The Environmental Stewardship Interview

Room For Nuance

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back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean DeMars, here with my guest...

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Andrew Spencer. Would you open us in prayer, brother? Absolutely. Let's pray. Father, we thank

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You for an opportunity to be together, to have a conversation. We pray that the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart would be pleasing to You, Lord, in this time, and that it'd be a good conversation that's edifying to those that see it.

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We ask that in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Well, brother, we usually start off with our guest telling us a three to five minute version of their testimony, how they came to know the

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Lord. Fire away. Well, I was raised in a home with Christian parents, and my parents made sure that we got to Sunday school pretty much every week while I was a kid.

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And then one week, just as the gospel was continuously presented, as a 10 or 11 year old,

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I came to faith in Christ. And so, didn't attend church regularly, attended

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Sunday school, but not church, and until I had my own license, I could drive myself to church.

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That's a sure sign of conversion, that you're a teenager, and you get your license, and you're like, I got to get to church.

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That's right. Well, and a lot of that was the result of the work and the influence of my high school swimming coach, who invited all of the swimmers to church on a regular basis, and also to a youth group.

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So, I got involved in the youth group, as well, when I had a license, and was able to do those things, and it really changed my life.

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So, I got baptized as a 17 year old, and then I, you know, at some level thought I was headed to ministry, but ended up at the

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United States Naval Academy, and have really been trying to serve the church in whatever capacity I can in all the years since.

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And can you tell people what you do for a living at this moment? Right. So, I am now the the books editor for the

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Gospel Coalition. What does that mean? So, that means that I get to look at all the books that are being published out there, evangelical and secular, and try and figure out what's gonna benefit people for the sake of the gospel to have discussed on our books forums.

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I run the book awards, I pick the books that we go through and review,

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I try and find reviewers, and then I edit what reviewers give us. But we did not meet through TGC Connections.

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That's right. Right. Like, did you publish a review of your own book? No. We met because you came to the

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Evangelical Theological Society's annual meeting, and I did a presentation on Population Control Con, and then you, we had a conversation afterward, and then you invited me down here.

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Your paper was so good, I immediately thought, I have to interview this guy. Which is saying something because I did not know this going in, but at ETS you actually have to read your papers.

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It was a long three days. I mean, the presentations, rather, were just a lot of them.

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No offense to anyone who loves ETS, but some of them are really tough to sit through. Yours and one other presentation were the highlight of my week.

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That's probably because I referenced Thanos in the introduction. Yeah. But that's, part of that is just the nature of academic presentations.

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You know, it's interesting to hear people present their research, but really a lot of the reason that you go to academic conferences is for the the meetings in the bookstore, just seeing friends year after year.

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So it's about the relationships much more than it is about the actual papers that you hear.

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Yeah, that's what Andy Nocelli told me. He said, you have to go to ETS. I said, okay, great.

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He said, try it once. I said, you don't have to keep telling me. I'll go. Bought the ticket, went, saw him while I was there.

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I said, hey, this is kind of the worst. And Andy said, oh, I don't actually go to any of the meetings.

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I just go, I'm here to hang out with God. I was like, you really should have told me that. I'm not in academia.

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I don't know any of these people. But look at this. A happy accident in God's providence we met. And I read your fantastic book,

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Hope for God's Creation, published through? B &H Academic. Yes, not a

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TGC book? No. No, okay. And tell us how you got to the place in your life where you wanted to write a book on creation care.

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Okay, so took a class on environmental ethics when

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I was in my MDiv program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and then went on to start working on a

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PhD in Christian ethics. Was working at the time in commercial nuclear power as an instructor for the power plant for the operators.

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And so what I realized as we took that class, and what I realized as I began to study for a

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PhD in ethics, was that there's a hole in conservative, theologically conservative environmental ethics out there.

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And so, you know, I wrote my dissertation on that topic, and then decided that there needed to be another treatment of that.

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And so I took the framework that I developed in my dissertation, and applied it in a way that I think is more helpful for the church, which led me to that.

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So, you know, there's a hole, and I wanted to fill it. And that's where I think good books come from that really serve the church.

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Was that because you looked at creation care stuff, which we're gonna get into exactly what that is here in a minute.

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But is it because you looked at that, and you said, you know, this shouldn't belong to the left, or only to so -called liberals.

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Like, this is actually a biblical thing, and like, we should be involved in it. Was that your thought process?

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Yeah, that's a big piece of it, right? You can't watch TV without seeing somebody talk about sustainability, and green this, or green that, or environmental impact.

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And so part of my process is of thinking about what's important, and what we, what do

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I need to write a book about, or what what do I want to research, is what does the church need help thinking through in biblical terms.

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You know, Francis Schaeffer's Pollution of the Death of Man is a good book, and actually I build on what he did back in 1970 in what my approach is.

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But, you know, that's 50 plus years ago, and there's been a lot of discussion since then.

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And so part of what I'm doing is taking some of the things that he did, and trying to update it for our current issues, and the conversation that needs to go on in our church.

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I noticed that the word hope is right there in the title, and a lot of the work you do throughout the book is trying to get

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Christians to have this conversation, to do the writing, to do the thinking from a perspective of hope, not of fear and anxiety.

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Can you speak to that? Yeah, so first of all, emergencies only motivate people in the short term.

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When we're under constant crisis, and this is true whether it's the environment, or you know, political debates, or whatever is going on, you know, you can't tell everybody that every day is the end of the world unless they do everything, because eventually it all disappears into noise.

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And so you've got to have hope in order to motivate people. And so part of what

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I want to do, and what I think I did in the book, was take what is often pitched as an emergency situation when it comes to the state of creation, the future of creation, and try and look through the biblical lens and say, where is the ultimate destination?

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And what we see in the pages of Scripture is hope, because Romans chapter 8, right, 18 through 25, when

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Paul's writing about the sufferings that humans are going through, there's a looking forward at the hope of the restoration of creation, that ultimately

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God is going to make all things new. And that hopeful perspective changes the way that we approach the topic.

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Now, when you look at just literature broadly in environmental ethics, hope is actually becoming a more significant theme out there.

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I'm seeing kind of a general revelation recognizing that. So like Jane Goodall, a lot of her books in the last decade.

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The Ape Lady. The Ape Lady, right, she's still out there. She's still living, not quite gorillas in the mist level, but she's still out there doing some work, but she also speaks on environmental ethics.

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Well, her last five or six books over the last decade all have hope in the title, because she's kind of realized that there needs to be a motivation that's looking forward to something.

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Now, what she's missing is kind of the supernatural restoration of all things that's going to come through the power of God when he makes all creation new.

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So there's not a complete hope or a full hope, but you can see that there's a desire for hope.

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And so part of what I'm trying to do is take a conversation that tends to be a little dark and say there's something better out there and help point people toward that.

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But just to be clear, this isn't like a rhetorical method or like a pragmatic decision, like I'm gonna frame it this way because it'll have this effect.

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You genuinely believe theologically, eschatologically, that we have grounds for hope. Yes, right.

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Well, you know, in my lifetime, the, you know, big conversation in the 1980s was acid rain, and we've...

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Wasn't it purple rain? That's a different artist. Oh, that's different. Okay, acid rain. Yeah, so acid rain was a significant problem.

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So all the, you know, sulfur dioxide coming out of the smokestacks from the Rust Belt was going into especially the

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Adirondacks in New York. It was killing all the fish because water, the ponds and lakes up in the

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Adirondacks became too acidic. It was harming trees, things like that. What we've seen because of some of the efforts in order to limit the sulfur dioxide release has been that ecosystems have begun to come back, right?

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When I was a kid, never saw a bald eagle outside of a zoo or maybe on TV or something like that.

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Now I walk the shores of Lake Erie and there's a nest that every year has multiple eaglets in it, and they've just come back.

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And we see them sometimes even inland, walking in parks, just flying around, things that we never used to see before.

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So what we have is even just naturally speaking, signs that that creation will recover if we take positive action to try and improve the condition of creation.

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But then eschatologically, right, in terms of our theology, right, we look forward to one day when

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God takes this fallen creation and makes it new again, right?

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And I believe he renews creation. So when we look at the picture of Revelation chapter 21 and chapter 22, we see the new heavens of the new earth, which is a garden city.

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And it's, you know, filled overflowing with trees, these garden pictures, which points back to it's the it's the future that Eden was always intended to be is what that is.

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And that's what we have to look forward to. So it is a sense of hope that even in this age that we anticipate.

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Now one of the one of the main things you do in your book is you deal with you you deal with critics, non -christian critics, some even professing

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Christian critics, of New Testament eschatology who say that that vision of hope actually works against creation care.

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And I feel that a little bit as I hear you say things like, we believe that God is going to restore all of creation on the last day.

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Does that not have some limiting effect on our desire to, you know, repristinate the environment today?

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Well, repristination isn't a valid goal. Okay. Because, you know, one of the one of the problems with some, especially secular environmental ethics, is that there's a view that, you know, nature is perfect when there's no human impact on it whatsoever.

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As if humans are some sort of alien species. A blight on the planet. Right. Yeah. Some will say that directly.

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Like, you know, the a -humanist Patricia McCormick. That humans don't, there's no symbiotic relationship with nature.

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That we are inherently a species that uses, which she has a complete negative meaning of that.

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Which is why she calls for human extinction. Right. So you kind of, that's an extreme view. So there are people that think that the

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Christian vision of heaven, the new heavens and the new earth, is kind of this pie in the sky when you die.

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That prevents us from doing things that are meaningful in this life. But instead of that, this is what

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Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer, calls substantial healing. And he points toward the new heavens and the new earth and says that even though it's going to take a supernatural event for creation to be renewed and the effects of sin purged away, we should live in a way that points toward that.

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That treats creation, at least in some ways, as much as we can, in the way that it ought to be treated based on what its future is.

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And we need to pursue what he called substantial healing. And he talked about that in like true spirituality.

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He talked about that with relation to human interpersonal relationships. How we ought to be trying to treat one another.

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Because one day, you know, there's going to be no sin. And so the person that drives you crazy in the church right now and, you know, is going to heaven alongside of you, but you can't stand to be in the same room with them, that person and you are going to get along one day when we get to glory.

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Because the effects of sin are going to be gone. So those relationships are going to be restored. And the fact that we can't completely treat creation the way it ought to be treated in this life shouldn't keep us from doing the best we can in the meanwhile and pursuing substantial healing.

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You know, every time that would come up in the book, I would automatically go to the hope of our resurrected bodies, which we are called to be stewards of here and now, even though we know we can't, you know, repristinate.

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We can't perfectly heal our bodies. God's gonna have to do that one day. He's gonna have to give us these glorified vessels.

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But we know that we have to be good stewards of these bodies to the best of our abilities without getting wonky or crazy or going off into ditches.

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And it's the same thing with creation. We have to just be as wise and as careful with it as we can possibly be.

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That's right. And part of it is because what the stewardship of our bodies or what the stewardship of our creation points toward is the glory of God, ultimately.

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You know, so if we try and be fit and get buff because we want to have a beach body, then that's not a good motivation, right?

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It's not gonna lead us to the right place. If we're trying to steward creation because we somehow put it in kind of some pedestal state where it's something to be worshipped, then that's problematic.

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But if we're doing what we're doing for the glory of God, right, then that's redemptive in nature as long as it's consistent with what the biblical witness authorizes us to do.

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Interesting. We've gotten a little bit ahead of my notes, and by we I mean me, because, by the way, for our viewers who don't know,

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I picked up Andrew at 8 o 'clock in the morning this morning, and we've been talking ever since. Our conversations have been fascinating and kind of jumping all over the place.

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Let me try to follow this outline I have here. One of the things I wanted to talk about right at the beginning of our interview, and you may be saying right at the beginning, this thing feels like it's been going on a year already, is a lot of your book feels like it's not talking specifically about how to do creation care, but more about how to help

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Christians think about creation care. So let me just run through some of these categories. The book starts off immediately talking about how our creation care has to be rooted in evangelical theology.

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We'll come back and dig into these. You also pretty quickly get into Reformed epistemology. I think it's

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Reformed epistemology. Some people might just say it's biblical. Avoiding left -right dualism, or excuse me, left -right ditches in the culture wars.

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You talk about theological triage, conspiracy theories. This all just felt very pastoral to me, which is one of the reasons why

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I would commend this book to someone in our church, because I feel like they could learn about creation care maybe in the latter half of the book, but you set up all these really good boundaries for those who are beginning to think about it in the first place.

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Thoughts on that? Well, so I'm a trained ethicist, right?

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So part of my approach to ethics, so I'm trying to apply the biblical witness rightly to the issues that the world presents, but ethics is fundamentally theological, right?

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And the purpose of theology is to rightly worship God. So what I'm trying to do is get at categories that help me live rightly before God in the life that I've been presented and that I've, you know, been ordained to live in.

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And so what the four major categories that I work through are all theological ones, and that's by design.

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So I have a working theory, right, that I'm still pulling out, but pretty much every major ethical topic, there are a subset of doctrinal headings that you can evaluate that ethical question with.

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And so for creation care, it's, you know, the source of authority, it's the value of creation, the place of humanity within the created order, and then finally, what's the end goal of creation?

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So those four questions, when you read a secular environmentalist, they're asking those questions, usually in different terms, but it's consistent all the way across.

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My dissertation, which is dry and academic, but it's been published as Doctrine in Shades of Green, is all about laying out those four categories and looking at different streams of Christian, self -described

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Christian theology, eco -theology, which is a form of liberation theology, liberal theology, evangelical theology, and fundamentalist theology, and showing how those four categories explain the position.

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Their theological understanding of those four doctrinal heads explains the theological and ethical place they land in.

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So that's how I approach it. What that allows me to do is read, like,

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E .O. Wilson, who is a Pulitzer Prize -winning biologist, and see where he's talking about creation, maybe using different terms, but meaning the thing that we recognize as creation, and then understanding what's the human place in it, and then have a conversation that's not primarily related to, should we tax carbon, or, you know, what kind of power should we use, or should you have an

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EV, or whatever, but really focused on what are the ideas that are driving you to make these ethical claims and live in the way that you do.

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So everyone's bringing their worldview to bear on this ethical conversation. That's right. And every ethical issue has a set,

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I think, of doctrines that kind of crystallize and are the core of it, so that if you analyze those and you speak to people in those categories, that you can at least better determine the points of disagreement with somebody that's, you know, a true pantheist, and say, this is why we have divergent solutions.

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Right. Because we have different anthropologies, right, different doctrines of God, creation, so on and so forth. Yes. So can we be good creation care ethicists?

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Can we have strong, robust, non -artificial positions on this ethical question as evangelicals?

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I think absolutely. Okay. And in fact, I think that as Christians, like, I think the

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Christian worldview explains the world better than any other worldview out there, otherwise I wouldn't be a Christian, right? And so I think that we've got a better foundation for true environmental ethics or true creation care than anybody else does.

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We have a stronger motivation because, you know, if you're not a believer, right, and you think you should care for creation, why?

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Right. I mean, because, okay, so future generations. Why do future generations have a claim on you?

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And these questions you keep pulling the string on, and eventually you come back to kind of an inability to provide a meaningful answer.

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There's a presumed Christianity, this is, you know, Tom Helen's Dominion coming out, that underlies a lot of this, so that when we go back to, you know, evangelical theology, understanding that that's rooted in the, you know, the

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Orthodox biblical tradition, small o, of Christianity, that that's the best explanation for why everything is the way it is.

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And so when we live that out faithfully, we have a better motivation to properly care for creation than anybody else does.

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So you don't have to give up your evangelical bona fides to care about the environment?

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No. And not only do you not have to, you must not. That's part of what

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I'm arguing in the book. That's right. I think you do a good job of that. You also get into epistemology, which is a fancy word, you know, our source of knowledge, information, authority.

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Why do you get into that so quickly? Well, because one of the big arguments about, you know, environmentalism is all about, you know, what's the role of science?

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And so people claim that the reason why evangelicals sometimes haven't been as avid about particular policy programs has been because there's a denial of science in some way.

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And so, and also, when evangelicals have largely parroted unhelpful non -Christian paradigms for their environmental ethics, it's been because they haven't, they've deferred to a different source of authority than something else.

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I mean, the big difference between a progressive, a liberal, using that word appropriately,

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Christian theology is, and an evangelical

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Christian theology, is the idea of a source of authority. Because what Roger Olson argues in his story of modern theology is that liberals traditionally will interpret doctrines ethically, and they will reinterpret

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Scripture in light of modern events. So, taking a step back, there's always multiple sources of authority in play for us, even as Christians, right?

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The Bible is sufficient in what it tells us for all of life and doctrine.

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The Bible doesn't help us to repair a car. The Bible doesn't give us specific ethical data about things that we're concerned with that, you know, that in their context they couldn't have conceived of.

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An example that I provide is, in the book, is the use of asbestos.

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So, asbestos, now we think of it as it's all bad, because people get mesothelioma and you watch the class action commercials that are on daytime

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TV, and that's a big deal. But at the time that asbestos was woven into all the fabric and in the theaters and put into the insulation, it saved thousands of people's lives.

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We don't know how many, because it was a rudimentary fire suppression system. And now that we have other fire suppression technologies, it's basically a negative thing.

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I can't evaluate the ethics of asbestos, because the word asbestos doesn't really occur in all of Scripture, without an understanding of what the purpose of that asbestos is, right?

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And what it served in that particular time. And so, when I go back and I evaluate the the morality of use of asbestos in a theater in the early 20th century,

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I now evaluate that as a positive thing, because it helps to fulfill the fifth commandment, not to kill, right?

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Or to preserve life as the reformers, in terms of those positively, and so it was a positive thing.

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But now that I know about the cancers that it caused when it's broken, and I've got other technologies that replace it,

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I now evaluate that as a negative. Now, so I have to take external data and bring that in, at least to help me understand these things, and as a some kind of source of authority, which is underneath Scripture.

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But it's always Scripture that provides me the moral framework that guides those decisions.

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The norming norm. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, what would that look like, specifically in relation to environmental concerns, climate care?

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Give us something that Scripture quite obviously speaks to, and then something that maybe we need to have data coming to us from the natural sciences to help us more robustly apply the truth of Scripture.

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So, something, you know, Scripture speaks clearly to the preservation of land.

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You look at one of the reasons why Israel was sent into captivity was because they didn't obey

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God in giving the land a break. In fact, the 70 years of the captivity that Jeremiah's prophesied to have were in part because that's the number of Sabbath years they skipped, and when

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God gives that, and I can't give you the passage off the top of my head, but He specifically gives that vision and says that because it was the land that was abused.

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And it's not like He didn't tell them about this. No. In the Mosaic law, He told them, let the land lie fallow. Right. Yeah, so the judgment came because the promise was tied to the obedience, which was not just for the sake of the poor, but also for the sake of the land,

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I think. So, there's an example where, you know, caring for the land. Now, it looks a little different for us, right, but some sort of rotation and caring for the soil, and there are agricultural implications to that.

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Other places where it's a little harder to kind of suss out are, you know, how do we evaluate what our sources of electricity are?

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Because, you know, there's no free lunch in economics, there's no free lunch when it comes to energy exchange either, right.

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I worked at a commercial nuclear power plant. Every time you work at a, you know, every time you split an atom, there are fragments left, there's radioactivity, there's a certain amount of waste that gets left.

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Whenever you burn coal, there are heavy metals that are left in the ash, there are heavy metals that go into the air, we now scrub those.

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There's a lot of things that go out, there's waste that has to do with that. Without understanding what those waste products are and what the long -term implications are of any one of those given wastes,

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I can't sift through whether, you know, coal is a better electricity source than maybe nuclear power or natural gas or something like that.

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So, I need external data, but it's always put under the framework that God's good creation has some sort of ethical standing that it should be treated with respect and with a sort of integrity.

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So, the moral norm comes from Scripture, the data to help me fulfill that moral norm comes from science and the world around.

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You also get into theological triage just a little bit. Can you help us think about, again, we haven't even defined creation care yet, really, we're gonna get there, but environmental concerns, being good stewards of creation, where does that rank?

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First tier, second tier, third tier issue? Well, I want everybody to buy my book, so it's obviously first tier.

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No, and actually, so, you know, I have preached on Romans 8, 18 through 25, which is a key text for environmental ethics, and I did not preach an environmental ethics sermon.

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Did you make an application? I did have an application on it, but it wasn't my first application, because the purpose of that, the primary purpose of that text is to communicate something about the gospel, right, and our longing for redemption in there.

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So, you can't take, you're doing an injustice exegetically if you're a pastor and you're making secondary applications the primary purpose of your sermon.

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Creation care is an implication of God's gospel message, but it's not the gospel, and we can never confuse those two, and so this is also why

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I begin theologically and then work toward the ethical application, because if you get the theology right, then the ethical application logically follows.

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You're also very careful to make sure that we don't make any missiological mistakes with this.

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Can you speak to some of the ways you've seen environmental concerns and the Great Commission bleed into one another unhelpfully?

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Well, so anytime you talk, you know, the missional movement, I mean,

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Tim Keller in Center Church talks some and says that sometimes the missional movement gets so focused on things that are not salvation, like the well -being of people, poverty alleviation, that are good things, that it loses sight of the need for conversion in there.

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So, in its most extreme versions, right, you can have a soft peddling of the gospel in there, and so it undermines the the

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Great Commission. That's one way. The other way that an environmental ethics could undermine the impetus toward fulfilling the

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Great Commission would be in sort of an extreme approach that has, you know, I can't move around,

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I can't take a jet trip to a nation that needs to hear the gospel because of the amount of carbon dioxide that's going to release, you know.

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My carbon footprint for this mission trip is significant, which it may be, but that also may be an appropriate use of it, and so, you know, we should evaluate that along with perhaps our economic costs of that, and you go in kind of a

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Brian Fikert, helping herds, and that kind of idea. Fantastic resource. But you you throw that idea now of environmental cost in along with that, and evaluate, you know, is this summer trip with the youth group, three continents over, actually worthwhile or not?

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But it shouldn't stop us from doing the Great Commission work in ways that only specialized people that need to go from one place to another can.

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I've also seen, you talked about this actually a little bit in our pastor's luncheon today.

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People who came from Christian backgrounds might have gone on mission trips with their youth group as teenagers, and then they kind of get involved in environmentalism, and that becomes their new mission, right?

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That becomes their Great Commission. They sort of leave the dregs of Christianity and evangelical Christianity in particular behind, and they're still carrying out a missionary task with missionary zeal, but the task is no longer the salvation of souls, it's the salvation of the planet.

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Right, and that's, I mean, that's the impetus for the social gospel has never left this world, and so that is a, that's a potential, and when you look historically at American environmentalism, the most significant leaders historically, especially within the 20th century, of American environmentalists are one generation removed from Christianity.

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So their parents were Christians, they were raised in the church, and then they found another cause, which often bears with it language that's very consistent with Christianity.

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Historian Evan Berry talks about early

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American environmentalism borrowing language of sin and salvation and redemption from liberal

33:10

Protestant Christianity, and just kind of incorporating in that. John Muir was raised in the disciples of Christ, and then took his kind of fundamentalist, biblicist interpretations, and then applied them in an unhealthy way towards nature, which some people have called mountainanity.

33:31

He converted from Christianity to mountainanity, and believed that you could find God in nature.

33:37

So it has very resonant language in it, and in fact that's one of the reasons why

33:42

John Muir, at the beginning of the 20th century, was so compelling to people, because he was using

33:48

Christian language in order to communicate this ecological idea, and so people sometimes went along with that.

33:56

So that's a real significant danger that we have to watch out for, that we don't do that. The other thing that we need to watch out for is what

34:04

Peter Greer calls mission drift, and that's where we may start out, and we may found an evangelical creation care association, right?

34:14

It's a para -church organization, but if I'm not anchored to a confession of faith, and really to the local church in some way, then

34:22

I'm gonna start to hire for proficiency rather than for mission fit, and you've watched, you know, he details like how the

34:31

YMCA drifted on that, the Pew Family Foundation was once actually, you hear it sometimes if you ever listen to NPR, you hear that, and they're funding stuff that has nothing to do with Christianity anymore.

34:43

That's the Quaker Oates family that left their fortune in order to further really

34:49

Christian causes, but the mission drift happened because there was no anchoring in there. So if we lose our theological foundation, the ethics were only one generation from losing the ethics and the real focus, and missing all that.

35:02

So this leads me to my next thing I want to highlight from the way you train us to think about these things and have these conversations.

35:11

You talk about avoiding dual, this is my language not yours, this is me trying to transpose out of your high register into my low register, avoiding the dual left -right ditches of the culture wars that can affect the way we think about creation care.

35:30

So I think we've probably just talked a lot about the leftward ditches. Right. Can we talk about some of the ditches on the right side, like maybe conspiracy theories and science denial and so on and so forth?

35:42

Yeah, so one of the common kind of tropes out there is that climate change is a hoax and that all the environmental ideas, environmentalism is fundamentally all about getting control of people.

35:58

And unfortunately, that's not entirely conspiracy in some sense, because when you read deeply into the activist literature, you find that they actually will say that control and social regulation is a huge part of what they're looking at.

36:16

But we have to be careful, abuse isn't the criteria we judge ideas on, it's the actual ideas themselves and their use.

36:26

We also have to be careful that we don't say, I don't like that data because that individual or that group has used that to argue for bad policy positions and therefore say that the data is not true.

36:43

And this happens a lot when we say things like climate change are a conspiracy.

36:50

I don't actually believe that climate change is a conspiracy. I think that we at some level as humans have input into the change of the climate.

36:59

And I base that on basically a preponderance of the evidence and I'm aware of the counter arguments out there.

37:05

And I mitigate my actions based on that understanding that it's more likely than not true.

37:13

But if I begin to argue that that's a conspiracy theory and then 30 years from now, let's just say, it's confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that that was not actually a conspiracy.

37:26

Now what I've done, and I'm trying to tie this to like my identity as a

37:32

Christian, I can begin to confuse my political message and my accusation of conspiracy with my

37:39

Christian witness. And so when I undermine data, when I undermine arguments by just saying that's conspiracy, that's a conspiracy, that's conspiracy, and things don't appear to be and they're not obviously, then my ability to communicate the gospel is undermined.

37:58

So even if climate change isn't human -caused, right, even if the majority of scientists, it's not a reified whole, there are dissenters, there are things that are exaggerated, the models are, the scientists argue the models are wrong, they just don't know necessarily in what direction.

38:19

But there's just not enough evidence for me to believe that it is a conspiracy. Because if it were a conspiracy, there's all sorts of incentive to come forward and, you know, show that the conspiracy is there.

38:36

Let's pause for a second. You keep using the word conspiracy, and I think you do a good job in your book defining it, you know, painting the picture of like a nefarious cabal of people who are pulling strings and levers behind the scenes, and you talk about how, rightfully so, something like that is basically impossible to pull off, to get a hundred people to all agree to keep a secret, even with promise of great reward or under great threat of death, is basically impossible, right?

39:08

Right. Well, that's one of the things that brought Chuck Colson to Christ, and convinced him of the truth of the gospel accounts, right?

39:15

He has that memorable quote, which I can't give you verbatim, but where he talks about... Not that memorable then. Well, it sticks in my mind.

39:22

It's in your memory, yeah. You can google it, so it's in the memory of the internet, but he talks about the fact that one of the reasons why he believed that the resurrection accounts were true was because of the

39:33

Apostles' willingness to die for it, and that nobody ratted out the conspiracy, because he's like, after Watergate, he's like, it's impossible to get somebody not to...

39:43

If it's not true, nobody would die for it, or not everybody would. There's no way that conspiracy would hold true.

39:50

But what about Hanlon's Razor? You know, this idea that never ascribed to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.

39:58

Is it possible, and I'm tipping my hand a little bit here. Thankfully, I don't feel burdened to go one way or another on anthropogenic climate change, but is it possible that there is just a general scientific consensus that has been unwittingly influenced by forces, nefarious or otherwise, cultural forces, so on and so forth, sociological forces, epistemological forces, that has just led them down the wrong path, as has happened many times in the past with science?

40:33

It's possible that it's wrong. I just want to ask it that way, right? Is it possible? Yeah, it is definitely possible that it's wrong, but then it's not a conspiracy.

40:40

Exactly, that was the point I was getting at. And so the big framing difference there is Joseph Usinsky defines a conspiracy as something that it is a small group of people that are controlling events or the knowledge, you know, the information about things for a purpose that is designed to undermine the common good.

41:02

And this doesn't fit, climate change doesn't fit that category. It may be right or it may be wrong based on the coherence and the consistency of the evidence, and only time will tell.

41:15

So in the end, when I affirm that I think the preponderance of the evidence of climate change points toward it being real and human -caused, what

41:27

I'm saying is I think it's more likely than not, but that I apply something like Pascal's Wager.

41:33

Now Pascal's Wager is normally applied apologetically, where you... Which is not good, by the way.

41:40

Well, it works if you assume that salvation is by works and that you somehow gain some sort of meritorious value from participating in the

41:52

Lord's Supper and other churchly activities, right? So it, you know, in that sense, in his context and from his

41:59

Blaise Pascal's... You believe a false gospel, sure, it works. Okay, so there's that perspective.

42:05

But I think it works better from the perspective of environmental ethics, because if I'm right and climate change is at least partially or significantly influenced by humanity, and I restrict my use of resources in a way that is probably more biblical because it's more frugal, then

42:30

I gain either way, whether I'm right or wrong. If I'm wrong...

42:36

If the opposition is right and that the whole thing is wrong, that we don't actually play any significant part in climate change whatsoever, and if they're wrong, and we do, and that we use a lot of resources, they're gonna make it worse, and that's a negative outcome.

42:54

So on one hand, you live as if it's true, and you live frugally, right?

43:00

And responsibly, and you put things like... The word responsible sounds so much better to me than frugal.

43:07

For whatever reason, as I've heard you use that throughout the day, it just kind of hit me. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it just feels a little...

43:13

I don't know what the word is. Well, responsible is good. I actually try thoughtful, and a lot of it is...

43:22

I come back to, and I'm thinking about another project along the lines that has kind of spun off of this creation care work, and it's a pursuit of the quiet life, because two different times,

43:33

Paul talks about seek to live a quiet life. One case, he's talking to Timothy, he's like, pray for the leaders, that they, you know, the political leaders, so that you can live a quiet life, and the other time, he's like, seek to live a quiet life and work with your own hands when he's writing to the

43:48

Thessalonians. So both times, there's something about a quiet life, which can't be just a sedate, you know, sitting on your porch drinking iced tea on a

43:58

Sunday afternoon all the time, or every afternoon, because he's out there getting shipwrecked and, you know, beaten and all these sorts of things, but it has to do with a state of life that's primarily gospel focused and, you know, low consumption in some ways, right?

44:13

I think there's aspects of that that's not pursuing financial gain and material wealth as the ultimate end.

44:21

So if climate change is true, if we pursue those ends responsibly, thoughtfully, frugally, however you want to say it, low consumption, we're gonna win, whether it's true or not.

44:33

Going back just one more time to the conspiracy bad actor things, I'm sure you've paid enough attention to at least, well that sounds combative,

44:44

I don't mean for it to sound that way, but I think you would agree or recognize the fact that there are nefarious actors who are more than happy, whether it's true or not, to jump on the climate change stuff for, yeah, wicked purposes and plans.

45:02

Well, so like Naomi Klein, who's an activist in this, in her book,

45:07

This Changes Everything, which is really, she was a socialist before she was concerned about the climate, and so she has a paragraph in there where she explains that she denied the anthropogenic contribution to climate change until she realized that it could be used to bring about what she thinks some of these positive, in her mind, policy changes would be.

45:29

And so she talks about this as well in her on -fire burning case for a Green New Deal, where she's like, hey, let's just remake the whole world after her socialist vision, and that's a net positive in her mind, right?

45:43

So it very much is sometimes used by some people in order to argue for a reordering of the social order in favor of something that they already presupposed.

45:55

So it's kind of a useful concept, whether it's true or not. And I want to resist the bad application of those sorts of ideas, but I still think that there's some reality to, or more likely than not to be reality to the claims about it.

46:17

I know you're not like a climate science expert, don't claim to be, that's not what your book is about, but while I got you here, and I know that you have been thinking about these things well and often and for a long time, can

46:28

I just ask you what would be your best argument, short but nuanced, argument for the anthropogenic climate change?

46:41

And then, Steel Man, your case, what would be the argument against that, do you think?

46:47

Well, I think the best argument is the fact that the greenhouse effect wasn't invented for the purpose of explaining some sort of phenomenon.

46:56

It was discovered or conceived of as a theory in the 19th century that gases were being trapped by the atmosphere.

47:06

And so when we look at that, and when we begin to look at the way that it appears that the temperature curve has distorted around the time when human emissions due to industrial revolution have significantly picked up, there's a correlative effect or correlative, you know, inference in there that leads me to believe that that's true.

47:29

And so the other thing is that we've seen some slowing of that as the rate of the slowing of the heating up as the rate of the carbon emissions has slowed as well, or at least slowed the increase, right?

47:44

So we're seeing some behaviors that would be consistent with that pattern. And so that's basically why

47:53

I would infer, and you know, all these data, why I think that's actually true. And there's explanations for the lags and those sorts of things.

48:00

I don't think the data is perfect. I don't think the models are perfect. But I do think the concept has some validity.

48:06

I think the strongest argument against it is really just the places where the model has been exaggerated over time.

48:14

I think the worst thing that has happened for those that are really focused on climate change is the amount of exaggeration that's taken place.

48:25

You think about the vice president telling us that the half of the country was going to be underwater by 2012.

48:30

There's always a date. There's always a time. A couple weeks ago, the UN executive secretary for climate said we have two years to fix all these social systems in order to change the world.

48:43

So you keep putting dates on that. You keep throwing out 12 years for this. The 12 keeps going, and the worst effects haven't happened.

48:52

Thankfully. I'm glad they're wrong. But some of those things, I think there's been an exaggeration. There's been a picking of the worst data out there and saying this is how bad it could get, and it's going to get there by this time.

49:04

And then it doesn't happen, and then people stop believing you. Personally, I don't think that negates the truthfulness of the idea, but I do think that should regulate how aggressive we are in completely turning the social order upside down in order to achieve what are kind of sometimes arbitrary goals.

49:26

Yeah, if we really will be underwater in five years, drastic action needs to be taken. If things are just going to heat up a degree or two, and we have some time, and we can probably just make some wise, careful, calculated, long -term adjustments, well, then we should do that.

49:43

But in the meanwhile, you know, we should also take it seriously and say with the odds that that might be true, there are probably some things that we ought not to do and ways that we should self -limit that aren't morally wrong, but actually are morally right, or at least morally neutral, even if the data is wrong, and live in a way as if it were true, and we'll end up with a better outcome either way.

50:07

Either one way, we'll have more filled bank accounts and be able to equip people and send people overseas or wherever to get the gospel out, right, because we'll have less money that's dedicated to the use of resources like heating and cooling things, or we'll have, you know, less debt or whatever it is, right?

50:29

So that's a better outcome. It's a win -win either way. If the data is wrong, and if the interpretation of the data is wrong, and we live responsibly or frugally, then we win either way.

50:42

How do you make sense of, you know, in the 70s and early 80s being told that we were on a collision course with extinction by way of freezing to now the opposite of that?

50:56

That's a good question, and I think it's because there are different models out there and different interpretations, and they were seeing a dip, and they extrapolated that, and the other piece is that, you know, we probably should be cooling right now, and so we are not.

51:13

So they were right that we should have been cooling based on the other geological effects that were in place, but we're not seeing that effect.

