Note: The script below is from the author at Manpollo.org
and other
site (on this second site, the author asks for help translating
the topics to Spanish for DVDs, etc.) The script doesn't correspond
100% to the video and still needs checking over.
This video is titled “God’s Will” and is part of the expansion
pack accompanying “How It All Ends.”
Let me start by saying I know little of theology or hermeneutics.
But the subject of God has come up enough times in my discussions
with people about global climate change that I want to address
it briefly here, without delving into the fundamental questions
of faith. I certainly have no answers, only questions, which might
have some bearing on how you feel about global climate change
and your personal relationship to it.
I recently had a very interesting conversation with an optometrist
about climate change. We were sincerely asking what the other
thought about it, since she knows I teach science and she hasn’t
looked into it too much, and I’m always curious about the process
by which people arrive at the opinions they hold.
She’s devoutly religious (Christian), and it turns out that she
feels that global climate change is probably God’s will, perhaps
in punishment for the sins of mankind. I don’t share that conviction,
but it seemed fair enough to me.
But when I asked why she thought that, it sparked a question in
my mind. She said that the issue was so big, so—well global—that
it seemed beyond the purview of humankind, and could only be the
realm of a higher being. I wanted to understand better how she
made this judgment. So I asked her a hypothetical question, to
try to illicit the principles underlying her belief.
I said suppose you live on a river, and you catch and eat the
fish from the water. If you eventually noticed that there were
fewer and fewer fish, and then that the water started to smell,
and then dead fish turned up, you might go looking upstream. Say
you find someone has installed a pipeline that is dumping foul-smelling
stuff into the river. You wouldn’t call the dead fish God’s will
and ignore it. You’d tell the guy upstream to knock it off. She
agreed with that.
If he assured you it’s not his stuff that’s causing the fish to
die, you might even hire a water-quality expert to come out and
analyze the water, and you’d probably weigh his statements about
the foul-smelling stuff more heavily than those from the guy with
the pipeline. She agreed with that, too.
So I asked, what’s the difference between this situation, and
global climate change?
Her answer was again, that it’s just so big. It’s hard to imagine
it in the hands of humans, and quite easy to imagine it in the
hands of God. She agreed that she wouldn’t consider the dead fish
to be God’s Will—or at least, not in the sense that she wouldn’t
take action to change the situation. You don’t have to be a strict
Calvinist to believe that in a certain sense, all is God’s Will.
So I gave a larger version of the fish scenario—say instead of
it being a local river, it’s an entire region that’s affected,
like the acid rain from industrial emissions in the Northeastern
US. She agreed again that she’d do something to get the emitters
to stop, because the phenomenon was clearly the direct result
of human action, and it was harming people both directly and indirectly.
So I asked: if we keep scaling the issue up, where is the line
where it goes from being of humans, and therefore subject to our
judgment and our action, to being of God, and therefore subject
only to prayer? She hadn’t really thought about it like that before,
and didn’t have a ready answer. That’s where the conversation
ended.
Since then, I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think perhaps what
might be causing the blurring is that with the fish, it’s clear
to our intuition that the problem is caused by humans. And when
you jump straight to the globe, your intuition now opposes the
idea that the problem could be caused by humans—it’s just so big,
and we are so small. As my dad put it—intellectually, he believes
the scientists and all—but at a gut level he still doesn’t believe
that we can change the planet just by driving cars around. We
just seem too small.
Which is why I scaled the same problem up gradually, starting
with the fish in the river, looking for at what point the issue
crosses the line
And that’s also why I introduced the idea of the water quality
expert. That represents someone whose judgment about the physical
situation you trust, because he’s studied long and hard, and has
lots of experience. Well, with climate change, that’s exactly
the role that the scientists play. And the statements of AAAS
and NAS really leave no question as to their judgment of whether
humans are playing a role or not. It is of course correct to say
that the climate has changed often, without us ever playing a
part. But that doesn’t mean we’re not the ones doing it now. If
you watch the videos “The Mechanics of Climate Change” and “Scare
Tactics,” you may see that it’s not too hard to upgrade your intuition,
so that it no longer opposes the conclusions of scientists when
they say that it is “highly likely” that the observed warming
of the globe is driven primarily by human activities. It worked
for my dad, when I explained the mechanics of climate change to
him—now his guts agree with his head, and all’s well.
So if you’ve thought in the past that global warming must be God’s
Will, or even perhaps the start of End Times, I don’t have any
answers for you. But I would respectfully request—for the benefit
of all—that you too ask yourself the question about the fish in
the river. Would you consider it God’s Will and continue fishing,
or would you ask your upstream neighbor to stop putting things
in the river you share? And then make the scenario slightly larger
and ask again. And keep making the scenarios gradually larger,
until you get to a global scale. Where, in that progression, does
the issue go from being a human-caused problem that we can and
want to address, to being the Will of God, which we can’t?
This
video-article is part of an advanced listening activity for advanced
learners of English. 
The video on Youtube:
