April 18, 2016 Show with E. Calvin Beisner on “Earth Day & the Worship of the Creature Rather Than the Creator”

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“EARTH DAY & the WORSHIP of the CREATURE Rather than the CREATOR”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,
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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.
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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 18th day of April 2016 and I'm very delighted to have for the very first time on this program
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Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. I have been an enormous admirer of his going back to the 1980s when
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I was a brand new Christian and began watching the John Ankerberg program, which many of you out there in the audience are probably very familiar with, the
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John Ankerberg television program, which still exists today, but that was a major part of my diet, if you will, in the media as a new
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Christian and I was always fascinated by the brilliance of Dr.
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Calvin Beisner when he was guest on the John Ankerberg program. He is founder and national spokesman of the
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Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a network of about 60
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Christian theologians, natural scientists, economists, and other scholars educating for biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the proclamation and defense of the good news of salvation by God's grace received through faith in Christ's death and resurrection.
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Dr. Beisner was associate professor of historical theology and social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary from 2000 to 2008 and of interdisciplinary studies focusing on the application of biblical worldview, theology, and ethics to economics, government, and public policy at Covenant College from 1992 to 2000.
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He earned his B .A. in interdisciplinary studies in religion and philosophy at the University of Southern California, his
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M .A. in economic ethics from International College, and his Ph .D.
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in Scottish history and history of political thought at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
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He has been an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, planning a new congregation for the latter and serving on its pastoral staff for three years.
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He and his wife Debbie, an accomplished portrait painter, have seven children and six grandchildren.
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It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron, Sharpens Iron, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner.
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Well, thank you very much, Chris. It's a pleasure to be on the program with you. I'm looking forward to it, and, gee, you brought back a distant memory there that John Ankerberg showed when
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Dr. Walter Martin and I debated the two top leaders of the United Pentecostal Church about the doctrine of the
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Trinity. Thanks for referring to that. Yes, in fact, many years later,
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I got Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries involved in debates with those gentlemen, and one on the interesting.
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First of all, tell us about the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and explain the name
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Cornwall as well. Well, the name comes from the fact that a group of about 35 scholars on environmental stewardship and economic development for the poor gathered together at a retreat center in West Cornwall, Connecticut back in the fall of 1999, and there we hammered out a statement called the
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Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which we then released in the spring of 2000, initially signed by over 1 ,500 religious leaders from around the world.
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And then five years later, we began the Cornwall Alliance for the
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Stewardship of Creation. We chose that name simply to go along with the Declaration, which was named for the location where we developed the
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Declaration itself. It's sort of like the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inheritance and the
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Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, which were issued by the
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International Council on Biblical Inherency. As you mentioned, we're a network of about 60 scholars, all of us evangelical
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Christians, about a third of them are natural scientists, a third economists and policy wonks, and a third theologians, pastors, and ethicists.
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And we work together to promote biblical earth stewardship, which we do not equate with environmentalism because most environmentalism has an anti -Christian worldview, theology, and ethics, and tends to use very sloppy science and economics, resulting in policies that often are not helpful to the natural environment, but are very harmful to the world's poor, and that has its own doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation, that are quite contrary to those of the
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Christian faith. But we define biblical earth stewardship as godly dominion.
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We're picking up there on the command that God gave to Adam and Eve after he created them, and he blessed them, and he said to them, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish and sea, the birds of the air, and everything that moves on the face of the earth.
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And this dominion should not be a rapacious, abusive activity, but it should be godly.
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It should reflect the very character of God himself. And so we try to summarize that by saying that godly dominion is men and women creating
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God's image, laboring lovingly together to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth, to the glory of God, and to the benefit of our neighbors, so that really, in the final analysis, we are addressing the two great commandments, to love
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God and to love neighbor. That's the first issue that we seek to promote, the first goal.
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The second is economic development for the very poor around the world. Think in terms of places like sub -Saharan
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Africa, or closer to home here, Haiti, and some parts of Latin America, Oceania, and Asia, where people live in desperate poverty, where infant and child mortality rates are still high, where life expectancy is low, where disease is rampant, and so on.
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And what we want to do is to promote the conditions on which the rise of whole societies out of poverty really depends.
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And we see those as two basic sorts of conditions. The first is a set of social institutions, private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, the rule of law, all of those things put together.
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And the second is access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, especially in the form of electricity, without which no society has ever climbed out of poverty, and no society can stay out of poverty.
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And so we want to help people understand the importance of establishing those two fundamental conditions for lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty.
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And then finally, we want to promote, most importantly, the gospel of Jesus Christ, its proclamation and its defense.
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All of this in a world permeated by an environmental movement whose worldview, theology, and ethics, as I mentioned a minute ago, tend to be anti -Christian, whose science and economics tend to be poorly done, and whose policies therefore really don't help the natural environment much, but often harm the poor.
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And it is intentionally infiltrating Christian churches and denominations, seminaries, trying to green the gospel, as we put it, and to really change the focus of the
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Christian message from salvation in Christ to something like, if you love
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God, take good care of the earth. And you know, if you love God, you should want to take good care of the earth, but that's not the gospel.
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The gospel is that Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, he was buried, and he rose again from the dead on the third day according to the scriptures.
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That's how St. Paul summarizes it in 1 Corinthians 15, and we want to make sure that that gets preserved and properly defended.
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Yeah, I just saw, not long ago, in fact, I saw it on Todd Friel's Wretched TV program, he was showing a clip of Dr.
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John MacArthur bemoaning the fact that there has been a new study
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Bible, released the Green Bible, and he basically was going into the fact that the extreme environmentalist movement is really in polar opposition to a
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Christian worldview, that Christians are taught, and the people of God have been taught for thousands of years, that we are to have dominion over the earth that God has created, but as you have brought out, that being
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Christian we should be responsible. I mean, even God's commandment on the
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Sabbath, we needed to give a Sabbath rest to the animals that were on the farms and so on, that were owned by the people of God.
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And to the land itself. Yes, and by the way, ladies and gentlemen, today we're talking about our main theme that we're discussing today is
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Earth Day and the worship of the creature rather than the creator, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
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that's c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the
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USA. And we look forward to hearing from you if you do indeed have a question.
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You know, you brought up something about the Cornwall Alliance that is very important.
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One of your main goals is to truly be an aid to those who are living in impoverished areas, the poor, the starving, and it is completely an irony to me that the leftist agenda seems to always claim as one of its hallmarks that they are for the care and they're looking out for the best needs of the underdog, the poor, the impoverished, the people who are living in areas where they are unable to grow crops and so on, all kinds of things that they would claim to be in favor for, and yet they would be very often pushing an agenda legally that would destroy the indigenous people's opportunities to actually make a living in those areas.
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Am I right? Oh, absolutely. And your listeners can learn a lot about this, not only from our website,
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CornwallAlliance .org. That's CornwallAlliance .org. We have quite a number of major papers and articles there by our various scholars, but there's one particular book that I would most highly recommend to make that point.
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It's by a dear friend of mine, Paul Driessen, and it's titled Eco -Imperialism,
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Green Power, Black Death, and it really is a stunning, a really frightening catalog of the environmental policies that have been forced upon sub -Saharan
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Africa by elite environmental organizations and their leaders in the wealthy
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West. Policies, for instance, like the opposition to the use of DDT, which is the least expensive and the most effective chemical agent to reduce the number of mosquitoes that carry the malarial virus, the wealthy
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West has bought into the poorly supported claim that DDT threatens lots more species than the mosquitoes.
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And in fact, that claim has been proven false. It was in fact proven false in the scientific study done by the
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U .S. EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, back in the 1970s, but the first EPA administrator,
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William Ruckelshaus, under President Kennedy, went ahead and banned DDT use in the
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United States anyway for purely political reasons. The green movement here had vilified
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DDT, and President Kennedy wanted to get more greens on his side politically, so he did this.
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When they did that, the U .S. Agency for International Development, USAID, made it a condition of U .S.
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foreign aid that countries in sub -Saharan Africa must not use DDT to fight malaria -carrying mosquitoes.
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The result there and in various other developing countries around the world that have foregone the use of DDT in order to get international aid, whether from the
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United States or elsewhere, the result has been, from the mid -1970s until at least the early 2000s, about two to three million preventable malarial deaths every year, most of them among women and children.