51:22

So our impact is actually being compensated for by other effects in nature.

51:31

When you're saying we should be cooling, I'm guessing you're talking about those long -term heating and cooling cycles that the Earth goes through.

51:36

Yeah, because, I mean, at one level, climate change is just a fact because it's happening because of, you know, the the energy of the

51:43

Sun, and the distance from the Sun, and our A -axis, and all these sorts of things. Those are just, like, those are indisputable facts.

51:49

It's how much contribution are we actually having is the piece of the debate. Yeah, I think that's the thing, again, to tip my hand a little bit more, that I've struggled with is, you know, being told for a decade, like, we're gonna freeze, and then being told, okay, well, now we're gonna burn to death, and then, by the way, none of the predictions that we've made have really come to pass.

52:13

And then there are all these other equally plausible, perhaps not, if not more so plausible, explanations for the heating of the

52:20

Earth, like, you know, solar activity, or we're going through this cycle, and or that cycle, that, yeah,

52:28

I just, I found it hard to land on the man -made cause -and -effect aspect of global warming.

52:37

Well, and that's one of the reasons why climate change isn't a major focus of my book. That's right, which, I'm sorry, I've dedicated way too much of this interview to something that you don't even talk about in your book, really.

52:47

Not really, and so I always defer to other people, and so, you know, in terms of, like, scientific data and things like that, but there's an ethicist, not a scientist.

52:58

That's right, and so I'm relying on other people's interpretation of data to do that.

53:03

And it's just me and you talking. That's right, and I'm weighing in input from those that are, that even the, so I generally don't listen to people that call it a conspiracy theory, because that's just not helpful, but I weigh the contrary evidence as well, and so what

53:20

I've decided is, I'm tipped toward the balance that we are having an effect, and that we probably should take some action, but I can't do anything immoral as a result of that, and so Scripture regulates my activity so that I'm trying to do things wisely.

53:35

I think, I like Pascal's Wager. I like that thought experiment, which is not an experiment to you.

53:42

That's how you're living your life, but I like, I like to channel this through that thought experiment, but I feel a little bipolar as I do, because when

53:51

I think about some of the really unhelpful propositions, solutions that are given to climate change, in light of a

54:02

Pascal's Wager approach to this, I go, oh no, I don't want to have anything to do with that, but then I hear you talk about it from a

54:08

Christian worldview, very measured, biblical, just being a good steward. You know, don't put your thermostat on 65 if you can have it on 72 and still be comfortable.

54:17

Little things like that, and I think, oh well that sounds very reasonable. Well, so a piece of this is, one of the things that the environmental movement has consistently gone after is kids, and that the problem is that there are just too many people.

54:31

So you look back in the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich, in his population bomb, you know, he's like...

54:38

Is that kind of like the founding, like the godfather and the... Of the modern movement, right? If you go back, it's

54:44

Thomas Malthus in the 18th century. Malthusian. Yeah, the Malthusian, right? So, I mean, so Malthus is dealing with a situation where things are getting hugely better, right?

54:56

If you haven't read Andrew Wilson's book on 1776 and all the things that happened about that time, right?

55:03

It's an amazing book, and... But he... There's this positivism, because everything seems to be getting better, right?

55:10

We've got the industrial revolutions underway and all these sorts of things, and Malthus is taking a look at the world and saying, the agricultural can't keep...

55:20

Agriculture can't keep up with the population growth at this point. People are going to starve, and so his proposal was, you know, have kids later, get married later, have fewer kids, you know.

55:34

Sounds familiar. It sounds very familiar. It sounds like what we've basically done, even though it was really controversial at the time.

55:41

I don't necessarily think that approach was a good approach. I think we've got issues because of that. So then, in Ehrlich's day, you know, he's looking at it and he's saying, you know, we're gonna have mass starvation, famine, the...

55:55

I mean, everybody forgets how terrible a decade the 1960s were. His book came out in the 1960s.

56:03

People were bombing. There were kidnappings, bombings, the political divides, the violence was extreme.

56:11

There's an undercurrent of kind of racism, which Paul Ehrlich has occasionally addressed, because it's always brown people that he's concerned about the crime rates in and these sorts of things.

56:24

But it's basically saying we're overcrowded, and so we're killing each other, and it's all bad, and we just have to stop having kids.

56:32

That happened. He actually made a bet with somebody, and there's a book on this called

56:38

The Bet. So another scientist who argued that things weren't really as bad as he thought, and that human innovation would necessarily prevent the severe resource limitation that he was concerned about.

56:53

And it was based on a set of commodity prices, and I think it was gonna conclude in the year 2000.

57:00

I forget the exact details, but they had this long, decades -long bet, and the other guy won, Ehrlich lost.

57:07

So... Which means that humans did adapt. Humans did adapt. We were resourceful. Right. Yeah, we're feeding more people than ever.

57:13

That's right, and so there's a piece of this that, this is one of the things that the alarmists get wrong, is that we have a huge potential for adaptability as humans.

57:24

In fact, that's part of what we're designed for, right? We are not an alien species on creation. When we shape creation, we're not inherently sinning.

57:33

Now, sometimes when we, you know, if you dump Roundup down the drain just for laughs, right, that's no good.

57:41

But when you're responsibly using things in order to cultivate something, that is healthy use, because it's for the purpose of, you know, feeding people, alleviating poverty, the, you know, general welfare of, hopefully the land, right?

57:57

We need to take that into calculation, as well as the people around. So that's a good thing. Even though there are going to be, inevitably, some negative consequences...

58:06

That's right. ...to anything that we do, because we live in a fallen world. Right. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's always trade -offs.

58:13

Noah Tully wrote a book called The Gardener's Dirty Hands, where he addresses this fact that, you know, one of the problems with a lot of environmentalism is any impact is deemed excessive.

58:26

And the fact of the matter is that we can't not have an impact. In fact, when you look at the, kind of, the eschatological vision,

58:35

Adam was placed in a garden. The new Adam opened up the garden city.

58:41

So development, technologically and urban development, was always part of God's plan, right?

58:46

So this was the destination that we were intended to head toward, eventually. You know, by Genesis 4, you already have not only a deterioration of the condition of sin of humanity, right, because things are getting bad there, but you also have music being developed, metalworking is listed.

59:05

These are technological developments that are good, I think, and just part of God's common grace.

59:10

Even coming from the line of Cain. That's right. So that's the common grace idea. So these are all good things, but we also can not give creation time to recover.

59:23

And so part of what we're doing, if we're living responsibly, is thinking about, what am I pulling out of creation, and am

59:30

I giving it time to actually recuperate along the way? Or what am I damaging in a way that it can't recover from, at least not for a long time?

59:40

And that's where the responsible piece comes in. So Ehrlich was wrong about human adaptability.

59:46

First of all, I don't think he necessarily considered it a good thing, though he doesn't really talk about the nature of technology in what he wrote, but he didn't think that people would adapt.

59:55

Now, we will adapt, but I do think it's possible that there comes a breaking point at which we may cause more damage than things can take care of, you know, kind of in the natural order of it outside of supernatural intervention.

01:00:13

And part of my concern with that is that it's going to be the people that are already on the margins that are most significantly affected by that.

01:00:22

So who's not going to be able to move if sea level does rise, right, as a result of ice caps and those sorts of things?

01:00:31

It's the poor people, right, who maybe are at a place where there's no property rights or they just don't have funds to go, right, so this creates a major crisis for them.

01:00:42

I'm not really that concerned that the multi -billionaire who owns property on the East Coast, you know, might have to file an insurance claim.

01:00:50

Or even if the temperature really is going up, I think we're gonna have AC. Yeah. We're gonna be okay.

01:00:56

Right. But, you know, someone living in the slums of India may not. Right, and so we ought to act like, you know, like with their interest in mind as well.

01:01:06

So I think we're adaptable. I don't think that we're infinitely adaptable, and I don't think that we, like, we have to actually take the need to adapt into consideration.

01:01:18

So this is where, you know, having worked in nuclear power, it drives me crazy when environmentalists that are like, you know, climate change is a big deal, aren't like, let's build a nuclear power plant.

01:01:30

You know, so part of my answer is let's resource electricity in a way that I think is the best.

01:01:39

It's all about the least dirty shirt. Right. What's the best way forward?

01:01:45

We need to pursue those things, and as we're doing that, we need to provide solutions that can alleviate poverty in other areas.

01:01:53

So I was at a conference, pro -nuclear power conference, and I was with a guy from Abilene Christian University who's building a reactor that's a liquid sodium reactor.

01:02:05

It's using uranium in the liquid sodium for medical isotopes, but also you can, with a relatively small footprint, create enough power for, like, a remote village, which means that you could go into some place that has no clean water, no fresh water.

01:02:29

You can desalinate with nuclear power and use some of these resources and provide a means of healing and well -being for people.

01:02:38

You can pump water different places. You know, one of the most significant time drains in the undeveloped world is often women going to get water from a remote source and bringing it back.

01:02:51

Imagine how much human capital, to use the term, it's a little crass, but imagine how much of their time could be freed up for other purposes that are also good if we provided them a source of electricity that's out there.

01:03:04

These are some of the applications that we need to think of along with other things. So it's not preventing development, it's using development in order to be more responsible, have a lower impact, and be wiser about it.

01:03:17

But here's the thing, right? So, like, I have solar panels on my roof and they provide about 70 % of my electricity at peak time.

01:03:25

So in the summer, about 70%, like on a sunny day, comes from my solar panels.

01:03:30

When I was purchasing those, the consultant was like, so here's what happens.

01:03:37

Most of the time when people buy the solar panels, they put them on and what happens is they just turn the temperature down on the

01:03:46

AC in the summer a little bit more because they're not feeling the pinch of their pocket.

01:03:53

So what we've had to do in the family is make an intentional choice not to do that, right?

01:04:00

So we keep our thermostat at the same level assuming that I'm actually paying for it, which makes financial sense because now my solar panels are going to be paid, they're going to have paid for themselves pretty shortly.

01:04:15

But it makes environmental sense because I'm actually now reducing the amount of electricity that's being developed by some of the fossil plants that provide energy to my portion of the grid, right, in Michigan.

01:04:27

And so if we think of consumption solely by economic cost and not by environmental cost as well, whether that's with the pollution of water, whether it's the pollution of air, whether it's concern for the climate or whatever, if we don't value the environment as part of our resource expenditure, then that's going to lead us to bad decisions.

01:04:57

So Milton Freeman in his book Free to Choose with his wife Rose talks about one of the problems with many environmental issues is that they define normal economics because the costs are externalized.

01:05:13

Okay, you lost me. Okay, so when I am, if I'm a cabinetmaker, right,

01:05:21

I've got a certain cost for the wood that I'm making and the nails and all the things and the screws and whatever that has to go.

01:05:29

There's a cost that's associated with that. And then I pay for the materials. There's a certain cost for my time, so I got to fund the food and those kind of things.

01:05:38

I got to keep the lights on. Those are all internal costs that are measurable. And so I pass that cost along to the customer because I charge a certain amount, hopefully it's a fair amount, right, that takes into account my skill and all the wood that I use and all that kind of stuff.

01:05:55

So those are internalized costs. But now imagine that I'm taking the stain and I'm dumping the excess down the drain.

01:06:05

That becomes an externalized cost. If I'm dumping it in the stream, because the stream will naturally wash that waste, which is potentially toxic, away from my property.

01:06:15

Well, it takes it to my neighbor's property. Somebody counts the cost. Now I've externalized it, right, but it's not part of my bottom line.

01:06:22

It doesn't show up on a balance sheet. It shows up on something else. Or it could be just that I've despoiled my own area.

01:06:31

Because if I'm doing welding and stuff like that and I've got heavy metal and it's kind of poisoning the land and I can't grow crops there in two generations when they plowed my house over, right, that's a problem.

01:06:43

I've now externalized that cost for that environmental damage to another generation or to another person.

01:06:50

So what we have to do, kind of, is conceive of some of the things that we don't measure directly economically as costs and include that in our balance sheet, at least mentally, as we're making decisions about the way that we live.

