The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis - Hardcover

McGrath, Alister

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385500599 ISBN 13: 9780385500593

Publisher: Doubleday, 2002

Synopsis

In this provocative assessment of the world's current ecological crisis, the author of the critically acclaimed In the Beginning exposes the false assumptions underlying the conflicts between science and religion, and proposes an innovative approach to saving the planet.

Traditionally, science and religion have been thought of as two distinct and irreconcilable ways of looking at the world, and scientists have often chastised the world's religions for keeping their eyes on the heavens and paying scant attention to the destruction of Earth's precious resources and its natural wonders. In The Reenchantment of Nature, Alister McGrath, who holds doctorates in both molecular biology and divinity, challenges this long-held and dangerously misguided dichotomy.

Arguing that Christianity and other great religions have always respected and revered the bounty and beauty of the earth, McGrath calls for a radical shift in perspective. He shows that by defining the world in the narrowest of scientific terms and viewing it as a collection of atoms and molecules governed by unchanging laws and forces, we have lost our ability to appreciate nature's enchantments. In order to address the threats to our environment, he maintains, it is essential to reawaken our sense of awe and look at the world as a glorious creation, an irreplaceable gift of God.

In setting forth a new framework for the debate between science and religion on ecological theory, The Reenchantment of Nature points the way to integrating two different traditions in a sane and productive effort to rescue the natural world from its present environmental decline.

About this title

About the Author

ALISTER McGRATH is currently Professor of Theology at Oxford and Principal of Wycliffe Hall. He is a consulting editor at Christian Today, the general editor of The New Thematic Study Bible, and the author of several books, including In the Beginning, which was a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year." He lives in Oxford, England.

Reviews

McGrath, professor of historical theology at Oxford and prolific author (this is his 15th title since early 2001, and another is due in October) could easily write a fine book on religion and ecology if he'd slow down long enough to eliminate repetition and to organize his material so that its content supports his stated theme. There is much to like in this apologia: its nonsectarian Christian viewpoint, the author's dual passion (he has Oxford doctorates in molecular biophysics and in theology) and his use of analogy and poetry to illustrate his points. Alas, McGrath does not focus. Although he announces that the book "is intended to bring out the strategic resources of the Christian faith for the environmental struggle" and says in the final chapter that its basic theme "suggests that we reclaim the idea of nature as God's creation and act accordingly," most chapters are neither motivational nor practical but defensive. Taking frequent shots at science writers and religion despisers Lynn White and Richard Dawkins, McGrath argues that historically it is not Christianity but prosaic, reductionistic godlessness that has led to the destruction, domination and exploitation of nature. Christians, unlike disenchanted heirs of the Enlightenment, value nature as God's creation and as a source of divine revelation, and this Christian worldview, he contends, is as intellectually respectable as any scientific theory. While Christian apologists and graduate students will find value in this scientist-cum-theologian's perspective, McGrath's material could have been more effectively presented in one well-crafted magazine article. (Sept. 17)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two dissimilar arguments on nature and religion are here offered by McGrath (theology, Oxford) and Crosby (philosophy, Colorado State Univ.). McGrath claims that humanity's vanishing sense of marvel or enchantment in nature results from scientific rationalism. He maintains that religion, specifically evangelical Christianity, urges humanity to cherish its divine origins and see in the beauty of nature not God but signposts that point to a transcendence wherein we find God. Alongside this, however, McGrath sustains a running quarrel with Lynn White's 1967 article "On the Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" and Darwinian Richard Dawkins, taking a chapter to prove Dawkins's "strident antireligious advocacy." Not a primer on how to become reenchanted with nature, McGrath's book stands in danger of merely offering a cadre of evangelical proofs against a small, specific scientific community that fails to see nature as God's art. On the other hand, Crosby (Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism) takes an admittedly atheistic yet blithely optimistic stance. Relying upon philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and William James, he espouses a literal religion of nature: "we need not go any further than nature to probe the depths of our existence and powers that sustain our being." Seeing nature as metaphysically ultimate, he offers a systematic religious naturalism devoid of God, prayer, or spirituality beyond that found in the beauty and inherent goodness of the earth. Since nature is metaphysically ultimate, Crosby must admit that both good and evil consequently reside there. Thus, humanity's task becomes one of aligning with the good and struggling against evil and how that is discerned, defined, or done is never clearly delineated. Both books are academic in tone and plainly intended for a scholarly audience. Recommended only where religious interest warrants. Sandra Collins, Duquesne Univ. Lib., Pittsburgh
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

The Meaning of Life and Other Enigmas

What is life all about? Does it possess any intrinsic meaning? Or is this "meaning" just something we impose upon a meaningless void? These are sincere and important questions, and there has been no shortage of answers. In his comic masterpiece Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams tells how a race of superintelligent beings from a very advanced civilization constructed a supercomputer called Deep Thought to answer the question "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" Deep Thought's circuit boards pulsed with activity for seven and a half million years and finally produced a result: 42--an enigmatic answer, to say the very least. Perhaps an even more puzzling answer is offered in Alan Dean Foster's Glory Lane, which tells of a group of people who visit another advanced civilization and ask its similarly advanced supercomputer more or less the same question. This time, the meaning of life is defined in less numerical, but still slightly baffling, terms: shopping.

Perhaps these answers are meant to caution us concerning the reliability of some of the more serious answers to this question. Precisely because these answers are of such importance, people tend to treat them with suspicion, even cynicism. And they are right to do so. How many people have been deluded, hoodwinked, or pressured into accepting less than adequate, and even dangerous, answers? Yet this understandable degree of cynicism must not force us to draw the conclusion that there is no meaning to life; or that, if there is indeed a meaning, it is so hidden and obscure that none can hope to find it.