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Since then, the rate of mortality from malaria in those countries has declined somewhat, but not a lot.
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It's still around a million a year, so we're looking at well over 50 million people who've died because of that policy.
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That's just one example among many. Another one that you might point at is the resistance of Greenpeace to the use of what's called golden rice.
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It's a genetically modified form of rice that is high in beta -carotene, and right now, childhood blindness affects tens of millions of children around the developing world, especially in Southeast Asia, every year.
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It actually kills a couple of million children every year through complications that arise from it.
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Golden rice, which is as inexpensive to produce as normal rice, could eliminate childhood blindness in those places, but Greenpeace opposes it because it's not natural.
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Well, this just plays out of the theme of much environmentalism that nature is best untouched by human hands, that what is natural is good and what is man -made is somehow bad.
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That simply is false. We know that is false from history. In the very best natural habitats, hunting and gathering as our way of supporting our life cannot support more than one or two people per square mile, and even then, only with a life expectancy of around 27 or 28 years.
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We need far greater productivity than that, and that comes from industrialization.
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That enables us to support instead hundreds of people per square mile, or even thousands of people per square mile, and with much greater health and longer life.
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The life expectancies, for instance, in developed countries today are around 80 years.
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Now, this seems to be a reverse of what the biblical worldview is and the biblical command to have dominion over the earth.
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This seems to be an ideology of allowing creation to have dominion over us, where plants and animals and wildlife have superior rights to human beings, even the so -called poor indigenous people of impoverished nations that the liberals are claiming to be the champions to defend.
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Yeah, that's correct. As another example of that kind of thing, you can look at the set -asides of vast amounts of land in Sub -Saharan
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Africa, where literally tribal peoples have been forced off of the land, away from their villages.
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Often those villages are burned and the people are forced out at gunpoint in order to set aside that land as refuge for supposedly endangered species.
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Sometimes the species actually are endangered, such as the white rhino or, in some locations, elephants.
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What the Greens won't point out is that if those species were tradable on international markets, that is, if you could actually have an international market for ivory from elephant's tusks, well, that would make elephants a valuable thing.
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But as long as it's illegal to trade in any part of elephants, as it is right now, internationally, you can't trade in elephant tusks or anything else like that.
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As long as that's the case, well, elephants are simply like gigantic rats as far as the poor people living on the land there in Sub -Saharan
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Africa are concerned. They trample gardens down, they eat up the food from them, they can destroy huts and so on.
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Well, that means that there's no incentive for anybody to raise elephants, to take care of them.
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Instead, there's an incentive for the poor people there to try to kill them just to get them out of the way.
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So we don't seem to be worried about broiler chickens going extinct, though we kill in the
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United States about 10 billion a year. But that's because there's an incentive for people to raise them because there's a market for the product.
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Well, similarly, if we could create a market for elephant tusks and so on, you would see the numbers of elephants rise rather than decline.
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But as it is, the only people killing them are poachers who do not raise them, they simply kill them.
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Excuse me. So the extraction of the tusks does not require the killing of the elephant.
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They just do that out of convenience because how else are you going to take a tusk if you're a bandit, if you're a poacher running through the jungles?
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The most convenient and quick way to get the tusks without being caught is to kill the elephant.
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Exactly. But you can remove tusks from an elephant and let it live? Well, that can be done.
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But frankly, since the rest of the elephant is actually useful as well, the hide and the meat are useful.
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If you raise elephants the way we raise cattle, they can be a fine livestock.
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Obviously, the techniques will differ somewhat, but it can be done.
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The problem is that you've got these international laws that make it so that there is not a market for that kind of product.
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Where we can make a market, where we can put a price on something, then we can increase the supply of that thing in response to market demand.
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Whether it's elephants or light bulbs. Now, going back to the DDT, was there not some kind of a scare that this was causing birth defects and all kinds of things, that that was the reason why
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DDT was being outlawed? It was the intent to protect human life?
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That was the scare, yes. But the scare turns out to have been founded upon very, very faulty science.
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The primary promoter of that scare was the author of the book
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Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.
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She was actually a marine biologist, and then she became heavily involved in the early environmental movement in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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And she was concerned that the use of DDT could be thinning the eggshells of raptors, of birds high on the food chain, eagles, hawks, falcons, and so on.
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And that these thinned eggshells would result in fewer survivals of chicks, and therefore declining populations of these birds.
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It was a perfectly plausible theory, a respectable hypothesis.
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The problem was that her data didn't turn out to really support it. And 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, there was a new book published called
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Silent Spring at 50, that catalogs not just that, but many other errors in Rachel Carson's book.
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The reality was that we were seeing some declines in the numbers of those raptor birds because of overhunting.
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When the overhunting stopped, the bird populations recovered. And they're doing very well now.
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DDT, it turns out, did not decrease the survival rate of the chicks from the eggs that were laid by the eagles and other raptors, it turns out.
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That was sad, and the EPA, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, ran a thorough scientific assessment of the risks of the use of DDT and the benefits of the use of it.
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Many people, by the way, are not aware that in the United States, malaria was endemic to 47 of the 48 contiguous
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United States. And it was very common, especially in the southern states, and that we eliminated malaria here in this country by the very widespread use of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s.
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Now, if we were back to experiencing the high rates of malarial deaths here that are happening in sub -Saharan
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Africa, we Americans would never put up with the banning of DDT.
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But we had already gotten rid of it. So for purely political reasons, although the
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EPA's scientific assessment found that DDT was safe, that there were not significant environmental risks from it, the
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EPA still went ahead and banned it in order to satisfy environmental activists whom
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Richard Nixon wanted supporting his political career. So you basically do have both sides of the aisle cooperating in this madness, don't you?
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It's not just the Democrat party thing. Oh, right.
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Yeah, environmental madness is definitely a bipartisan affair. Right. And we do have a listener in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
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I haven't heard of that city before. Casey in Kannapolis, North Carolina says, when it comes to educating ourselves and Christian apologetics, what resources and facts should we use when talking to unbelievers about the lies of climate change, global warming, and extreme environmentalism?
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Oh, that's a great question. I'm glad that I have a great answer for you. The first place to go is simply to CornwallAlliance .org.
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We have a large number of short articles there, hundreds of them, actually.
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And then we also have about six or seven major papers there by authors who are themselves climate scientists and climate and energy and environmental economists, putting forth the real evidence, the empirical evidence.
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The most recent one of those was titled, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the
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Poor, 2014. The Case Against Harmful Climate Policies Gets Stronger.
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That was co -authored by Dr. David Legates, who is a professor of climatology at the
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University of Delaware and author of many, many refereed articles in peer -reviewed journals on climate change, and Dr.
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G. Cornelis Van Kooten, who is the Canada Chair and Research Professor in Environment and Climate Change at the
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University of Victoria in British Columbia. And they review all of the major science up to the time of the release of their paper, which was a little less than a year and a half ago, and they show that contrary to the claim that our emissions of carbon dioxide might raise global average temperature enough to cause some sort of catastrophe, instead the warming effect of added
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CO2 in the atmosphere is quite small, probably on the order of half a degree to maybe a degree and a half
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Celsius for every doubling of CO2, and so far we've only managed to raise
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CO2's concentration by about 48 % since pre -industrial times, so that's not a doubling, and we won't double until probably around 2100.
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But at any rate, the actual warming is likely to be about a half a degree to a degree and a half, and all of the models suggest that that's actually helpful.
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Furthermore, we could actually burn up all the fossil fuels in the earth and not manage to push
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CO2 concentration in the atmosphere past a thousand parts per million.
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Well, even that is about a fifth of its historic concentration over long periods in geologic history.
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The earth is actually right now starving for more CO2 because plants need it to grow, and they grow better in higher concentrations of CO2.
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So there's not great danger from our use of fossil fuels, instead there's enormous benefit from our use of them.
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So for that question of where do we go for good apologetics on climate change,
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I'd first recommend Cornwallalliance .org, and click on the landmark documents tab there, landmark documents, and you'll find quickly a number of those major papers, but we also have hundreds of short articles there as well.
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We have to go to a break. By the way, Casey, you have won a free bonded leather
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Bible, that's the New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the New American Standard Bible, now in their 74th year of providing the people of God with his word.
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That's the New American Standard Bible, and we thank you, Casey, for writing in a question, and I believe
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Casey's a first -time questioner, and make sure that we have your shipping address, and we will get that out to you right away.
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If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages.
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Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God, or am
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I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church.
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We are a Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689.
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We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts. We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how
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God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things. That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the apostles' priority, it must not be ours either.
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We believe by God's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.
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If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.
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You can call us at 508 -528 -5750. That's 508 -528 -5750.
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Go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our
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We were made to thrive. Welcome back.
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If you've just tuned us in, our guest today is Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, and we are discussing
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Earth Day and the worship of the creature rather than the creator. Dr. Beisner is founder and national spokesman for the
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Cornwall Alliance of the Stewardship of Creation. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
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chrisarnsen at gmail .com. I know that next Monday, a week from today,
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God willing, you're going to be back on for two hours to specifically address global warming and the hysteria that surrounds it.
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But there seems to be, even from some evangelical groups, some caving in to the global warming scare.
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Is there legitimate science that may be in some way contradicting any of the data that the
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Cornwall Alliance has brought forth? Well, there are various data that come from various different sources, and in science, we always have to recognize that things are, shall we say, never proved, because we don't start with, in science, you don't start with propositions that you know are true because God says them.
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Instead, you start with observations of the material world around us. Those observations are always tentative.
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When we do inductive research, we recognize that new research can always discover a problem here or there.
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So all of that is to introduce the direct answer to your question, which is, yes, there's legitimate scientific work that points in a variety of different directions.
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And so the task for the Christian assessing these things is to do what the Apostle Paul tells us to do, which is to test all things and hold fast what is good.
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Now, probably the most crucial thing to keep in mind on the debates about climate change or global warming, particularly man -made global warming, the most crucial thing perhaps to keep in mind is that the fears of dangerous man -made global warming are driven entirely by predictions of future temperatures driven by rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that are done by computer models based on particular theories about how the natural climate system responds to this rising
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CO2. The models are perfectly legitimate scientific instruments.
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Modeling is how scientists try to figure out how many different natural systems function.
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But models always have to be tested by comparing their output with empirical observation, with real -world observation.
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As the great Nobel Prize -winning physicist Richard Feynman put it, the key to science is that when you come up with an idea for how nature works, you must compare the predictions that flow naturally out of that idea with what you find in the laboratory and experiments or out in the real world itself.
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And if the observations contradict your idea, then your idea is wrong, period.
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It doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how many people agree with you. It doesn't matter how sincere you are or anything else.
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If the observations contradict your theory, the theory is wrong.
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Now, here is a sort of a basic summary of the comparison between the models and the observations.
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The models, 117 of them basically used by various different research centers around the world and relied on by the
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United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The models, on average, simulate two to three times as much warming as we've actually observed over the relevant period, basically stretching back to about 1960, most especially stretching back to 1979, the earliest period for which we have the most reliable observational data, which is from satellites going around the planet.
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So the models, on average, simulate two to three times as much warming as actually observed.
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Ninety -five percent of the models predict or simulate more warming than actually occurred, actually observed.
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And that indicates that the errors are not random because if they were random, the models would be as often wrong by underpredicting as by overpredicting warming, but rather they must be driven by some sort of bias.
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And it doesn't necessarily have to be a dishonest bias. Bias may just simply be, well, we've thought that this particular feedback in the climate system increases warming when it turns out that it decreases warming.
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We didn't understand that. And that assumption gets written into all the models, and therefore they all turn out to do that kind of thing.
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Or sometimes the biases are themselves driven by a commitment to an agenda that is determined to show high degrees of warming from added
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CO2. Regardless of whether the bias is honest or dishonest, it's clearly there because 95 percent of the models overpredict the amount of warming that comes from added
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CO2. And then finally, none of the models, absolutely not one of the models, simulated the complete absence of statistically significant global warming stretching from early 1997 to the end of 2015, a period at its longest that was 18 years and 10 months.
41:03
Over the last three months, January, February, and March, and it's continuing into this month, we are experiencing warmer climate worldwide, and that's driven not by rising
41:16
CO2 in the atmosphere, but by an unusually strong El Nino oscillation in the tropical
41:24
South Pacific. But that's a cyclical thing. The same thing caused 1998 to be exceptionally warm, and it comes and goes on varying periods.
41:36
So the fact is the models badly exaggerate the warming effect of CO2, and it's probably in the range of about one -third to one -sixth as much as the models have been thought to predict.
41:53
They've been thought to predict something in the neighborhood of about one -and -a -half to four -and -a -half degrees
42:01
Celsius of warming from doubled CO2 in the atmosphere. It's more likely that it's about a third to a sixth of that, perhaps half a degree to a degree -and -a -half.
42:16
Well, just keep in mind, folks, that Dr. Beisner, God willing, will be back next week to specifically address global warming for a two -hour period.
42:27
So we hope that you keep that on your calendar and join us. Earth Day is
42:35
April 22nd this year. What exactly is
42:40
Earth Day, how did it start, and who is behind it? Well, Earth Day began in 1970, and I've forgotten at the moment the name of the congressman who got it started, a
42:55
Democratic congressman back then who was himself an environmentalist. And the point of Earth Day is sort of to focus people's attention on the importance, and it's a legitimate importance, of our trying to minimize the emission of dangerous pollutants, truly toxic chemicals or soot and things like that.
43:20
And Earth Day got started back at that time and has grown over the years to where, rather than focusing so much on truly dangerous pollutants, which do still exist, it tends to focus on the more speculative and non -dangerous things like global warming nowadays.
43:44
But we need to remember the time when Earth Day first began, and it helps to understand the history of the relationship between economic development and environmental quality.
44:01
That history is characterized by what economists of the environment call the environmental
44:09
Kuznets curve or the environmental transition. Here's basically an explanation of that.
44:17
When a society makes the transition from subsistence agriculture, everyone living on farms and growing basically just what they themselves need as a family, and then perhaps a little bit extra to support the few people who lived in towns instead who did not grow their own food.
44:37
When a society moves from subsistence agriculture to early industrialization, the emission of various truly dangerous pollutants like carbon monoxide and sulfur oxides and things like that from burning coal and not so much natural gas, but especially from burning coal, those pollutant emissions rise.
45:04
Now, the pollutant emissions are harmful, and it's a good idea to try to reduce them, but reducing them is costly.
45:13
The products that are obtained by using the energy that comes from burning that coal or that natural gas or that petroleum, those products are very helpful to people.
45:28
We know from economic history, from the statistics, that during that very period when the pollutant emissions are rising, human health and longevity is also rising.
45:41
That is, people are not dying as young, they're not getting sick as often, and they are living much longer lives.
45:49
What that means is that the benefits of the activity from which the pollutants come outweigh the risks.
45:57
But when this economy gets a little bit beyond early industrialization and begins to be a little bit wealthier, well, at that point, people can afford the more costly technologies that remove those pollutants so that you don't have those dangerous chemicals or fly ash coming out of the smokestacks of energy -producing units of electric generating plants.
46:31
Once people are able to afford that, they begin to actually do it. You can put it this way.
46:38
If you're worried about putting food on the table, clothes on the back, and a roof over the head, you really don't care much about smog, about runoff of fertilizer from farms into water or something like that.
46:55
That just simply is not as high a priority. You can live for a very long time in bad smog.
47:01
You can only live for a few weeks without food and only for a couple or three days without water.
47:08
You're worried about those much higher priorities. But when food, clothing, shelter, education, transportation, healthcare become predictable, when you are confident that you will have those things, then you're ready to allocate some of your income, which is higher now because of the industrialization, to reducing the pollution emissions.
47:32
That's exactly what societies do. In the early stages of economic development, you have simultaneously the increase in income and the increase in pollution levels.
47:45
But pretty quickly, those pollution levels peak, and then they decline.
47:52
By the time you reach a largely service and technology -oriented economy, the pollution levels actually decline to below what they were before you started the industrialization in the first place.
48:06
Now, all of that was by way of historical background to the founding of Earth Day. In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s in the
48:16
United States, we were still in the fairly early stages of industrialization. We still had over 50 % of our population on farms into the 1940s.
