There he goes again: The Pope on climate change

Last updated on: June 20, 2015 at 3:18 pm by Gerald McDermott

There he goes again: The Pope on climate change 2015-06-20T15:18:15-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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Once again the Pope has made dubious claims in support of a theological imperative.

The last time he did this was in his apostolic exhortation on evangelism, in which, amidst wonderful teaching on mission and evangelism, he waded into economics where he is sadly misinformed. He derided capitalism, which has done more than any other system to lift billions out of poverty.

The theological imperative, on which he and I agree, is that Christians must lobby for what helps the poor and the planet.

But on the means to get there we disagree.

In his new encyclical on climate change, he continues to disparage the free market, the disparagement of which will only hurt the poor long-term. He also makes the unscientific charge that the science of climate change is settled (it is not), that the rise of temperatures is a terrible threat to humanity (it is not), and that governments must help the poor by diminishing the use of fossil fuels (this will hurt the poor).

Sadly, he is repeating the mistake the Catholic Church made when it condemned Galileo. Then it allied itself with the government-supported scientific establishment, which was Aristotelian. It refused to listen to evidence-based challenges to the politically correct paradigm, coming from Galileo and others.

Today, it is politically correct to say that global warming is a threat to human life, and scientists profit financially from government-supported institutions by climbing onto this bandwagon. But today there are also thousands of scientists who use hard evidence to challenge this model.

The Pope is also climbing on to this bandwagon. This is scientifically risky.

It is also theologically perilous. Robert Benne writes in his Good and Bad Ways to Think About Politics and Religion that it is a theological mistake for churches and theologians to make political policies into gospel imperatives. It is not just the problem of suggesting that salvation is dependent on the right politics or economics.

The problem is also that good Christians disagree on economic and political and scientific policies. What happens when the winds of popular policy change? If the gospel is tied to one of those, then it too appears to fail when the political or economic or scientific policy has failed in the court of “expert” opinion.

I am not a Catholic, but I have enormous respect for the Catholic Church and its traditions. Unfortunately some popes fail to learn from the best of Catholic tradition. This is a warning to Protestants and us Anglicans (who want to be thought of as in the Via Media and thus neither Protestant nor Roman): Let us not attach the chariot of theology to a particular economic or political or scientific policy, all of which are subject to the vicissitudes of prevailing opinion.

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