Christianity is Not Ecological

the Christian worldview is deeply anti-ecological which nobody really wants to draw out at length except a few gaians, and which is only seriously considered either by liberals (who… you know, are liberal about it) or crazy intelligent design / eschatological types.

i mean ecology in the broadest “here is how solar inputs lead to energetic eddies called weather and landscape patterns and some sophisticated eddies called “life”, all acting to maximise the entropic process of converting a few high energy solar photons from a tiny circle in space into a lot of low energy thermal protons radiating from the whole surface of the earth” sense.

all of that is the “mundus senescit” trope of how one must consider that just as everything in the world becomes worn down and weary, then so is the world itself taking the long route to death, and death is in the world because of sin. the reason there are viruses in the world is because of sin – the reason animals are eaten is because of sin. it is not difficult to square this with the paleontological-ecological worldview but it does result in a strange world where deep time becomes filled with deep sin, due to some combination of the War in Heaven and Adam’s sin somehow reflecting back in time.

it doesn’t worry Christians for two reasons: 1) because people generally do not care about deep ecology and enough Christian memes about “stewardship” grew up to make caring about shallow ecology obviously right and 2) God will at some point make a new heaven and a new earth made on an entirely different and sinless basis, which will be negentropic or some kind of steady state, so no more trouble!

this is the same problem as the old question “will my doggy be in heaven?”. folk Christians everywhere agree that yes of course there will be doggies in heaven and specifically your doggy, whereas anyone who looks at scripture and thinks it through carefully says “no, your dead dog is just annihilated”. the general form is “will there even be animals, never mind dogs in the new creation at the end of time?” and it is difficult to come up with a clear answer, especially one that has animals that act anything like the ones we know and love.

the picture scripture gives of the animals that might exist in the New Jerusalem are, as in Isaiah, strange ones of lions eating grass and living among oxen (which makes no ecological sense) or in Revelation/Ezekiel the various “living creatures” which are bizarre zoomorphic angels (which do not even make any pretense at ecology)

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