48:28
We were seeing our air get dirtier. We were seeing our water get dirtier.
48:34
There were serious problems. It made perfect sense to focus very heavily on those.
48:42
I'm perfectly happy with the founding of Earth Day in that period because there was much to be taken care of.
48:49
The fact is that now in the United States and in all developed countries in the world, all the
48:55
OECD countries, the Organization of Economic...
49:01
Let's see, OECD. At the moment, I've forgotten the name of it. But anyway, in all of those countries, air pollution levels, water pollution levels, toxic waste levels have been declining since the 1960s.
49:18
Our air and our water are cleaner now than they have been in well over 150 years.
49:25
So we no longer need and we don't have that crisis that we had going on in the 1970s.
49:33
And you would think from the media that the reverse was true. Oh, yes, you would because everybody talks about the environment is going well to hell in a handbasket, so to speak.
49:46
It's just getting worse and worse. The truth is that in developed countries, it's getting better and better. And the developing countries are actually going through that transition faster than we did because they can use technologies that we've already developed.
50:03
Developing a technology in the first place is very expensive. Once it's developed, it can be replicated all over the place.
50:11
So whereas our transition period lasted for a period of about 60 or 70 years, in developing countries, that's getting squeezed into a period more like 20 to 30 years.
50:25
And that's very good news because it means that they will have the benefits of industrialization more rapidly than we did, and that they will shorten the period during which the pollution rises.
50:38
You touched on this a little bit already in your just recent statements there, but we do have a listener in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, Christopher, who asks, although you may be frustrated and infuriated by many of the left -wing environmental organizations, did they and do they not bring to the attention of the public things that we need to hear about and be fearful of and take action against, like greedy multi -billion dollar corporations that are dumping dangerous sewage into our own sources of drinking water and things like that, were there conservative organizations who were just as much on the tail of people like that disrespecting the planet as there were liberals?
51:36
Well, as a matter of fact, the environmental movement grew out of the conservation movement, which was far more closely related to political conservatism.
51:48
Teddy Roosevelt was a big... That's right. In the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, conservation, you notice the similarity of word to conservative, conservation was a standard thing for many conservatives.
52:04
The difference happened when environmentalism went to a different sort of a vision of the world.
52:13
Conservatism, or conservationism rather, thought that our responsibility was to make a wise use of the things that we find around us in the earth so that they could serve us without putting others at danger and that it would be...
52:31
We would not, by so doing, make future generations less well -off than we are.
52:39
We would instead try to promote the continued improvement of the human condition.
52:46
Environmentalism has a very different sort of basic vision. Conservationism sees the earth as something that human beings are supposed to manage for the good of humanity at the same time as for the good of other species.
53:05
Environmentalism sees nature as best untouched by human hands and it sees preservation rather than conservation as the goal.
53:15
The idea then is that we should minimize our influence on the earth.
53:24
That's contrary to scripture, which as we mentioned early in the program, early on tells us that God blessed
53:32
Adam and Eve and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and everything that moves on the face of the earth.
53:42
This dominion can be and has been harmed.
53:49
It's been compromised by the fall of humanity into sin. Of course, we have to recognize that.
53:56
That's absolutely clear. But the fact that we've sinned doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to fulfill this command.
54:06
When I was raising my children and I would tell one of them to do the dishes after dinner, if the child disobeyed, the child would be corrected, but the disobedience didn't relieve the child of the responsibility to go back and do the dishes.
54:22
Well, God tells us to exercise a godly dominion over the earth. We disobey him.
54:28
We fall into sin. Does that mean that we're not supposed to exercise that dominion? No. It means that we need to be redeemed by Christ.
54:37
We need to be reconciled to God by Christ and our minds need to be transformed by the word of God so that we better understand this world that he's given us dominion over and we can exercise that dominion in a godly way.
54:50
So now the question was in part, you know, did these left -wing organizations point out real problems and did that help us to solve those problems?
55:01
In some instances, yes, particularly in terms of the dumping of chemicals directly into toxic chemicals directly into rivers and streams that led, for instance, to Lake Erie being almost dead in the 1960s.
55:18
That's true. But now their constant theme is to vastly exaggerate various different risks.
55:28
And there's another problem, too, and that is that they tend to favor bureaucratic regulatory means of responding to pollution problems rather than one of two other options or both of them.
55:45
The two other options are, first, market mechanisms where the market itself can recognize that pollutants are a sign of waste.
55:59
A pollutant is a waste and a business that wastes a lot cannot be very profitable.
56:06
So you want to turn those wastes into products. You want to recover them and recycle them. And that's the whole point in principle behind recycling.
56:17
The other response to pollution is through tort law. That is, if I run a business that emits some sort of a pollutant that harms your person or your property, you can go to court and the court can command me to stop regardless what it costs or can order that you and I need to work out an agreement between us where I pay you something for the harm that I've done.
56:50
And again, what that does is it, again, brings the market in because as a business owner, a business manager,
56:59
I want to have a profitable company, but I can't have a very profitable company if I'm getting hit with large lawsuits and the courts are hurting me.
57:09
So I will then seek to minimize my pollution emissions. So the issue is not do anti -environmentalists want rampant pollution all over the place, killing people, whereas environmentalists want a clean and healthy planet.
57:26
No, it's what are the best ways to go about achieving that clean and healthy planet.
57:34
And just to play the devil's advocate, though, are those who may tend to be more conservative in their voting record, those individuals who are in favor of tax cuts for large corporations and things like that, are these political representatives and even those themselves who are owners of these corporations more likely to be less concerned about the environment around these factories and businesses than they are about the corporation saving money by not disposing of its pollutants in a more environmentally friendly manner, so that the corporation doesn't lose money, so that it can keep all the people on the payroll that it's hired and all that kind of thing?
58:36
Well, we would be completely blind to the effect of sin if we were to deny that that sort of an incentive ever enters into a businessman's decisions.
58:49
Of course it does. But the continuation of that kind of activity is not a market failure.
59:02
It's actually a government failure. The government has failed to force the corporations to, as economists put it, internalize their externalities.
59:15
An externality is a cost of doing business that isn't borne by the business itself.
59:22
The smoke that comes out of the smokestack and goes downwind and causes people to have respiratory diseases, that's a cost of doing business.
59:31
But that business isn't bearing that cost. So it's called an externality. When the government is aware that there's an externality, its task, whether through tort law or through regulation, is to force the corporation to bear that cost.
59:49
And that may be done through negotiations between the corporation and those who are downwind of it.
59:54
It might be done in a variety of different ways. But it's not so much a market failure as the failure of the government to prevent trespass.
01:00:04
Because that's what pollution emissions that get onto other people's property are.
01:00:09
They are a trespass. And government is supposed to stop that from happening. Now, what
01:00:16
I can also say, though, is we need to remember that stockholders, executives, board members of corporations, they're all human beings just like you and me.
01:00:29
And they are not, in principle, more susceptible to sin than you and I are.
01:00:39
Neither are they, in principle, less susceptible to sin than you and I are.
01:00:44
Now, you and I want to live in a clean, healthful, beautiful environment, right? So do the vast majority of stockholders and executives and board members of businesses.
01:00:57
They're just like us. And frankly, if their businesses are emitting large amounts of pollution that are causing harm, they themselves are likely to suffer from it.
01:01:09
And so, in fact, you have many businesses that spend large amounts of money reducing their emissions and helping with cleanup where problems have occurred.
01:01:21
That's a very common thing. And so to vilify business is no more
01:01:28
Christian than to vilify the poor or to vilify any other group. The fact is, we're all fallen into sin.
01:01:36
We all struggle with sin. And, you know, we do better or worse jobs at overcoming that.
01:01:46
And all of us, most importantly, need redemption in Jesus Christ. AMEN. And we do have a couple of listeners patiently waiting to have their questions asked and answered on the air.
01:01:56
And we will get to you as soon as possible when we return from our next break. And if you'd like to join them on the air with a question of your own, you can email us at chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
01:02:09
chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr.
01:02:15
E. Calvin Beisner and our discussion on Earth Day and the worship of the creature rather than the
01:02:21
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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back.