01:07:07

Okay, so let's get into a little bit more of the theology of this, because we're getting into...it's all very good, by the way.

01:07:14

Why as a Christian should I think like this? Why should I want to do creation care?

01:07:21

Why should I want to internalize the cost for the sake of the environment? Well, one, because all creation is

01:07:31

God's, right? He is ultimately the owner of creation. You see this woven through, you know, when

01:07:37

God talks about the land in the Old Testament, it's always His ownership of it, and that the

01:07:43

Israelites' ownership was always, you know, like He would talk about property rights.

01:07:48

You own this land. This is your family's land, but it ultimately was the Lord's, right? The earth is the

01:07:53

Lord's and everything in it. So God owns it. We're leasing it. It's a long -term lease. That's right.

01:07:58

Yeah. Yeah, and so when we go back then, we take that later concept that even after the fall is true, it's still

01:08:05

God's. He still owns it. We go back to the origin, the creation story, and we see in Genesis chapter 1, which begins with just this wondrous declaration that God speaks everything into existence.

01:08:17

It's really marvelous. Six times in that, He says that it's good, and the seventh day, the seventh time,

01:08:23

He says it's very good, right? So there's a there's a value in creation, and we see in places like Psalm 19 where the heavens declare the glories of the

01:08:34

Lord, that part of the purpose of creation is not just to meet human needs, but it's to testify to the goodness of God.

01:08:42

You see this in Revelation chapter, or I'm sorry, Romans chapter 1, where Paul talks about, you know, how creation reveals

01:08:50

God sufficiently so that people should know that they're in need of salvation out there, right?

01:08:57

So God owns creation. It's good, as Al Walter says in his book

01:09:04

Creation Regained, he said, God does not make junk, and He does not junk what He has made, right?

01:09:10

So creation is good, and honoring it and treating it with respect honors

01:09:15

God. Second, we as humans were created with a stewardship responsibility.

01:09:22

You know, the first thing that God said to Adam and Eve, right, when

01:09:27

He created man, male, and female in Genesis 1, He said, be fruitful and multiply, right?

01:09:35

Subdue the earth and fill it. Right, yeah, so in that instance, like that actually may be the only commandment we've, as humans, generally tried to do pretty well, and that's because it feels good, right?

01:09:47

We've tried to have lots of kids, and so we've done that, but that wasn't all.

01:09:53

Like, when you look at Genesis 2, where you get that kind of zoomed -in account of the creation of humanity,

01:09:59

Genesis 2 5 tells us that there were no plants on the earth because there was no man to tend them, and then

01:10:07

Genesis 2 15 tells us that God took Adam and put him into the garden in order to cultivate it and keep it.

01:10:16

So God's mandate to humanity was to cultivate and keep the garden, and I think ultimately that was going to be an expansion of the

01:10:25

Garden of Eden, pointing toward the development that was supposed to be what we're going to see, and it's what we're going to see in Revelation 21 -22 when we get there, new heavens and new earth.

01:10:33

So that was the plan. Then sin comes in the world, right, and then you have the curse of sin, which now

01:10:39

Adam's working, and he's sweating, and he's toiling in order to eat his bread, which is a reminder to us that things are not the way it's supposed to be, and it's actually a gift from God because hard work, thorns, thistles that have cursed the ground that we're continually fighting against show us and show everybody we're in need of redemption.

01:11:02

So but all that puts us as humans as a part of creation, but a very special part of creation with the purpose of imaging

01:11:11

God by caring for creation well and developing it and cultivating it in a way that honors him.

01:11:17

So fundamentally, like if there's nothing else, creation matters because it it glorifies

01:11:22

God. We were as humans given the responsibility to do that, and then if you ask what does that continue after the fall,

01:11:29

Genesis 9, when the creation mandate is renewed, right, so Noah, they're done with the flood.

01:11:36

In Genesis 9, you get God making a covenant with all of creation that he's not going to destroy it again, but he gives

01:11:43

Noah the command to be fruitful and multiply again, right? So I think that that continues post -fall as part of our responsibility as humans to have kids and to flourish as a society.

01:11:58

You know, you look at stuff like, you know, Jeremiah 29, not the prosperity gospel part, you know, but where when you read that in context, and God is telling

01:12:10

Jeremiah, write this letter to the exiles, right, because they're headed off in punishment in part for abusing the land, but what does he tell them to do?

01:12:18

He's like, marry, have kids, plant gardens, seek the good of the city is fundamentally, but the way you do that is having kids and gardening, right?

01:12:28

These are fundamentally kind of environmental, there are issues that touch on the way we talk about environment today, but the command is do these things, you know, for the good of the city, for the good of society, for the for the good of creation,

01:12:40

I think. So okay, so we move from creation, fall, we go into exile, right?

01:12:48

In light of the cross, in light of redemption, does it still really matter? He asked with his tongue in his cheek.

01:12:57

Yeah, well, no, I do think it does matter. When you look at Romans chapter 8, right, where you see the sufferings of this life or sufferings of the world are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us, and then he talks about how creation's groaning, longing, with eager anticipation for what?

01:13:18

The glorification of humans. I think that that points toward, A, you know, in that the future restoration of creation, but the creation that comes after the future restoration of humanity, and I think we should live in light of that.

01:13:34

When we're given the responsibility to be ambassadors for the gospel, right, part of that is showing what it, at least in part, what it looks like to live a gospel -focused life that's not just about proclaiming, but also living out the implications of the gospel in a meaningful way.

01:13:54

This is where Francis Schaeffer talked about substantial healing, right? We're pursuing things, not that we're gonna hit perfection, but we're gonna hit improvement in this life.

01:14:04

And that bears witness to the gospel. And that bears witness to the gospel. So when Peter says, you know, always be ready to give an answer, a reason for the hope that is within you, you have to live like there's a hope within you in order for people to answer your questions.

01:14:17

Well, what does a hopeful life look like? A hopeful life looks like one that isn't like,

01:14:23

I'm destroying everything around me because nothing matters. A hopeful life looks like restoring, building, growing, painting, designing wondrous things.

01:14:34

In fact, you know, there's a close correlation between care for the environment and poverty.

01:14:40

So when you look at places that have been severely afflicted by poverty, they're typically environmentally damaged.

01:14:51

Now, sometimes that's causal. Sometimes it's a result.

01:14:57

So in some ways, land is cheaper when it's damaged.

01:15:03

You know, the land that's nearest to the manufacturing facility is gonna be cheaper, even though there's environmental costs to it, right?

01:15:11

And so people that are already on the margins are gonna get pushed there. But when you look at, even in kind of like, you know, just the slums kind of situation where there's no real pure toxin that's being pumped into it, it's not an environmentally healthy situation.

01:15:25

It's a very short -term perspective where, you know, like, what do I need right now? I need to eat and I need to be warm.

01:15:32

And if I have to kill the forest in order to do that, I'm gonna do that. When we begin to alleviate some of the worst effects of poverty and give people other things that are, you know, maybe even technologically advanced, where they don't have to take so much of the environment, you see environmental improvement that results from that.

01:15:51

You alleviate some of the poverty. People care and they take care of things better.

01:15:58

You know, there's one of the reasons why there are multiple reasons, but one of the reasons why nicer places tend to have nicer parks is because people that have the bandwidth to care about other things will begin to care about the environment.

01:16:14

And so there's an element of that human development and an alleviation of poverty that actually helps to improve the lot of creation as well.

01:16:24

That's such an interesting remark, the bandwidth to care. I'm thinking about developing nations and how we kind of finger wag them for their carbon footprint, whether that's fair or not.

01:16:35

But we finger wag them because we're already developed. We're already affluent. You know, we're like, you guys really need to reduce your carbon footprint.

01:16:44

But they're trying to play catch -up with us and they don't really have the bandwidth to have those same concerns that we do. Yeah, well, and there's a lot more that goes in with that.

01:16:53

So Betsy Richards wrote a book, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, where she talks about, it's all about, you know, population control attempts.

01:17:01

And she's a opposed. Now, it's interesting because she's an advocate for abortion, but she's also opposed to kind of centrally regulated population control measures.

01:17:12

But one of the things that she points out in that book is that population control plans almost always come from white men in affluent areas that are like, you people need to stop having kids.

01:17:26

But what she points out is the people that they're concerned about having too many kids tend to be the people that have the lowest carbon footprint.

01:17:34

So there's an inherent injustice in it. And she also details some of the ways that just all these attempts at population control tend toward eugenics and just really negative, unethical, even by her standards, outcomes in there.

01:17:51

And it's just abusive situations. So we want to avoid that. But it's funny because it's the people who already have it that are really using, probably, if we wanted to divide it up, more than their fair share, right, that are accusing the people that don't have enough in doing that.

01:18:07

You look at the way that electricity generation has been restricted, even in the subcontinent of Africa.

01:18:17

And, you know, South Africa has some nuclear plants, but they're the, and I'm not sure if there are any other ones.

01:18:25

There's one natural one. But, you know, those, some of those technological developments, we haven't helped with.

01:18:33

And we've actually discouraged. We've incentivized not developing. So then you have people, basically, you know, cooking over dung or over manure.

01:18:43

That's actually another thing that I got from the guy from Abilene Christian University, is the plan, the vision is to build these small plants in order to electrify so that people don't have to heat their homes with animal manure anymore.

01:18:57

Because the, it's just terrible for your respiratory system, because you're breathing all the fumes, and, you know, you just, you just do the particulate, all that.

01:19:05

So negative health outcomes, and the reason why, because development hasn't gone forward.

01:19:11

Why hasn't development gone forward? Because a lot of times, in the name of environmentalism, there's been aid that's been promised or offered, and it's restricted certain aspects of development, and not allowed that, whether it's economic or, you know, kind of infrastructure, power generation.

01:19:28

But their development in those areas would actually reduce their... That's right. Yeah. Well, it would alleviate some of the signs, symptoms of poverty.

01:19:35

It would improve the situation a lot. And it would reduce their environmental impact. In many ways, yeah.

01:19:41

In many ways. Going back to a little bit more of this theology of creation care, I'm not gonna be able to do this perfectly, and I didn't get it in my notes, but you talk about the way we ascribe value to creation.

01:19:52

You say we can't say that creation has intrinsic value, because only God has that in and of Himself. We also can't be utilitarian and say that creation is valuable only insofar as we can use it for some purpose that we desire.

01:20:06

And then you kind of, you set those up as like the Aristotelian, you know, one on one side, and then you chart the way, the mean in the middle.

01:20:13

What's, what's the right way we should think about the value of creation? Okay. So there's, there's basically three terms out there, and I borrowed this from a non -Christian philosopher,

01:20:22

C .I. Lewis, not C .S. Yeah, I kept reading it as C .S. Lewis, even though, again, an

01:20:28

I is not an S. Yeah, he's a pragmatist, was not a Christian, so he argued for these three tiers.

01:20:34

But I can find it in, Augustine, I can find it in Jonathan Edwards. I think it's, I think it's a real thing.

01:20:40

You can probably find it in the Bible. By implication. If you squint and look sideways. Right. Well, some of these, you know, we're using human categories and creating categories to try to better understand reality.

01:20:51

Yeah. So intrinsic value says that a thing has value in and of itself. Right. That, so if, if, if space were a totally void, and the only thing that existed was this thing, that it would be valuable.

01:21:07

The only thing that's true of is the triune God. Right. Right. When people talk about, and I have to be careful here, because intrinsic has been the standard term that many

01:21:18

Christians, Francis Schaeffer uses the term intrinsic, and he doesn't mean intrinsic in the way that other people use it in that extreme sense.

01:21:26

But if we, if we view something as valuable just because it exists in and of itself, then that sets us up to have a very hard time making decisions about what to do with a thing.

01:21:37

So if I'm choosing, you know, can I cut down this tree in order to, to fuel my fire in the middle of a snowstorm, and the thing has intrinsic value, then

01:21:48

I don't really have a basis to make that decision. Yeah, like the tree is no, we're pantheists or panantheists.