Many of the answers given to these questions are religious, and for that reason they automatically attract ridicule from the "let's get rid of religion" school. Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, who is a particularly luminous representative of this group, is quite clear why so many people find religion attractive. It offers them--to use his terms--"explanation," "consolation," and "uplift." In every case, of course, Dawkins argues that what religion offers is completely false and that the truthfulness of the sciences is to be preferred. Science may not always be able to offer the equal of religion, but at least what it offers is absolutely true. As Dawkins puts these points in an article in Humanist magazine, following his election as Humanist of the Year:

Humans have a great hunger for explanation. It may be one of the main reasons why humanity so universally has religion, since religions do aspire to provide explanations. We come to our individual consciousness in a mysterious universe and long to understand it. Most religions offer . . . a cosmology and a biology; however, in both cases it is false.

Consolation is harder for science to provide. Unlike religion, science cannot offer the bereaved a glorious reunion with their loved ones in the hereafter . . .

Uplift, however, is where science really comes into its own. All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it's exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe--almost worship--this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide.

One cannot help but feel that Dawkins here proceeds from preconceived ideas to predetermined conclusions with almost indecent haste. Religion is "false"--just like that, totally and completely. No room for doubt, discussion, or debate. The possibility of even a hint of the truth in any religion is excluded as a matter of principle. Nothing that religion says can possibly be right. Dawkins seems to live in a chiaroscuro world, in which everything is black and white, true or false. Science is true, religion is false--a neat little slogan, with about as much plausibility as George Orwell's creed from Animal Farm: "two legs bad, four legs good."

One of the reasons that religion is enjoying new public interest is a new awareness in its ability to address questions about what gives life its meaning, what consoles us in moments of darkness and despair, and what gives us a sense of hope, vision, and wonder. It is almost as if we are preprogrammed to ask these questions and deem them important. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell famously remarked in his History of Western Philosophy, once humanity has managed to work out how to feed itself, it naturally turns its attention to the great questions of meaning and significance. How do we fit into the greater scheme of things? These questions underlie the new interest in spirituality that has swept through much of the Western world in recent years.

The Recovery of Religion

One of the most distinctive features of the last few decades has been a rediscovery of the spiritual dimension to human existence. In every continent of the world--with the conspicuous exception of western Europe--there has been a surge of interest in the concept of the transcendent, with a growing reaction against what are seen as the unsatisfactory reductionisms of various materialist philosophies and worldviews. Why has there been this cascade in interest in spirituality and religion? Social theorists offer us explanations that sometimes sound rather like academic sour grapes--religion is just what infantile minds hang on to in times of crisis, or what people turn to in an attempt to resist modernization. Sure. Yet there are other more compelling reasons, which help us understand why religion will continue to play such a major role in human life and culture.

Religion offers explanation, consolation, and inspiration in about equal measure. Each of these resonates with a fundamental aspect of human life and thought. For the Christian, this is entirely predictable. If the world and humanity are created by God, such resonance is to be expected, as we shall see in a later chapter. Everyone wants to find something that is really worth pursuing and possessing rather than the chimeras whose luster vanishes once they are secured. The greatest questions life has to offer can be summed up in just a few words. What is really worth possessing? And where is it to be found?

These questions dominate the "wisdom literature" of the ancient Near East and far beyond. In one of the Gospel parables, Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a pearl of great price. "The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it" (Matthew 13:45-46). On finding a beautiful and precious pearl for sale, the merchant realizes that he must sell everything else in order to possess it. Why? Because here is something of supreme value, something really worth possessing. Everything else seems of little value in comparison.

The merchant searching for that pearl is himself a parable of the long human quest for meaning and significance. It is clear from the parable that he already possesses many small pearls. Perhaps he bought them in the hope that they would provide him with the satisfaction that he longed for. Yet what he had thought would satisfy him proved only to disclose his dissatisfaction and make him long for something that was, for the moment, beyond his grasp. Just as the brilliance of the sun drowns that of the stars, so that their faint light can only be seen at night, so this great pearl allowed the merchant to see what he already owned in a different perspective.

For C. S. Lewis, the discovery of Christianity was like taking hold of and possessing something intrinsically precious and beautiful, which allowed the rest of the world to be seen in its reflected radiance. He put the significance of his discovery like this: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen--not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Christianity offers a spine-tingling vision of the transcendent and a framework that helps make sense of life's joys, cruelties, ironies, and pain. For Lewis, Christianity is more than a theory in which one can take intellectual delight, offering a new appreciation of the beauty of the world--to be compared to Newton's optics or laws of motion or Maxwell's electrodynamic equations. It points to something that transcends these, which can be intuitively grasped in the present and which will be fully possessed in the future. The beauty of the world is affirmed, and declared to be a foreshadowing of the greater glory to come. As the great English religious poet George Herbert (1593-1633) put it, we are enabled to catch a glimpse of "heaven in ordinary."

Lewis attempted to put this into words by using an image from his childhood, when building sand castles on a trip to the seaside was seen as heaven itself:

Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite glory is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

For Lewis, the sense of wonder we experience at nature is not meant to satisfy us; it is meant to make us yearn for the greater wonder that it silently signposts and whispers will one day be ours.

All this seemed a little unrealistic in the light of the wave of secularism that swept through Western culture after Lewis's death in 1963. Secularizing social theorists predicted the coming of a future secular global culture with much the same confidence as an earlier generation of Soviet theorists proclaimed the historical inevitability of Marxism-Leninism. Religion was on its way out. Yet as William S. Bainbridge and Rodney Stark point out in their excellent critical study The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation, "the most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology and psychology have unanimously expr...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385500599
• ISBN 13: 9780385500593
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224