01:05:12
This is Chris Zarnes, and if you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron for the last hour and the next hour to come, our guest today is
01:05:20
E. Calvin Beisner, founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the
01:05:26
Stewardship of Creation. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
01:05:33
chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Our subject today is Earth Day and the Worship of the Creature Rather Than the
01:05:40
Creator. Before I return to our discussion, our friends at PNR Publishing, also known as Presbyterian and Reform Publishing, who are the newest sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron, they wanted to let you know that they're having a pastor's retreat
01:05:56
May 9th through 11th at Harvey Cedars Conference Center on the beautiful Jersey Shore in New Jersey.
01:06:05
That's May 9th through the 11th. The speakers are Dan Doriani and David Powelson, both of whom have been guests on Iron Sharpens Iron.
01:06:14
If you'd like more details on this conference or this pastor's retreat, you could go to AllianceNet .org,
01:06:22
AllianceNet .org, and then click on Events at the top of the screen and scroll down to the
01:06:30
Faithful Shepherd. That's the theme of the pastor's retreat, the Faithful Shepherd, May 9th through 11th.
01:06:38
And remember, the website is AllianceNet .org, AllianceNet .org. Click on Events.
01:06:45
Also, I want to remind you that the Iron Sharpens Iron radio pastor's luncheon is coming up very quickly.
01:06:53
It's going to be two Thursdays from today, Thursday, April 28th from 11 a .m.
01:06:59
to 3 p .m. at the gorgeous thorn -walled mansion of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a very historic building that has been newly renovated and restored to its original breathtaking beauty, once the site of lavish parties and celebrations where national politicians, celebrities, and societies elite were entertained.
01:07:24
And now we are, from what I understand, at least as long as the new owner has had possession of it, we are the first Christian group to have this event, to have an event at their location.
01:07:37
So we look forward to this event. It's absolutely free of charge, and the pastors are not only going to give a free gourmet lunch prepared by the owner, the chef and owner at Spoon's Cafe here in Carlisle, but every pastor is going to be leaving with close to,
01:07:56
I would say, probably close to 50 pounds worth of books that have been donated by major Christian publishers all over the
01:08:04
United States and the United Kingdom, and pretty much almost every major publisher that you can think of has donated a book for each of these men on titles that I specifically requested of them.
01:08:18
And this is all from beginning to end free of charge. We're going to have as our keynote speaker
01:08:24
David Wood, who is a nationally recognized expert on the religion of Islam.
01:08:32
He is an atheist convert to Christianity who has traveled the globe debating some of the most prominent
01:08:40
Muslim clerics and apologists. And he has what
01:08:45
I would call a photographic memory, not only in the scriptures, but also in the Quran. And he is quite a remarkable individual, fascinating individual, who pulls no punches.
01:08:57
And on the other side of the spectrum, he does not also create false stereotypes and caricatures of Islam either.
01:09:07
In fact, he is going to be attempting to separate fact from fiction at this pastor's luncheon.
01:09:13
If you know of any pastors that either live in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or live nearby, and they're willing to travel there, and in fact, as long as they're willing to travel there, they could live anywhere, have them email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:09:29
They must RSVP by this Saturday, the 23rd of April. So please let them know as quickly as possible.
01:09:37
We have room for about 20 men, in addition to what we have already had registered.
01:09:43
So please have them contact me as soon as possible. This is the end of the discussion that we're having on Earth Day with our guest,
01:09:57
Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. And we've just been joined minutes ago by my co -host, the
01:10:03
Reverend Buzz Taylor. Now the Presbyterians are outnumbering the Baptists on the program, as Dr.
01:10:09
Beisner being an Orthodox Presbyterian and my co -host being a member of a PCA congregation.
01:10:15
But if you could greet Dr. Calvin Beisner, Reverend Buzz. Well, hello, Calvin Beisner.
01:10:21
It's good to finally meet you. Well, thank you. It's good to meet you. And Chris, do you feel immersed in Presbyterians here?
01:10:29
I was thinking by the end of the second hour, he might get him converted. Well, Buzz, you've known me about six years, and you haven't even come close to that.
01:10:38
So I don't think there's any chance of that happening. But anyway, but we do, we are all theologically reformed right now on this program.
01:10:46
So we have a lot more in common than we disagree on. And actually, we have more in common than you think, because this is a subject
01:10:52
I love. You're talking about the environment? Yes, this was a very bad day for me to miss the first hour.
01:10:59
Yes, and we usually are annoyed with Buzz's presence from the very beginning of the program.
01:11:04
Right. And now we just have to tolerate him for the last hour. But before I move on, do you have any question of your own right now for...
01:11:13
Well, just that I have, when I lived in Maine, I used to listen to this radio station that left a lot to be desired, because it was the only one around at the time.
01:11:21
And I remember hearing about Christian environmentalism, and that I was told that we're not being good keepers of the garden, that within 10 years, we're all going to be dead from irradiation of foods.
01:11:32
And the problem with that was, that was about 20 years ago. So we're doubly dead by now, as you can see.
01:11:39
Are you aware of that hysteria that Buzz is speaking of, Dr. Bison? Yeah, in fact, that was one of many, many different environmental crises that have come, or rather, never come, though we were warned of them, and gone.
01:11:56
There was the fear of ozone depletion by our use of chlorofluorocarbons as propellants in antiperspirants and the like, or in our coolants in our air conditioning systems.
01:12:23
And as it actually turned out, after we had gone through the very, very costly task of replacing the
01:12:33
CFCs with other coolants and propellants that don't work as well, that are more expensive, as it turns out, the actual correlation between CFC use and ozone concentration changes in the stratosphere turned out to be insignificant.
01:12:54
It was less than 0 .19 correlation. And our further study indicated that what was going on with the ozone layer is a cyclical thing that goes up and down over periods of about 22 years, correlating well with the solar sunspot cycles.
01:13:16
But that was one. We were told that we were headed into another ice age, warned by many scientists around the world of this in the 1960s and 1970s.
01:13:29
And then, of course, that didn't happen. And instead, we saw global average temperature to begin to rise in the late 1970s.
01:13:37
As it turns out, that was probably caused primarily by a reversal of what's called the
01:13:43
Pacific Decadal Oscillation from negative to positive, which warms the
01:13:49
Earth. And that also goes in cycles. We were told that we were going to suffocate ourselves by eliminating too much of the rainforest, which is the primary producer of oxygen, because it's the densest area of plants on the
01:14:08
Earth. We were told that we were eliminating the rainforest at very alarming rates.
01:14:14
Well, actually, we kept getting given figures in acres or square miles.
01:14:22
But if you actually calculated those two rates, it turned out that the rates were under 1 % per year, and that they were declining, and that that's a normal thing to have happen as a society comes out of subsistence agriculture and begins to industrialize much more.
01:14:40
It doesn't keep converting forest lands to cropland, and instead, it returns cropland back into forest land.
01:14:48
The United States did. So, you know, the many different claims of great environmental crisis have been gone.
01:14:56
And the fact is, you know, we're still here. We're living longer than ever before. And frankly, the planet is healthier than it's been since, you know, very early times.
01:15:10
Oh, you can see this. I grew up in Buffalo, New York. And I remember as a child,
01:15:16
Lackawanna, New York was always in this dark cloud from Bethlehem steel. And everybody just seemed to accept it like this is just the way it is.
01:15:27
You got to have steel. So, you know, but yeah, it seems a lot cleaner now. And of course, we went through a situation up in Maine with clear cutting.
01:15:36
And, you know, people didn't realize that trees were crops that were being used by the paper industry.
01:15:42
But everybody wants the paper. So, I don't know. I just wish
01:15:48
I could have heard everything else you're talking. Is there, you know, we do have such a steady stream of misinformation concerning the environment.
01:15:56
Where can we go? You may have answered this in the first hour. So forgive me for not being here. But is there a site that we can go to someplace, yours, anybody?
01:16:06
Yes, that would be the CornwallAlliance .org. That's what I, okay, that's exactly what
01:16:12
I wanted to know. So I didn't have to go very far for that one, did I? Right.
01:16:17
Yeah, the Cornwall Alliance, as Chris explained at the start of the program, is a network of some 60 scholars,
01:16:26
Christian natural scientists, and economists and theologians at various universities and research centers around North America and some other countries in the world.
