The Catastrophe of Nature

  Global climate catastrophe is the most forceful example of the basic danger of having nothing but Nature, and human ability to manipulate Nature, to rely on, even in matters of this life. Unrestrained human appetites are bringing the house down around our ears. The builders & sellers of technology were going to raise human beings above all the sufferings of even our recent ancestors: collectively, we've knocked holes the very tent which has protected & sustained life, through runaway material progress.

   But instead of equating damaged physical nature with our damaged human nature, to show the former inevitably follows the latter, many who purport to hold normative Christian teaching concerning man's place in Nature & the effects of transgressing divine wisdom deny the very existence of the phenomenon that gives these teachings new force. Instead, the evidence that shows what damage has been done, and what further catastrophes are coming, are dismissed as delusions of a Nature-cult, of an alleged (and sometimes real) contemporary worship of planetary ecology. The climate-catastrophe deniers are devout believers in the very technological demi-paradise which they ought to hold in derision. To love God above all things ought to clarify how limited even the universe is: even the resources of all the galaxies combined are finite, not infinitely exploitable.