01:21:54

Right. The tree's not more valuable than me and my comfort. Yeah. And so it's, it's a term that is, has problems, which means that like there's, when, when value theorists talk about this, they actually will say there's intrinsic one and intrinsic two.

01:22:09

So intrinsic one is this absolute idea, and, and then there's intrinsic two. So that's one side.

01:22:15

Intrinsic two could be us reflecting the image of God. Well, that's the inherent value. Okay. Right, so that's my middle way.

01:22:21

So the other, the other, the other extreme, which is true, is instrumental value. So things have value for the purpose that they, they're, they're, they're utilitarian.

01:22:32

Yeah, there's some sort of utilitarian value, and things legitimately do have utilitarian value. The problem is when we assume that that's the only value that a thing has, and that goes back to the goodness of creation.

01:22:44

God created it. It reflects his glory. It's useful for pointing people toward him. So it can't be only instrumental.

01:22:52

That's where inherent comes in, and that's where an object has value as it appropriately reflects the purpose for which it was designed.

01:23:02

So, say that one more time. So an object has value as it reflects the purpose for which it was defined.

01:23:08

Okay. So some of this comes into the idea of, you know, kind of the Augustinian idea of evil as negation.

01:23:14

So that, that absence of good. Right. Not a thing in itself. That's right. I think that's where I see it in, in Augustine most strongly, but he also talks about use, and abuse, and enjoyment.

01:23:27

So abuse is the misuse, so that would be seeing something as purely instrumental. Enjoyment is something that only, you should only do, enjoy

01:23:35

God, but you use an object in order to enjoy God.

01:23:40

Right. It's, it's a mediating, but you don't enjoy the thing itself. So it's this middle purpose.

01:23:46

So as humans, right, we have inherent value, right, because God values us, because we're reflecting the value of the creator, and we were created for a purpose.

01:23:58

The tree in my front yard has inherent value. It reflects God's design.

01:24:05

It also has, so it has a purpose in God's economy, right, simply to be a tree. I mean, the

01:24:12

Psalms talk about Leviathan playing in the deep. Right. So there's a sense that God gets delight from his creatures existing and frolicking, right, out there.

01:24:22

So there's a, there's a value in creation, even though it does no instrumental good for me.

01:24:27

And so that idea of inherent value, I think, is essential to rightly understanding creation care.

01:24:34

Because, on the one hand, that means that the tree in my front yard has value, despite its shadiness or whatever, because it reflects the glory of God.

01:24:45

But it's not an ultimate value. So if my choice is between heating my house and keeping my family from freezing to death, and having shade, and, and it's, you know, it's based on God, I can cut it down.

01:24:59

Because I'm making a calculated decision at that point based on values.

01:25:07

At the same time, you know, so we talk about inherent value. That's important as well when we think about just like medical ethics, too.

01:25:15

Right. So people, people say, well, every human life is of infinite worth, which sounds really good.

01:25:21

And I'm gonna sound really mean when I say it, but that's not true. Right. Now, we have to not treat humans as a means to an end, so they don't just have utility in there.

01:25:32

But there's, there's a, an inherent value in humans. That's the reason why

01:25:39

God was authorized the death penalty in certain circumstances. That's the reason why, while we try and rightly, you know, care for people, and try and heal people as appropriate, but it really wouldn't be acceptable to wipe out all the trees, just to use an extreme example, in the whole world to save one person's life.

01:26:00

But that's the kind of thing. If somebody really is of, if every life is of infinite value, then that would be justified.

01:26:06

Right. Economically, you talk about things like, if everybody were of infinite worth, then cars would be regulated so they could only go like five miles an hour.

01:26:15

So you really could never kill anybody. Right. Those kind of things out there. So we don't believe the intrinsic idea in the way that we live, because you can't functionally live that way.

01:26:26

But we can't live in the instrumental only way, because that's terrible, and that denies the imago

01:26:33

Dei, when we're talking about humans, or the goodness of creation, as it's ordered by Scripture.

01:26:39

So we have to find that middle course, which is, in my book, inherent value.

01:26:44

Can you give us those three again, just in case we have any note -takers? Yeah. So, intrinsic value in and of itself, instrumental value for its usefulness, inherent, which is value as it reflects the

01:26:59

Creator's purpose for it. That's good, brother. You know, as I was reading your book, I think the thing that really stuck with me most, the thing that made me go, okay,

01:27:11

I do think I need to do a better job of caring for creation, whether or not, in my mind, the jury is still out on the causes of climate change.

01:27:22

Just the stewardship argument. Just, we recognize this in other areas.

01:27:29

There's money, if it's in our, if it's in our possession, God gave us this money to use well, in such a way as to glorify

01:27:36

Him. Our bodies, our marriages, our children, our whatever.

01:27:41

And that seems like it has to be applied to whatever little plot of garden

01:27:47

God has given us. Yeah, I mean, that at the center of it is the key, and that's why, you know, the climate question really comes up really late in the book.

01:27:56

It's not a major focus, and you can rightly, you can do a lot of things and completely disagree with my preponderance argument on that.

01:28:04

So, the big focus is, how are we living rightly with the resources that God has allotted us, and using those ultimately for His glory, which, you know, is tied up in the

01:28:15

Great Commandment and the Great Commission, right? How are we fulfilling those within our local church, within our communities, and, you know, throughout the globe?

01:28:24

And the way that we live has to reflect those priorities. One of the things, at the end of the day, and part of this whole

01:28:33

Pascal's wager argument is that I'm convinced that many Christians are too trapped in, especially in the

01:28:39

West, in materialistic consumption, and it's the old, you know, we're spending money we don't have to impress people we don't like, right?

01:28:48

And we're going into debt. We go to work to jobs that we hate, to buy cars that we don't, to buy things that we don't need to impress people that we don't like.

01:28:54

Yeah, that's the one, right? But I think that's true, and it has, I think it has an environmental impact. It does, clearly, even if it's not carbon, the amount of junk that flows through my neighborhood every week.

01:29:07

Just the amount of food that we waste is sinful. That's right, yeah. At some level, you, like,

01:29:13

I don't want to, like, if you didn't eat the baked beans that were left over from two weeks ago, I don't want to attribute, like, sin and malice to that.

01:29:20

Sometimes things get left over, but when we're thoughtless about things, we're taking God's good gift, and we're not treating it well, because He's provided so much, and that attitude is definitely sinful, whether or not, you know,

01:29:31

I left the lights on by accident. I wouldn't attribute sin to that. Oh, after reading this book, now I have theological grounding to yell at my kids whenever I come home, and every single light, are we being stewards of the resources

01:29:44

God has given us? Get back in there. Yeah, but this, that affects every area of life, right?

01:29:51

There's, you know, the Kuyperian quote, there's not one part of life, though, over which God has... Not one square inch. Yeah, one square inch of the world that God has not declared mine, and that's absolutely true, and it has to do with the environment, too.

01:30:03

So, you know, things I talk about, I think things that are important are, are we using resources wisely?

01:30:10

When I'm buying an object, am I buying it just because I'm getting a quick dopamine hit when

01:30:16

I push the button on the online retailer? Does that actually add... Is there a purpose for that?

01:30:22

Am I stewarding all of my resources wisely? Do I have an end goal for that? Am I just carelessly throwing stuff out that could be repurposed or given to somebody else for another responsible use?

01:30:34

Am I buying something that I really probably should borrow from somebody? And you give the example of having like a snowblower or something like that.

01:30:43

Well, the snowblower would make sense in Michigan. I use the example of the pressure washer. Pressure washer.

01:30:49

Which I purchased because it was on sale, but I've used a total of like four times now, and so, you know, like did that $300 expenditure really make sense?

01:31:00

Maybe, but what would make more sense is if I used it and then if my neighbors were able to use it as well, and so we shared that resource instead of everybody having their own individual pressure washer.

01:31:12

What if we all got together on a commune? I mean, no?

01:31:17

Okay. So, you know, Aquinas talks about concerns for property rights, so, and his argument's a little helpful here because he,

01:31:28

I think it's question 66 in the Summa, where he talks about property rights.

01:31:33

So he talks in that, in an ideal world, we would share, right?

01:31:40

There'd be, you know, I think, and when we get to heaven, there's still gonna be work, I think, but it's not going to be.

01:31:47

Probably won't be boundary stones. Probably not to the same extent. I'm probably not a mass, I'm not amassing a 401k, right?

01:31:53

You know, the resources are gonna be provided for, but because of the fall, some of these things are necessary, so, and the law of the commons applies, right?

01:32:02

So the reason why communism works when it's on the scale of your family, right?

01:32:07

Because you're basically a socialist system. You don't make your kids pay rent, do you? Not yet.

01:32:13

Okay. So it works on that scale, and part of that's because you have some ability to enforce the amount of work that needs to get done to make the family work, or you can cover for, you know, the freeloaders in your house.

01:32:28

It doesn't work on a social scale because it changes the incentives in there, and so it's just a function of human nature in there.

01:32:37

Yeah. That's way off topic. No, I'm actually trying to, like, keep my brain from running down that path to stay tight on this path because there's so much still to be discussed from your book.

01:32:47

One of the things that you talk about that I think is very helpful is the need to think locally. I don't remember the name of the author.

01:32:53

He wrote about, and I'm gonna mess this word up. It's such a hard word. Macadamization? Okay. Bilbrow?

01:32:59

Yeah, Geoffrey Bilbrow. Yeah, what's that word? Macadamization. Macadamization. Such a hard word.

01:33:05

He basically just says, like, we live in a world where we can see all of the problems in the world from our backyard all the way to Timbuktu, and they all are disparate.

01:33:15

We don't really see the clear connection that they have if there is one, and so we're left kind of paralyzed in many ways to take any action, and the solution, and he's not the only one that says this, a lot of people say this, including you, is subsidiarity, you know, the proximity principle.

01:33:33

You probably can't do anything about the emissions that are coming out of the smokestacks and factories in China, but, like, you can think well about your family, your local church, your neighborhood.

01:33:47

Yeah, so talk a little bit more about that, thinking locally. Yeah, so, you know, Geoffrey is the editor of Front Porch Republic.

01:33:55

They've been inspired by, like, Wendell Berry and his thoughts about community and place and all those things in order to do really good work there that I find helpful in a lot of regards, and what he's talking about there with mechanization, it's in his book about reading the news, which is a great book and, you know, be worth reading, and just the amount of information we have causes us a great deal of stress, and it fragments our minds because we're always shifting from one thing to another.

01:34:26

Now this. And now this. That's the postman quote, right, and so it's following that train along, and you think about, you know, like, 45 percent of young people say that they're severely affected on a day -to -day basis by climate anxiety, right, because they're concerned about the fate of the world, and it's because when you go into an algorithmically determined world in your telephone or your cell phone, you have everything is this crisis that's happened, and it's tied to climate and this crisis, and it's environmental, and over and over again, these things are negatively portraying, and they're creating a sense that I can't do anything about it, and I can't make my parents do what

01:35:12

I want them to do, and it leads to a sense of despair. It leads to a sense of hopelessness because they think that, you know, we're off the rails, and there's no hope in the future, and we're all gonna die.

01:35:26

So the answer to that is turn off the phone, right, because this is where, like,

01:35:32

Jonathan Haidt in his Anxious Generation, Gene Twenge talks about, you know, the amount of stress that's caused by some of these technologies.

01:35:40

Just simply avoid them. Recognize that there are real issues that need to be solved, but that as a human that has been, you know, given by God a body and limitations and put in a place that God has called me to at this given time, that I have only a certain sphere of influence, and so what can

01:36:00

I do? Well, like you said, I can't make the Chinese factory, for example, stop spewing whatever it is or pushing something into the river.

01:36:10

I can't do that, but what I can do is I can clean up the river that's nearby, and this is part of the problem because when we think about environment, when people say environmental ethics, we think about something that is outside of ourselves, and like environment is

01:36:29

Yellowstone National Park, right? That's what I'm concerned about.