01:16:38
And we've produced a large number of articles and major studies, and those are all at CornwallAlliance .org.
01:16:46
Now, for those who are interested in learning more, really, about the long -term history of the relationship between economic development and environmental quality, there's one book that I most highly recommend.
01:17:02
It's by an Indian economist. Actually, he's in America, but he's of Indian derivation.
01:17:11
Indur Goklany, G -O -K -L -A -N -Y. And the title of his book is
01:17:17
The Improving State of the World, Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a
01:17:24
Cleaner Planet. That came out about 10 years ago, 2007, and it's really one of the clearest, most well -documented, most persuasively argued books on this field that I've ever seen.
01:17:38
So that's Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a
01:17:47
Cleaner Planet. Chris, sounds like he's a Puritan, doesn't it? Long title. And we have, or I have given the subtitle of this discussion today,
01:18:01
The Worship of the Creature Rather Than Creator. Obviously, drawing from the text in Romans 125,
01:18:10
For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than creator, who is blessed forever.
01:18:18
Amen. And we're not obviously suggesting that leftists are religiously, intentionally, and knowingly worshipping animals, plants, and images of them, as there still are religions that do that in many cultures, and as the
01:18:43
Native Americans did, and people have been doing for thousands of years. But the result is really the same thing.
01:18:51
Wouldn't you agree, Dr. Beisner, when human beings, although not being sacrificed to the fires of Molech, like infants and others were, or babies, are being sacrificed in the womb because of the convenience of not having children and other reasons?
01:19:15
And you have, as you were just discussing, those in poverty -stricken areas, indigenous people, additional indigenous tribesmen, and so on, who really rely on certain activities to feed their families, and so on, are being robbed from them by environmentalists who have a higher view of plant and animal life than they do of human life.
01:19:47
And the result is that they are really, whether they are knowledgeable of it or not, they are really worshipping the creature rather than the creator, aren't they?
01:19:57
Yeah. And by the way, there are some in the leadership of large environmental institutions who really do worship the earth.
01:20:06
Like Wiccans? Yeah, like Wiccans. But take, for example, Christiana Figueres.
01:20:12
She recently completed her time, I think it was about five or six years, as the
01:20:21
Secretary General of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the parent organization of the
01:20:31
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the world's biggest, alarmist body about man -made global warming.
01:20:40
Christiana Figueres said right about a year ago now that the use of climate change as a reason for reformulating public policy around the world is our best opportunity to replace capitalism with socialism as the world economic order.
01:20:59
But that's not all she's famous for. She was in charge, she was chairing the
01:21:06
Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
01:21:12
Conference of the Parties, I believe it would have been number 19 in Cancun back in 2012, might have been 18.
01:21:22
At any rate, she was chairing that and she introduced it with a prayer to the goddess
01:21:29
Ixchel, who is the Costa Rican goddess of the earth, so to speak, the equivalent of Gaea.
01:21:40
And she dedicated the activities of that UN gathering to Ixchel and thanked
01:21:48
Ixchel for the wisdom necessary to address the climate problem correctly.
01:21:56
You know, that's one part. It's very common to encounter goddess worship among environmentalists.
01:22:06
And David Forman, who was a former chairman, president of the
01:22:14
Sierra Club and then founded Earth First after that, once said that if he were in the wilderness somewhere and saw a grizzly bear attacking a child, he would favor the bear over the child because the child had invaded the bear's environment, the bear's ecosystem.
01:22:36
The bear had a right there, but not the child. So this kind of thinking is very broad across the environmental movement.
01:22:45
One of the most ironic and I think terribly tragic instances of this was last year when
01:22:53
Pope Francis released an encyclical called
01:22:58
Laudato Si on the environment. And he had just a short section in it in which he talked about global warming, but he accepted all the outlandish, exaggerated claims about man -made global warming.
01:23:15
And his chief advisors on that were Ban Ki -moon, the
01:23:21
Secretary General of the United Nations, and Jeffrey Sachs, who is an economist at Columbia and the head of the
01:23:29
United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Well, both Moon and Sachs are very, very strong proponents of the idea of overpopulation and the need to reduce human population.
01:23:46
They're both very strong proponents of government -funded, government -directed family planning programs to reduce population growth and then actually to reduce population itself, especially in poor developing nations around the world.
01:24:00
And they see that as a way to fight global warming because if global warming is caused by emissions from our burning fossil fuels and the more people you have, the more fossil fuels you're going to burn, well, the fewer people you have, the fewer fossil fuels you're going to burn.
01:24:18
So the fewer emissions you'll have, therefore, the less warming you'll have. Well, you know, this means that Ban Ki -moon and Jeffrey Sachs see population control as a part of the answer to global warming.
01:24:34
The problem with that is that these government family planning programs invariably include either highly incentivized or even forced sterilization and abortion.
01:24:47
And they often will penalize families and parents who have more than one or two children, fining them, taking away their jobs, and so on.
01:24:59
And that results in people having far more abortions. The ironic thing, of course, is that Pope Francis doesn't want abortion.
01:25:07
He rejects abortion, at least so he says. But then in addition, there's another wrinkle to this.
01:25:15
When people in these poor countries resort to abortion to limit the number of children that they're having, they tend to do sex selection abortion.
01:25:26
That is, since a boy child is the promise of support in your old age, but a girl child is not, they will abort more female babies in the womb than male.
01:25:40
And the result is that you have, as is the case right now, in China, typically about 109 male births to every 100 female births.
01:25:54
And at this point in China, there are about 19 % more males of marriageable age than there are females.
01:26:05
And very similar numbers apply to all of the major Asian nations.
01:26:12
Well, what that means is that, of course, many of these men can never find wives.
01:26:19
And that results in a high demand for pornography and prostitution.
01:26:25
Now, most women don't choose to go into pornography and prostitution voluntarily.
01:26:31
So the result of that is kidnapping and forcing women into the sex slave trade.
01:26:40
They become sex slaves around the world. And here's the final irony in this. Pope Francis, when he first came into office, told his bishops around the world that he wanted them to make fighting sex trafficking their top priority.
01:26:58
But the policy that he has endorsed to fight global warming actually causes more sex trafficking.
01:27:08
Wow. And this is where we're going to have our final break. If you'd like to join us on the air, this is your last opportunity.
01:27:15
We've only got about 28 minutes left or so. So you can join us on the air by sending an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:27:23
chrisarnson at gmail .com. I did not forget those of you who are still waiting, who have already had your questions emailed to us to be asked and answered on the air, and we will get to you.
01:27:34
But any of you who intend to and have not yet emailed us, now is the time to do that.
01:27:39
chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:27:45
Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner and our discussion on Earth Day and the worship of the creature rather than the creator.
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01:31:15
Welcome back. This is Chris Lawrence. And if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes, our guest today has been
01:31:21
Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, the founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the
01:31:27
Stewardship of Creation. And we are discussing Earth Day and the worship of the creature rather than the creator.
01:31:33
Our email address is ChrisArnson at gmail .com if you have a question. ChrisArnson at gmail .com.
01:31:40
We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, asking,
01:31:47
I know that the Cornwall Alliance has scientists involved. Is there any restriction against young Earth creationists being in participation, or are they included in the mix?
01:32:02
They are included in the mix. The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation takes no particular position on the age of the
01:32:09
Earth. We have scientists who are young Earthers and scientists who are old Earthers. We do take a very clear position that Adam and Eve were directly created by God.
01:32:20
They are not descended from any earlier life form. And therefore, the unity of the human race is preserved that way.
01:32:30
But we do have people of different positions as to the age of the Earth. So you would, although think that this is not an area we should divide over, you are vehemently opposed to the rise of some theistic evolutionists who profess to be
01:32:47
Christians who do believe that Adam and Eve were evolved from hominem species in some form.
01:32:56
Yes, that is correct. Okay, and I'm very thankful to hear that as well.
01:33:03
Tell us about what you actually do with the Cornwall Alliance, as far as really rolling up your sleeves and getting into the community to really assist in making this
01:33:17
Earth a better place to live. Well, you know, when scripture tells us my people perish for lack of knowledge,
01:33:25
I think we need to take that awfully seriously. There is so much misunderstanding in the world around us, among Christians and non -Christians alike, as to what is good
01:33:37
Earth stewardship, what is good commercial activity, what is good economic activity, that simply addressing those issues and getting the truth out there is a very important task.
