Saving God’s Green Earth

Reviewed by Nick Mattiske

From a book-printing perspective, the creation of naturalist and Pulitzer-prize winner Edward O Wilson’s latest is a great success. Before you even begin to read, you notice the attention to detail—the ornamented cover, the rough cut pages and the illustrations.

On opening the book, you discover much to enjoy but also a skewed-ness to Wilson’s thinking.

His intention is to write a letter to an American Southern Baptist minister; the type who, Wilson tells us, he was familiar with in his youth. Wilson himself left the church to laud science as king, if not god. Here, though, in the interest of saving our world from ecological disaster—an increasingly urgent project if movies from former US vicepresidents and extraordinary weather is anything to go by—he writes about how science and religion should work together to combat our destruction of the natural world. At least, that is the intention, and a much-needed one, seeing as how we constantly hear about the supposed incompatibility and history of antagonisms between science and religion.

This is commendable, coming from an evolutionary biologist and atheist, or—as he puts it—secular humanist.

But he starts off on the wrong foot. If he wants to find common ground with a Baptist minister who wholeheartedly embraces seven-day creationism, then stating up-front their ideological differences seems like a crossing of swords.

From that wrong foot he is off and running, throwing around evolutionary terminology that the ardent creationist would find hard to swallow and hard to persist with. He also includes the old fallacy that science is all the rational stuff, and religion the irrational, superstitious stuff our ancestors should have left by the camp fires.

The idea that a rational, knowable God created the world and that the world, therefore, was understandable drove Western civilisation’s scientific progress. Not to mention the fact that while Europe lingered in the dark ages, it was Islamic scholars who kept alive the Greek science and philosophy that eventually found its way into Europe through Spain.

Wilson doesn’t make enough of science and religion’s common ground— an understanding that the world is a harmonious whole, whether it was created in six days or millions of years.
The interconnectedness Wilson has studied is also attested to in the sweep of Psalm 104, which reads like a David Attenborough film script.

Wilson does rightly point out that Christianity’s focus on heaven can sometimes make us disregard this world. But this is not a weakness of Scripture; it is a failure to read the Bible properly. Writer Wendell Berry emphasises that the Bible does not state that the world is given to us. This is the mistake of those believers who want to lord it over creation or non-believers who think Christianity is anti-green.

We are caretakers, with the accompanying responsibilities. Wilson makes much of the Lord’s phrase “let the waters teem,” which must render obsolete any interpretation of “subdue the earth” that advocates overfishing.

Of course, it is not just Christians who are slow to repent our ecological sins. Wilson suggests our seeming inability to grasp the environmental problems we create may be built in, that our technological advances may constantly outrun our understanding of the harm they create. Humankind is “a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology.” Humanity in general thinks our civilisations can rise above, even when our behaviour is not sustainable.

For Berry, the fact that we focus on production, rather than the state of the land, is part of the problem. We are like children gorging on chocolates. When those children get sick, they find out they can’t get away from their bodies.

Wilson writes that our bodies are suited to this world alone and no matter how good science is, we are unable to simply move to the next planet. There aren’t other options. This is a blatant example of where being made in the image of God does not mean we are god-like.

So, says Wilson, it is time we stopped assuming science will allow us to rise above nature and focus on using science to save nature.

We might reject science as a god but we could have reservations about making nature a god. Wilson, whose autobiography was fittingly titled Naturalist, would do well to encourage his Christian readers to remember nature is God’s creation, rather than simply extolling the virtues of nature. Part of the book is dedicated to making children into naturalists; in fact, they are natural naturalists, interested in biology.
Weld this to a view of biology as God’s work and you have a formidable force for conservation.

Wilson’s enthusiasm is, hopefully, contagious. He calls on amateur biologists to lead the charge to know and help the natural world. Just as this evolutionary biologist can’t help but talk in those terms, so this entomologist can’t help but talk about ants (the subject of his Pulitzer-prize winning book). He goes into bat for the insect and microbe worlds that, he says, are vital for ecological equilibrium: “More respect is due the little things that run the world.” Here he excels, it is this naturalist’s native habitat.

His belief that the natural world is worth saving for its own sake, and his enthusiasm for it, makes for a terrific little book. Regarding his aim of enlightening the religious, there is a gap between intention and realisation, and therefore some Christians may struggle with some of his scientific opinions.

But it would be a shame if that diminished his readership, as there are few better at describing the wonders of the world God has made and advocating its salvation.

Extract from Signs of the Times, March 2008 .

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