01:36:35

Environment's my front yard, right? Environment is this, you know, and so part of it is not just, you know, allowing the environment around your home to actually be something that you participate in and not just getting out of your car, going in your house, plunk it down in front of the

01:36:50

TV or the computer and watching the next horror stream of emergency things that are happening, right?

01:36:57

But actually seeing the neighborhood and cleaning up, picking up trash in the park, you know, all those things that we can do that actually make a difference because even though the trash in my park, it's only a few pieces, right?

01:37:13

But if I pick that up, that doesn't go into the river, and if I pick it up out of the river, that it doesn't go into Lake Erie, and if I keep it from Lake Erie, then it's not going to go eventually into the

01:37:23

Atlantic Ocean. If it's not going to go in the Atlantic Ocean, it's not going to become part of the next plastic burg that's out there, and so those little actions don't have a huge effect, but cumulatively, they can have an effect, and they give me a sense of hope because when my park, because I live right across the street in my little cul -de -sac from a park that's a nice walking park, when that park looks good,

01:37:49

I enjoy it, and it reflects God's glory at some level to me, and so those are things that I can do that make a difference, that give glory to God, that lead to a sense of hope in my own life.

01:38:02

You know, the consistent small actions reminds me of my family's budget.

01:38:09

When you look at the bank account sometimes, and you go, oh my goodness, what happened this month? Right. It's never like a $5 ,000 bill that you didn't expect to come up.

01:38:19

It's like, oh, we went out to eat twice as much this month, or you know, you bought 15 energy drinks, or something like that.

01:38:26

I don't drink any drinks, but it's always a small things that add up, and so now you extrapolate that out to, let's just say the

01:38:35

United States, 300 plus million people. If even half of them were just a tiny bit more cognizant of the way that they care for their own little sphere, what you're saying is it would have a pretty big impact.

01:38:48

I do. I do think that, and you know, but it again, it takes calculating more than just how much does it cost in terms of financially, though that's an important metric, but there are other metrics that go along with that.

01:39:02

You know, like what are the waste products of it, and where are they being taken care of, and can it be reused, and all those kind of things that are very important as well.

01:39:12

But yeah, everybody wants to solve the problem by them, some other them, doing something big, and there is a sense that regulation is necessary at some level.

01:39:28

Yeah, let me pause you right there, because in the talk you gave earlier, you talked about, in the one hand, saying regulation is necessary, on the other hand, saying that you're a free market guy.

01:39:39

Help me understand how those two things fit together. So my position on environmental regulation largely comes through Milton and Rose Freeman and Roger Scruton.

01:39:53

Classic progressives. Not how most people would classify them, but depending on the day where we say they didn't say what

01:40:00

I liked now, they would be classified as progressives. So Freedman talks about the need for regulation in order to internalize external costs.

01:40:11

For those people who don't know, Milton Freedman is like the most anti -government regulation economist maybe ever.

01:40:18

Not the most, he's one of, there's actually multiple streams of libertarianism, and he's in one of them, so he's not the extreme extreme, but he's trending in that direction.

01:40:28

I've never gone more than him, so good to know. Okay. I've stayed within the bounds of sanity. So, but he does argue for, and he's not, he's talking about more like sulfur dioxide and things like that, and putting regulations on that to make sure, and that's where the scrubbing is now on smokestacks.

01:40:45

This is all, that book was written in either the late 70s or early 80s. The issues have changed, but...

01:40:53

But why didn't he say, let the free market take care of pollution? Well, that sounds like something he would say. It does, except that what has actually happened, what actually happens is when you externalize, the market doesn't have the information that it needs to to make the change.

01:41:09

So here's the thing. So here's the famous example of the free market working, people argue.

01:41:15

This is in Ian Murray's book, An Inconvenient Truth, A Really Inconvenient Truth.

01:41:22

Ian Murray, the church historian? Not that guy. There's another Ian Murray out there. So Ian Murray, A Really Inconvenient Truth, and he cites the example, and this is common among small government libertarians,

01:41:36

Ronald Coase, C -O -A -S -E, I think, makes the argument that the market should take care of everything, there should be no regulation, and that the regulation on pollution is actually a license to pollute.

01:41:52

And he uses the case, and he's not totally wrong, but he uses the case that in the

01:41:58

UK, there was so much pollution going on that the fishermen societies sued the companies that were polluting, and in a civil court, caused them to pay such a heavy fine that it caused them to stop polluting, right?

01:42:18

And that's the example that says there's a legal system that's designed to enforce property rights in order to allow for, you know, ending of this environmental problem that is causing damage with the free market, no government regulation required, no release permits, nothing like that.

01:42:39

That works, as Scruton argues, only because of the common law and the way that fishing rights are understood in the

01:42:49

UK, in particular, where fishermen are understood to have rights to the fish, right, and therefore have a claim to push back on the polluter.

01:43:02

That doesn't really work well in a situation where the rights are not easily established.

01:43:08

So, if it's, let's just say oil out in the middle of the ocean, right, and it's a common fishing area, because everything outside of a hundred miles is by international treaty, unless you're

01:43:21

China, but international treaty is considered basically free, right?

01:43:27

You can fish, you can, you know, whatever, but if I, as a company, am taking oil out and just dumping it in there, and I'm destroying this fishing ground here, who's gonna sue me?

01:43:39

Nobody has a property right in order to do that. So, there's no legal mechanism in order to do that, because it's not

01:43:46

US territory, it's not, you know, Swedish territory or anything like that. So, it doesn't work in all circumstances, and in the

01:43:55

United States, where you don't have common law treatments of, you know, the trout population in the

01:44:03

Tennessee River, right, then there's no mechanism for me to be able to sue as an independent citizen or as a member of a club, basically.

01:44:12

So, it's ideal, and the example that Coase gives is true, but as Scruton argues, it doesn't actually work in larger situations, or in other situations where you have emissions that are externalized, that cross over some sort of political boundary.

01:44:31

How do you... Could cross state lines, could cross international boundary lines, yeah. Right, so when the

01:44:37

UK, or not the UK, so USSR had their Chernobyl accident, and they had a radiation plume that spread throughout

01:44:44

Eastern Europe, right, what, how do you get back at them? You can't, right? There's no mechanism for that.

01:44:50

So, you know, we need some sort of regulation, so you, especially state lines, there needs to be some sort of regulation in there in order to control that.

01:44:58

The problem with regulation is, and this is just part of the dysfunction of our political system, is that there's so much need for regulation that high -level laws get passed, and we allow bureaucrats that are unelected to fill in the gaps, right, and so then some people are making decisions that aren't geared toward the actual needs.

01:45:24

So, you may have somebody making decisions about, you know, whether or not you can clear a ditch in Nebraska that has never set foot out of the, you know, the off the

01:45:35

East Coast, right, one of those states, and that can create real problems. So, you've got to have, you know, you're always going to be pushing back.

01:45:42

Regulation is never going to be perfect, but you have to pursue regulation that's just, that values the norms of law, the rule of law consistently, that values property rights and respects people's ability to actually generate wealth and proceed without enabling abuse.

01:46:02

What if we put together an international court system, run, and it'll kind of govern maybe all the countries of the world to preserve the environment?

01:46:13

What do you think about that? So, again, the bigger picture you get in trying to regulate some of these things, the worse the rules get, and then what that, you know, and when we look at the climate treaties and things like that that have been put forward, they almost always are disadvantageous to the the players that most need to develop, right, and they're, you know, in our advantage because we're not going to give up anything, so there's that, or they're disadvantageous, you know, they don't give us the ability to do what we need to get done.

01:46:51

So, I don't put a lot of trust in that. I don't think that's helpful. I think that there is a place for, you know, a nation to have the rights to make some determination, but then our role in that is to be responsible with that.

01:47:07

The free market works when you have moral people, right, so when you look at Adam Smith's first book before he wrote his economics book and invented the thing was moral philosophy, right, so he was a deist, so he's not a perfect model in all things, but he was concerned about the morality of people.

01:47:26

When you look at his example of the butcher's self -interest in not putting, you know, the waste out in the back alley, he's concerned about social pressure.

01:47:36

That only matters if people aren't commuting 20 miles to the butcher shop and they actually care what's in the back alley, so when you have a tenement there with a bunch of people that are barely making a living, if they are, and they're the only ones that are being negatively affected by the the rotten meat in the back alley and nobody's listening to them because it's a bunch of people that are driving their, you know,

01:47:59

SUVs in from the neighboring suburb to get their stuff, now you have an issue, and now some of the free market breaks down because it's that information, because the information about the stinky meat isn't getting to the people that are the customers, so they're not making a good decision.

01:48:17

I don't remember who said it, some Christian economist, he just said the free market can't actually be free without biblical morality.

01:48:26

Yeah. Like, sin always puts us in chains, epistemologically, morally, so forth.

01:48:37

Oh man, there was something I was gonna ask you about, something that you were just saying. It was gonna be good. It was gonna be real good.

01:48:45

Okay, well, I can't remember it. If I do, I'll come back to it. Oh, no, I do remember. Look at that. I came right back to it.

01:48:50

Just like I said I would. I never lie, like me and George Washington. Romans 13. Okay.

01:48:56

It is in the purview of the government to punish that which is evil. Yeah. There's some debate about what it means to promote what is good.

01:49:03

Is that something the government actively does? Is that something that they do by not punishing people who are doing good?

01:49:09

Anyways, but it certainly seems like it has to be within the purview of government, per Romans 13 and its

01:49:16

Genesis 9 antecedent, to bring the sword against those who are destroying the land and making it uninhabitable and being bad neighbors and, you know, all that seems like, if applied wisely, it has to fall under Romans 13 stuff.

01:49:35

Yeah, and I think there's a measure that that's true. Unfortunately, so much regulation

01:49:41

I'm not happy with, but I think it is within the role of the government to do that, and so it's our, should be our goal to lobby for things that are actually beneficial in doing that.

01:49:53

So one example of this, I think, is I would love to see something like the Endangered Species Act reconfigured.

01:50:00

Okay. Because right now... Not repealed. Not necessarily. I mean, if it's repealed, then replace it with something that is actually intended to improve things.

01:50:09

So right now, when you have an endangered species on your property, you can lose the ability to use that economically, that piece of property, in a way that's kind of economically advantaged, and it's basically a big penalty.

01:50:28

So if you've got the, you know, the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, now that property becomes a value less to you based on finding that thing.

01:50:39

So it essentially punishes someone for having something that could be good.

01:50:47

So it punishes the good... How does it punish them? Because they're deprived of the use of that resource.

01:50:55

And you said they shoot? So what it leads to is a mentality of shoot, shovel, and shut up.

01:51:00

Okay. Right? So you kill the animal, you cover it up, and you don't talk about it at all.

01:51:07

And I think that that creates negative incentives, and I don't think it works that way all the time, but you know, you can...

01:51:12

And there's novels written about, you know, developers, you know, hiding the fact that there's a thing, you know, whatever endangered species that's out there.

01:51:22

That's a negative thing. But what if we really value the spotted owl or the bald eagle or whatever, that we put our economic will behind that, and we decide that, yes,

01:51:35

I think that the world is a better place because this thing, this species, is in existence.

01:51:40

So now somebody finds a thing. Now it may be inconvenient, but what happens if I actually just maybe not reward them over, but at least provide compensation for the market value of that land that they can't use, that resource, in compensation for having this nest there?

01:52:00

An example of this that is real, and in real life, I mean it's an experiment that's still, you know, going on, is that gray wolves have been reintroduced to Yellowstone.

01:52:11

And one of the big problems with gray wolves is, you know, they don't recognize when they're going outside the park, and they don't always scan their pass on the way back in, right?

01:52:19

They're just kind of going in and out, whatever. And to them, a cow is a much slower buffalo, and it probably tastes just as good.

01:52:29

So they will eat a rancher's cattle instead of catching something else.

01:52:37

What's happened is there's a trust that actually compensates ranchers for the cost of the cattle that's been destroyed along the way, the property loss there.

01:52:47

That trust is not set up by the government? No. It's basically a free market experiment out there.