01:33:51
Now, the Cornwall Alliance is a primarily educational ministry. We do that through publishing many different articles and papers on our website, through social media.
01:34:02
We have a Facebook page, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation on Facebook. We have an email newsletter.
01:34:10
We provide churches and schools and colleges and conferences and so on with speakers from among our network of scholars.
01:34:21
We even have had many of our scholars testify as expert witnesses to congressional committees experts, whether on the science or the economics or the ethics of climate policy, energy policy, and so on.
01:34:38
So we're primarily educational. However, under the same 501c3, under which we function, that's the non -profit organization called the
01:34:49
James Partnership, we have a sister organization and we work in tandem with that.
01:34:56
That is churches and villages together. Churches and villages together is a ministry to do a combination of evangelism, church planting, pastoral training, micro -enterprise startup and development, and environmental restoration and protection projects in East Africa, especially in Uganda, in remote rural villages far away from any cities.
01:35:25
What we do through churches and villages together is we train people in how to do door -to -door, person -to -person, one -on -one evangelism.
01:35:35
We train pastors to do biblical studies and preaching and all the things that a pastor does.
01:35:44
We also train those pastors to start up micro -enterprises of agricultural nature to support themselves in ministry, because these remote villages cannot afford to support a pastor.
01:36:00
So the pastors become self -supporting in terms of agricultural production and they make a part of their agricultural production, the actual restoration and protection of the environment where they function from past environmental harm.
01:36:16
So all of those things go together. Since you both are
01:36:22
Reformed and one of you is Presbyterian, you may very well have heard of my dear friend,
01:36:28
Dr. Henry Crobendom of the Solomon College. Henry is on the board of the churches and villages together and has helped us a great deal in that work.
01:36:39
The one arm is educational, that's Cornwall Alliance, the other arm is on -the -spot, very down -dirty, nitty -gritty work in these remote villages in Uganda to do the combination of economic development and environmental stewardship there.
01:37:00
O. A. Harrison, you're also receiving a free copy of the New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the
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New American Standard Bible who sponsor this broadcast, now celebrating their 74th anniversary of providing
01:37:14
God's people with his word. And we do have Orny in Perry County, Pennsylvania who says, why is it that the experts and scientists that we always hear on television are those that support global warming as being real, man -made, and dangerous to the planet?
01:37:37
We very rarely hear of the scientists who are opposing these notions in the media.
01:37:44
We only hear that the notion that this is not a great threat to the planet is laughable and that those that espouse that it is not a great threat are morons.
01:37:58
There are a number of different reasons why that kind of thing happens. One of them was made clear by Ben Wattenberg, who is an excellent sociologist.
01:38:11
A number of years ago, he wrote a book called The Good News Is, The Bad News Is Wrong. In it, he wrote about a rule of thumb among journalists, and that is, bad news is good news, good news is no news.
01:38:28
Here's the point. Bad news headlines sell newspapers.
01:38:35
Bad news program segment titles keep viewers on television news programs or on radio programs.
01:38:44
Bad news gets attention. For whatever reason, human beings seem to be far more fascinated with bad news than with good news.
01:38:54
Well, if you've got to pay bills as a newspaper owner or a radio station owner, you know that a large audience is crucial because that's what enables you to sell advertising.
01:39:06
You keep your audience by focusing on the bad news. That's one part of it. Another part of it is simple politics.
01:39:16
In essence, it's this. Politicians like to be thought of as saving us all.
01:39:23
They have a savior complex, an awful lot of them. That means that they're always going to favor claims that there is this crisis or that crisis going on around us so that they can present themselves as delivering us from the crisis.
01:39:40
It really doesn't matter what the crisis is. They're going to try to do this. For instance, when we were facing global cooling in the 1960s and 1970s, the meme was the globe is cooling.
01:39:54
It's being caused by emissions from industrial activity, especially from power plants putting aerosols into the air, reflecting sunlight back away from the earth and cooling the earth.
01:40:09
We face global cooling. This is dangerous. You need to trust us.
01:40:15
You need to give us power to reduce our use of fossil fuels to fight global cooling.
01:40:22
When warming started instead, the problem switched from cooling to warming, but the solution to the problem remained the same.
01:40:34
Give us power over your lives to force you to change your energy systems.
01:40:41
Politicians tend to do this. There's another problem as well. That is something that President Eisenhower pointed out in his farewell address.
01:40:52
That is the growth of a symbiosis between research science and government.
01:41:01
People have heard all the time of the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about.
01:41:08
That's also a significant danger. The other danger he warned about is that as governments become more and more involved in funding scientific research, that scientific research gets biased.
01:41:23
It begins to serve government agendas. What you have now in the case of global warming is, if you have a research project that you want to do, you're far more likely to get funding for it if you can connect that project somehow to the idea of global warming than if you don't.
01:41:45
If you're doing something on the mating habits of snail darters, if you can somehow tie your research proposal to global warming, you're likely to get funded.
01:41:56
If you don't, you won't. That's a very serious problem. There have been actual published studies on that very thing as part of what drives the bias, the imbalance on these things.
01:42:11
It's all over. The truth is there are indeed thousands of scientists, including hundreds and hundreds, literally thousands, of climate scientists who reject the notion that human activity is the primary cause of dangerous global warming.
01:42:30
I don't know a single one. I know hundreds of them, but I don't know a single one who denies that human activity has any part in global warming.
01:42:40
They'll acknowledge that it does. That is basic physics. But the idea that human activity is the main driver and that it's dangerous?
01:42:50
No. Far more rejects that than accepts it. As a matter of fact, in the last two years, over 600 articles have been published in referees journals challenging the notion of dangerous man -made global warming by a large variety of climate scientists.
01:43:10
So I happen to think that the worm is beginning to turn, but it's going to take a very long time for the politicians and the journalists to find out.
01:43:19
It's interesting. You have a polar opposite worldview and you're sounding a polar opposite alarm bell than Bill Nye the science guy.
01:43:34
Bill Nye the science guy. I saw him on a talk show where he was calling upon the viewers to try to stop creationists from getting positions on school boards all over the country because if evolution ceases being taught in public schools, you're going to dumb down the science classes, according to Mr.
01:44:05
Nye, and you're going to prevent the inventors in our future from existing and therefore these inventors who otherwise would have found resolutions to world poverty through their inventions will cease to exist.
01:44:29
They won't come about because our science class is being dumbed down. Bill Nye the science guy, frankly, is laughable.
01:44:37
Yes. And the truth is that in any area of scientific controversy, pedagogical studies show over and over again that students who are exposed to more than one side in a controversy learn not only more total, but they learn more about each side than they would if they were exposed only to that side.
01:45:05
So in the evolution -creation controversy, if you teach students only evolution, they learn less about evolution than they do if you teach them creation and evolution simultaneously.
01:45:18
This is because students tend to respond well to the intriguing problem of conflicting evidence, of conflicting arguments.
01:45:27
They get more interested and so they remember more, they learn more, they pay more attention.
01:45:34
This is crucial. And by the way, the studies also show that when you teach both sides, they tend to come out more skeptical of evolution than otherwise.
01:45:47
Now that seems to be, I think, the real reason why Bill Nye doesn't want both sides. But you know, as a worldview issue, there's something deeper here.
01:45:58
And that is, why is it that people like Bill Nye, or now the
01:46:04
Alliance of Attorneys General United for Clean Power, who are threatening investigations and prosecution of climate skeptics, climate change skeptics, why do they so want to silence the other side?
01:46:22
And I think it really goes down to a root worldview issue. If you have a metaphysical materialist worldview, if you think that matter and energy and motion is all that exists, well, your worldview really can't support the support the reality of reason.
01:46:41
You know, when two billiard balls meet on a pool table, they don't, you know, stop and hold a conversation and think, you know, which way do you want to go?
01:46:50
How fast do you want to go there? No, they don't. They simply exchange energy and ricochet off of each other and head off different directions.
