“TO CHANGE THE WORLD”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Earth Day Sunday,
All
Our Earth Day theme this year concerns “change.” Unitarian Universalists tend to be quite familiar with change. Most of you, like me, were raised in a different religion, and "changed" from that religion sometime on life's journey. Unitarian Universalism is very much a religion of change, and is not embarrassed to claim that as a religion it has changed substantially over the generations.
I find this to be unusual among religions, which are more often mortified to admit that what the religion taught 100 years ago is different from what it teaches today.
In his book Science and the Modern World, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead compares the attitude of science toward change with the attitude of religion toward change. When scientific beliefs change, we see it as progress. If we once thought the world was flat but later believe it to be round, we would never consider that change of perspective to indicate failure. Why is it, then, that in religion a change of belief is resisted and seen as a defect? Cannot religion progress through change as science does? Whitehead says this:
Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step in scientific insight has been gained.
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
There is, I think, a curious paradox about change. The most important reason for change is to preserve, protect, or conserve something we treasure most. In science, what is hoped will be protected is truth, or at least the truth of how the world works. If a new theory proves more adequate than a previous one to reveal the truth of how things work, then the less adequate theory is discarded. Science changes in order better to protect truth.
Religion should work the same way. I’ve said the most important reason for change is to preserve, protect, or conserve something we treasure most. What religion treasures above all – or should treasure above all – is not truth. It is values. Religion is, or should be, about love and compassion, justice, hope, community, and so forth. These are values. Religions make a mistake, I think, when they believe themselves to be about truth more than values.
If religion is about protecting values as something we treasure, we should applaud changes that assist us in that goal. That is why it is a point of pride to think that Unitarian Universalism has changed in beliefs over time. We have found beliefs that better equip us to protect the values we hold most dear: values of freedom, reason, justice, and tolerance. While beliefs and practices and outward forms of religion have changed, the changes have been in service of protecting and conserving these values that have remained constant from the beginning. There is no question that the religious views of today’s UUs are quite different from those of Unitarians two hundred years ago. There is also no question that their beliefs and our beliefs were both formulated to best protect the values we share with them.
Change is in the air at All Souls. This year has seen big changes here. We have grown in our facilities and in our programs, and things look quite a bit different from here. But there is only one reason for the changes we see around us. Only one reason to expand the building, install new bathrooms, put in an elevator, remodel offices, refurbish the organ, and renovate our home in so many ways that we’ve done. The only reason to do all this is the only reason worthy of making changes: to better protect and conserve that which we treasure most. The same values shared by those who built this building originally, the same values held by those who founded All Souls 104 years ago: freedom, reason, justice, tolerance.
This theme of change applies just as much to our Earth Day celebration today. The values imbedded in Earth Day are in fact among those we celebrate as Unitarian Universalists. They are found in the seventh principle of the Statement of Principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association: “To affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of existence, of which we are a part.”
Many of our society’s decisions concerning the environment are about how much we are willing to change, and how much change we are willing to accept. One case in point is the current hot-button issue about what to do about global warming. Climate change is happening. The question is whether we change our behavior along with it.
For a couple of decades now, some scientists have been warning that the earth’s climate is gradually warming. The long-term consequences of this phenomenon are horrendous – ocean levels rising and flooding coastal cities, food production curtailed, new diseases emerging. There has been a flurry of investigation as to whether it is true and, if so, why it is true. By and large, few scientists have disputed that global warming is happening. What has been disputed is its cause – to what extent the damage to the earth’s atmosphere comes from human-made products or from general processes of nature, which, after all, has given us ice ages and droughts.
In some sense, the controversy is not so much scientific as it is political. On one side are the environmentalists who emphasize the responsibility of our species to protect the health of the earth. On the other side is largely the industrial sector of society which says that global warming can be attributed far more to natural causes – such as volcanoes, changing ocean currents, or general deviations of solar activities. Human activity, they say, is minor compared with these other enormous natural factors, and restraining economic development would be shooting ourselves in the foot. Development can give us protection against any threatening forces of nature.
In February of this year, though, the scientific question was all but answered. Hundreds of scientists representing 113 nations around the world issued a report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report was unambiguous. Global warming is happening. It comes primarily from higher concentration of greenhouse gasses, and the warming will continue to rise even if the gasses are held to their current levels. The primary cause of this is human activity. Natural sources, such as volcanoes and solar variations, have relatively small effect.
