days, combined stupendous social snobbery with scientific ignorance and dismissiveness of all who questioned its authoritarian precepts.
You can imagine, then, that I came to the New Orleans Symposium on religion, science and the environment armed with a good deal of scepticism. Would the splendidly dressed religious eminences acknowledge the role that the dogmatism and intellectual blinkeredness of their religious traditions had played in creating the ecological crisis, or in generally messing up the world? Hearteningly, there were signs that they might.
Metropolitan John of Pergamon (of the Orthodox church), one of the world’s most distinguished theologians, set the tone in his background paper. He blamed parts of the Christian tradition, notably neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, for their disdain of the body and nature, and the Calvinist ethos of capitalism, which views the world simply as raw material for exploitation. Heavy and abstruse stuff, but not so abstruse when you looked out of the window and saw the polluted Mississippi flow by, carrying its load of pesticide and fertiliser effluent into the Gulf of Mexico.
Environmentalists have long berated Christians for following the Biblical injunction to dominate and populate the world with scant regard for the intrinsic value, balance and order of nature. But here on the banks of Old Man River, we heard a message from the Pope stressing that “nature is prior to us” and contains its own “grammar, which sets forth ... criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation”.
In the past, religions got a bad name among the open-minded by fearing and opposing science and scholarship. This fear and opposition ranged from the heavy-duty persecutions of the Inquisition to the silliness of those who taught me that the first five books of the Old Testament were dictated directly by God to Moses.
In New Orleans, I saw religious scholars and leaders reaching out in genuine humility to other intellectual traditions; not being afraid of science, but actively embracing and using it. Of course you can see that religion needs science; it is no longer possible to deny certain kinds of geophysical and biological evidence without cutting yourself off from the community of the intellectually curious. But the more interesting question is whether science needs religion.
Science illuminates many things but cannot tell us what they mean to us, in human terms. What religion can bring to science, and the pressing task of planet-healing, is not the arrogant certitude that brooks no argument, but passion and community.
Abused and dangerous words these may be. Passions can be whipped up by obscurantists and community too easily becomes a meaningless token. But the Latin origins of the word “passion” take us to suffering and to the cognate word “compassion”.
Science gives us repeated and intensifying warnings that the earth, our home, is in bad shape, and that we are causing potentially disastrous disruption to the great planetary systems of weather and cleansing and renewal. But it leaves us in the lurch, with the bad news. Religion and religious art, at their best, can offer communal means both of mourning our inescapable losses and of celebration.
Intellectual proofs on their own have never been enough to change human behaviour; we need emotional reconnection. © Financial Times