01:46:58
There's no volunteer activity there. There's no reasoning going on. Well, if our ideas are nothing but the result of matter and energy and motion, of brain synapses firing, then they're really no different from the billiard balls on the table.
01:47:18
And there is no such thing as reason, as C .S. Lewis pointed out in his book, Miracles, in the chapter on the problem of naturalism.
01:47:26
The problem with naturalism is that naturalism is the argument that there is no such thing as argument.
01:47:34
So it's self -refuting. Well, you know, these folks want to silence the other side precisely because their worldview can only appeal to force.
01:47:44
It cannot ultimately appeal to reason. So when they find that they're having a hard time with the arguments, they want to shut the other side up.
01:47:52
Yeah, your model seems to be that which is espoused by the classical
01:47:58
Christian education movement, where they will have evolution taught in the science classrooms, not as truth, but just so the students will become familiar with what the evolutionists are saying.
01:48:12
And they will obviously teach creationism as truth in their science classes.
01:48:18
But they don't just teach creationism and keep the students ignorant of what the evolutionists are saying.
01:48:26
Right. And we find the same thing in the climate controversy. Frankly, I read constantly people from all sides on this.
01:48:37
And so because of that, I understand the arguments pro and con. The folks who are just on one side of it and only read those who agree with them tend not really to understand the arguments pro and con.
01:48:49
So, you know, we need to have open minds, we need to do what the Apostle Paul told us to do in First Thessalonians 521, test all things, hold fast, what is good.
01:48:59
And that, frankly, is the key to science. It seems that these leftists, who are environmentalist extremists and evolutionists, they hold tenaciously to their doctrine, like religious fanatics who are intolerant of others, the very thing that they claim we who are evangelical
01:49:24
Christians do. They are, in fact, doing that not under the openly expressed terms of religion, but it really is a religion, isn't it?
01:49:36
Yeah, in many respects it is. And this is something that's been pointed out by a number of different scholars.
01:49:43
Michael Crichton, for instance, in a major lecture back in,
01:49:48
I believe it was about 2002 or 2003, made the point, Crichton is the author of the book,
01:49:55
Climate of Fear, I'm sorry, State of Fear. And he portrays environmentalists as highly religious in their attitude and largely impervious to evidence.
01:50:10
Now, the one thing that I don't want to do is to embrace the notion that religion doesn't care about evidence.
01:50:16
Some religions don't seem to care about evidence, but the Christian faith is firmly rooted in the rational apologetic.
01:50:27
We start with certain presuppositions, every worldview has to have presuppositions, but we pay attention to evidence as well.
01:50:35
You know, Luke began his gospel by saying that he had carefully compared eyewitness testimonies from a number of people so that he could set forth an account of Jesus' life and ministry in proper order that would be credible.
01:50:51
He began his book of Acts by saying that after his resurrection, Jesus presented himself to the disciples with many infallible proofs.
01:51:01
The apostle John in his gospel in chapter 21 said that he had written about the various miracles that Jesus had done and cited the eyewitnesses who had observed these things so that we who read might believe that Jesus is the
01:51:19
Christ, the Son of God, and believing have life in his name. Paul tells us to test all things, hold fast what is good.
01:51:28
Peter tells us that we are supposed to be ready at all times to give to everyone an answer, a reason for the faith that lies within us.
01:51:36
So Christianity is by no means anti -evidence, it is by no means irrational or irrational.
01:51:43
It is in fact the foundation of science. Science arose historically at only one time and in one place and that was medieval
01:51:52
Europe and it's because the Christian worldview there told people that a rational
01:51:58
God designed and created an orderly universe to be understood and managed by rational human beings in God's image.
01:52:10
That's the soil out of which science grew. It did not grow anywhere else and as we are losing that worldview from dominance in the
01:52:20
West, now we're actually seeing the breakdown of science. We're seeing the beginning of the irrationalizing of science in what's called the post -normal science movement in which people go through the motions of science but their conclusions are already determined by political agendas that they hold.
01:52:45
This is a movement started by Oxford philosopher of science
01:52:50
Jerome Ravitz and a partner Silvio Funtovic and has been heavily embraced by a number of people at the very heart of the global warming alarmist movement.
01:53:03
One of them is Dr. Mike Hume who was professor of climate change at the
01:53:10
University of East Anglia of climate gate fame where emails were released that showed that a number of people at the center of all this were fabricating data, exaggerating data, suppressing contrary data, intimidating scientists who disagreed and so on.
01:53:26
Hume wrote in his book Why We Disagree about Climate Change that post -normal science was an important part of the foundation of alarmist thinking on climate change and he approved of that.
01:53:41
He had co -authored articles with Jerome Ravitz promoting post -normal science. This is essentially post -modern deconstructionism applied to the sciences.
01:53:54
Deconstruction says language doesn't exist to convey meaning or truth to project power.
01:54:01
Post -normal science says science doesn't exist to discover how the world works, to discover truth, but rather to project power to go through the motions of science in order to provide a rationale for political agendas that have already been predetermined.
01:54:20
I would love for you now to really unburden your heart and mind and leave our audience with what you most want etched on their hearts and minds before they leave the program today.
01:54:33
The most important thing is simply the knowledge of Christ. Jesus said you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.
01:54:41
He also said I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father but by me.
01:54:47
When we come to know Jesus, our minds can be transformed by the word of God so that then we can understand all things better.
01:54:58
But that will only happen if we are diligent. If we do the kind of thing that Paul says, test all things, hold fast that which is good.
01:55:08
We as Christians need to be exemplary in our commitment to truth and we need to learn the arguments pro and con on this and on many other issues.
01:55:21
Thank God for the many Christian apologists who work in fields where frankly I've done little and so I'm glad that the
01:55:28
Lord has raised them up. But we need to be followers of the one who said I am the way, the truth and the life and that means we need to diligently search for truth and serve truth and have the courage to stand up and speak it in the face of serious opposition.
01:55:49
We do have time for another listener question, B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.
01:55:56
B .B. asks are there voices of those impoverished nations, tribal voices and others that are crying out against the abuses taking place by the leftist environmentalist agenda that is crippling their people financially that the media is not allowing us to hear?
01:56:15
Well, early in the program I made reference to a book by Paul Driessen called
01:56:20
Eco -Imperialism, Green Power, Black Death. And one will encounter many such voices in that book.
01:56:27
Paul knows those people in many African countries. So that would be
01:56:33
I think the book that I would most refer to to get you started on finding these people. In addition, the
01:56:41
Cornwall Alliance's open letter to Pope Francis on climate change includes signatures of hundreds of scientists and economists and theologians from around the world, many of them from impoverished countries who are making this point as well.
01:57:04
That letter, open letter to Pope Francis on climate change is available online at climatelettertopopefrancis .org.
01:57:15
That's climatelettertopopefrancis .org. I'm definitely going to get a hold of that, review it, and post that.
01:57:25
It is quite amazing how there seems to be a conspiracy of silence amongst the conservative and traditionalist
01:57:35
Roman Catholics who are not saying a word in public via the media in protest against their pope, who is by far the most leftist pope that they've ever had, sitting in the so -called
01:57:52
Chair of Peter there in Rome. So it's amazing how Catholic Answers and EWTN and all these different groups are really handling him with kid gloves, when even as Roman Catholics they're supposed to have the freedom, as long as they act respectfully, to protest things that the pope is saying, as long as it has not been declared as dogma, ex cathedra, etc.
01:58:23
But it's just amazing that this is happening. I do have a number of Catholic friends, most of them natural scientists, a number of them physicists, who are at the forefront of criticism of Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment.
01:58:44
I think they are getting a hearing increasingly, but we'll see. It'll take some time.
01:58:51
The important thing is that all of us need simply to keep on testing all things, holding fast what is good.
01:58:59
And your website is CornwallAlliance .org. I'm really looking forward to next
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Monday, God willing, for you to return to the program and enlighten me and our listeners about global warming in even a greater depth.
01:59:20
So we're looking forward to having you back. Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be on the program with you today, and I pray that the
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Lord will just continue to use your endeavors especially to bring the gospel of Christ.
01:59:36
I really appreciate that, and if you wouldn't mind hanging on until we're off the air, because I'd like to talk to you very briefly when we're finished.
01:59:42
I'd be glad to do that. And I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater
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Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.