There is now a scientific consensus. Over 30 scientific societies and academies of science have endorsed these findings. Only one scientific society has questioned the conclusion: the Association of Petroleum Geologists, which is funded, of course, by oil companies. Otherwise, there are a few individual scientists here and there that are skeptical, but no other association of scientists.
So now we have a scientific conclusion. That means that whatever controversy remains now on this topic isn’t science – it’s all politics. Science has made its decision.
Which returns us to the question of change. Earlier, in a different context, I said that the most important reason for change is to preserve, protect, and conserve what we treasure most. It comes back, then, to a question of values. Do we continue to change nature itself, making life as we know it increasingly fragile even to the point of breaking, or do we change our own behavior and adapt to the demands of nature. What changes are we willing to make, as individuals and as a society, to conserve what we treasure most.
So many
environmental questions eventually bring us to this point. Environmentalism, in some ways, is the most
conservative of all movements, because it exists on the premise of conserving
what we treasure from nature. And much
of what we decide to do seems to be determined by how we view nature. Or, in the words of David Fisher, a professor
of “cosmochemistry” at the
In an essay called “The Nature of Nature,” environmental scientist David Fisher says that there are two different emotional understandings of the essence of nature. There are those, on one hand, who see nature as a battleground for survival. There is only struggle. This is the nature that Tennyson described with the phrase “red in tooth and claw,” nature as a place of battle and blood. Nature offers threats to the human species – not just hurricanes and wild animals, but one of nature’s deadliest members is the tiny malaria mosquito. As the biologist Thomas Eisner once observed, “It’s time to recognize that we don’t share the world with insects. They own it.”
On the other
hand, there are others whose view of nature may be captured in the metaphor of
These two ways of understanding nature affect how we relate to it. From the “red-in-tooth-and-claw” view of nature as a battleground of survival, our task is to find ways of controlling nature in order to use it for our own needs. Fisher writes of this view,
“The red-in-tooth-and-claw crowd sees nature in the purest Darwinian terms: the fittest survive, the rest are eaten. As Bertolt Brecht put it: ‘What keeps a man alive? He feeds on others.’ And conversely, the world is full of creatures who want to eat us. . . Nor are the non-living aspects of nature any more mild. . . . (Hurricanes), volcanic eruptions, tornados, tsunamis, (viruses, and bacteria, as well as) man-made terrors as global warming and ozone depletion and heavy metal poisoning and radioactivity. Nature itself rises against us on every side, and will devour us in a moment once we let our guard down.”
From the “Nature-as-Eden” point of view, our task is to protect nature and its delicate eco-balance, and work with it to preserve it, rather than try and control it. Fisher writes of this view,
“We are part of a balanced garden and are entitled to live here freely and happily. But we are not its masters. . . . If we attempt to confront nature as an adversary, we are bound to fail, for with all our powers we are still just one species among billions of others. Instead, we must search for our rightful niche, stay within our ecological boundary, and all will be well again.”
These two views about nature can define how we decide to live with nature. In confronting environmental problems, the question is whether to change the environment or to change our own behavior, to change the world of nature, or to change the world of human habit. The “red-in-tooth-and-claw” group would just as soon have nature change to adapt to us. The Edenists would say that we need to learn to change in order to adapt to nature.
Fisher’s essay concludes that the Edenists are right, but for an odd reason:
“It’s time to face up to the fact that (nature) doesn’t care whether we live or die. For if we douse the world in radioactivity or warm it beyond the temperatures of all past climates with greenhouse gasses, nature will yet endure. As conditions change, nature will change with them, and go on serenely as before. If some species disappear, well, that’s all in the scheme of things, isn’t it? It matters not one whit to nature.
“Ay, there’s the rub. For if we change nature sufficiently, we may feel that we are no longer welcome on this planet. And so we had better tread softly, until we understand better how nature works, and how we fit into the nature of things.”
No point about change could be made more decidedly that his next to last sentence. “If we change nature sufficiently, we may feel that we are no longer welcome on this planet.” So it is not nature that we ought to be about changing, it is our own behavior. If the most important reason for change is to protect, preserve and conserve what we treasure most, nothing could be more worthy of that treasure than our own home.