01:52:54

And, you know, is it working perfectly? Probably not. Like, systems never do. But at least there's a means for compensation for the loss, that if we value as a society the gray wolf being a part of the

01:53:08

Yellowstone ecosystem, then investing some money, whether it's private, as private citizens, into a trust fund, or as if we decide to do that as a society, can be a positive thing.

01:53:20

And that essentially is, if not rewarding good, at least compensating for the good of the toleration of the gray wolf and not exterminating it, because it's a population.

01:53:33

And so I think there's real hope for some positive outcomes if we think creatively and are willing to kind of invest some energy in those things.

01:53:41

Should we have the EPA? That's a really good question.

01:53:48

So, you know, I don't know. I think, you know, there's a lot of things that I wish were different about the way things are.

01:53:58

I wouldn't snap my fingers and get rid of it right now. I do think that there has to be some sort of body that's in charge of enforcing regulation, whether that's the

01:54:09

EPA or whatnot. I don't know. What I do know is, so the EPA was formed,

01:54:15

I think it's 1970, it was Nixon's administration when he formed the EPA. Classic liberal,

01:54:22

Richard Nixon. Yeah. So when you look back, why did he do that? Well, he was not liberal, but when you trace it back, we had literal rivers on literal fire.

01:54:36

Just sludge rivers. Right. Well, the the famous one is the Cuyahoga River in 1967 lit on fire.

01:54:42

But it wasn't the only river and it wasn't the only time that it lit on fire. Made the news. There was just so much gunk on the surface of the river that it literally was on fire, right?

01:54:54

That's how gross things were, because there were no regulations. So the EPA, for all the things that, you know, as kind of like,

01:55:03

I really would love, I would love to be a libertarian if I could support it biblically, right? But we have clean water now.

01:55:11

So Lake Erie was essentially biologically, I mean, I guess that's an overstatement. It was dying, you know, like it had severe issues.

01:55:19

There was a fishing industry at one point on Lake Erie and it died. It's coming back, right?

01:55:25

We're seeing positive effects from some of these things. Is it the most efficient means to get there?

01:55:32

Probably not. You know what would have been better? It's people having a conscience and valuing the environment and not mistreating the environment.

01:55:39

The problem being that if the incentives are all to externalize and push the problem to somebody else, somebody's got to step in to weigh that balance and to enforce some sort of, you know, collective morality.

01:55:54

And the EPA does that for us right now. You say you give some practical tips towards the end of the book for personal.

01:56:01

I think we've already covered that pretty well. You know, clean up the trash at your local park. Don't dump a Drano down the drain.

01:56:07

Not Drano. Roundup down the drain. Stuff like that. You can add on to that if you'd like. But then advice for the church and then things we can do politically.

01:56:17

You want to just walk through that for us? Yeah. So I think I'll leave the personal aside. And it's, but basically what that comes down to is evaluate your decisions.

01:56:26

Think about them and think about environmental impact for what you do. And make choices appropriately. And what that's whether it's the way you use chemicals.

01:56:34

It, you know, could be the carbon off footprint and all that kind of stuff. When it comes to our churches, right?

01:56:42

You know, I'm not, I'm not saying that we have no mow lawns. And I'm not saying that we ought to have, what

01:56:51

I really don't want to do is distract from the purpose of the church, which is to get the gospel to the ends of the world, the ends of the earth.

01:56:59

But discipleship is all of life. All of Christ for all of life.

01:57:04

That's right. Which is going to be the way that we live in with respect to the environment. So we don't want to bring in and talk about the, where the elements came from for the

01:57:14

Lord's Supper. And that they're ecologically sourced. Because that's not the purpose of the elements. By ecologically sourced ones, let's not talk about it.

01:57:23

Yeah. But, but let's not talk about it. But what we can do is make better choices as local, local bodies.

01:57:29

That could be just landscaping. Not putting invasive species in our landscaping when we're making choices about how we're going to, how we're going to care for that.

01:57:38

It could be that we regulate temperature. There, I can't tell you how many times in the middle of the summer where it's so cold inside the sanctuary that I wish had a sweatshirt on.

01:57:50

Right? And I get that from a certain perspective. Because nobody wants to be uncomfortable and be sweating the whole time.

01:57:57

But on the other hand, we probably have overdone it sometimes. Yeah. You take probably out of that and you're, you're right.

01:58:02

Yeah. So we need to think about it that, that way. When, when you're rebuilding, right? Think about putting solar panels on.

01:58:10

Because I think that's wise economically. And it's, and it's, has some potential for improving the environment. So thinking about those things and making that part of your committee process as you're making decisions about things within the church shouldn't necessarily, that's not, don't conform your worship service to environmental ethics.

01:58:29

But conform the general kind of business function of the church to think about and include that as part of what you do.

01:58:36

Have it in your, your thought grid, your matrix, your decision matrix. Real quick, before we get to political stuff, you know,

01:58:44

I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed. There's so much I have to think about.

01:58:49

Reforming the criminal justice system. And I have to know these facts and this information in climate change. And I have to know these facts and this information in, in our electric cars actually good for the environment?

01:58:59

Or are the batteries going to cause, you know, more issues in the future? And is, is, is plastic, is recycling plastic actually good for the environment or bad for the environment?

01:59:08

I think one of the things is, that's helpful to remember, is that this is less about information and more about moral formation.

01:59:15

Right. Just, just have this. It's not like you need to have a, an ecological checklist written out on your committee where you kind of walk through these things.

01:59:24

It's just part of the, the, the framework. Whenever you think about something, this is, this is going to be one of the factors that you use to consider things.

01:59:32

And it may not even be explicit. It may just be intuitional, but it'll be there. Yeah. Well and the, the other thing we need to remember is, is that grace is a thing.

01:59:40

And that we're gonna find out that some of the decisions that we made were wrong or based on wrong data in the end.

01:59:46

So let's not do something that's overtly sin in the name of the environment. But let's absolutely try to do the best that we can and trust

01:59:54

God to redeem the results. Right? So we, we do what we can with the resources and time we have.

02:00:00

We make the best decisions we have with the intent of glorifying God, and we trust Him to fill in the gap.

02:00:06

But Andrew, I do not want to give up my plastic straws. I just don't. Well, that's a whole different issue because the, like that's based on some kid's science project.

02:00:15

Like the problem is not the straws. The problem is all the other junk that we have, and paper straws are the abomination of desolation.

02:00:23

There's a great video of this guy holding up a cup from McDonald's, and he pulls out the plastic straw, and he goes, he's like, you know, they want to get rid of these, but the plastic cup is this massive piece of plastic.

02:00:35

So I just, you know, like some of those things, like focus on the big things before you focus on the little things, but, but it should be part of our moral calculus.

02:00:43

Yeah, that's right. And then we think about politics, right? When it, when it comes down to it, you know, there's no perfect candidate for anything.

02:00:52

It's all a mix, but we need to start talking about the issues that are of concern to us and kind of depolarize some of these, these issues.

02:01:03

You know, it's, it's the Saul Alinsky rules for radicals method is that you have to be 100 % the good guy, and everybody else is 100 % the bad guy, and that's just not the reality, right?

02:01:15

Everybody's a hero in their own eyes, and so what we need to do, though, is, you know, not just reject ideas because the other guy says they're for it, but actually to evaluate it on its merit.

02:01:30

That can put us in dangerous places sometimes because then we coalesce, but if we're careful and we're discerning as we work through, we can make godly decisions in that.

02:01:39

And then just, like, local, people can work together at a local level in ways that they can't at a national level.

02:01:49

You know, at the end of the day, usually, you know, if multiple people are killed because you need a sidewalk someplace, the

02:01:57

R's and the D's are gonna get together and be able to figure out a way to solve that in a local context, and so let's try and do that, and remember that we're serving our neighbor here, and try and treat things accordingly, and then work our way up the chain, and so I think that would help a lot of things.

02:02:17

There is so much more in my notes, even, that I would like to have discussed with you, but I think

02:02:23

I want to end on this note, and then we'll get to the rapid -fire questions, which are, I think, gonna be, at least for me, it's gonna be the most fun.

02:02:30

No, no, I think at least for you it's gonna be the most fun part of the interview. You say that Scripture both energizes and limits our efforts to do good here on this earth.

02:02:42

That could be for poverty alleviation, right? Jesus says, you know, serve the poor, love the poor.

02:02:49

Also, the poor will always be with us, right? So energizing but limiting. Can you speak to how

02:02:54

Scripture energizes and limits this idea of creation care? Yeah, so on the one hand,

02:03:01

Scripture authorizes and gives us, you know, moral authority, moral responsibility to care for creation, and to do it with a certain level of energy, right?

02:03:10

We're called to pursue these things. We're called to pursue substantial healing and anticipation of God's final supernatural restoration of all creation that we look forward to in the eschaton, right?

02:03:21

That's a big thing, but it limits us because not everything that wears, you know, environmental ethics on its shirt is actually godly, right?

02:03:31

So when we look at a lot of contraception methods and abortion that's used to limit population, some of these population control eugenics, all these things that are sometimes bundled under environmental ethics, we have to resist those things.

02:03:47

We have to do both of them. You know, there's two wrongs don't make it right. You can't do good, or you can't do evil in order to achieve good.

02:03:55

Now, it may achieve a good, but that's not God's design. You're still culpable for your sin. So we are accountable to pursue the good of creation, but always to do it within the limits of biblical morality.

02:04:09

That's good, brother. All right, to the rapid -fire questions. Are you ready? I think so.

02:04:15

We'll see. Tea or coffee? Coffee. Favorite TV show? Monk.

02:04:23

Wow, that one's wild. I've never heard that before from anybody ever, not even from Tony Shalhoub, the guy who started it.

02:04:32

Wait, did I say his name right? Shalhoub? Okay. If you had to be stuck on an island with just the books of one of these authors,

02:04:41

Dever, Piper, Keller, Sproul, John MacArthur, for the rest of your life, whose books do you pick?

02:04:48

I pick Keller. Okay, stuck on an island with all the same people, and you can only listen to one of their sermons.

02:04:57

Hmm, I'm probably still going with Keller. Yeah, yeah. Lewis or Tolkien?

02:05:04

Their entire body of work. Lewis. Favorite fiction? Lord of the

02:05:12

Rings. Hmm. Mountains or beach? Mountains. Champagne or wine? I'm Baptist.

02:05:19

Amen, brother. Least favorite candy? There's a lot of them.

02:05:27

Let's see, probably, I mean, let's just say Werther's. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's an old lady candy.

02:05:32

Nothing wrong with being an old lady. Android or iPhone? Android. There you go. Macaroni salad or potato salad?

02:05:39

Potato. Foie gras or escargot? Neither. Okay, night out or night in?

02:05:45

Night in. Concert or football game? Concert. Morning person or night owl?

02:05:52

Morning. We have both been up since basically 3, 3 .30 this morning. Burger King or McDonald's?

02:06:00

Pass. You have to choose. I have to choose. Whopper? I would probably go

02:06:05

Burger King. Okay, flame broiled. Mexican or Italian? Italian.

02:06:11

What is your least favorite race? Like, what, what, what do you mean by that?

02:06:17

What do you think I mean? The Daytona 500. There you go. Burger or barbecue?

02:06:24

Barbecue. Chinese takeout or sushi? Chinese. Okay, there you go. Cold or hot?

02:06:32

We talking coffee here? You take it however you want. Well, if it's, if it's coffee, I'm gonna take it hot.

02:06:38

Okay. Was the government involved in 9 -11? Afterward, yes.

02:06:45

Rock or rap? Rock. Even, okay, what about Christian music? Rock or rap? I mean,

02:06:54

I think still rock. I mean, I've benefited, obviously, from, from the ambassador and Shilin, and we were talking about that earlier.

02:07:01

Yeah. Classical or jazz? Classical. Trapped on an island with one systematic theology for the rest of your life?

02:07:09

Bobbings Reformed Dogmatics. Oui, what hymn do you want to be sung at your funeral? For the

02:07:14

Cause. I've not heard that before. It's the Gettys. It's also the, the hymn of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

02:07:21

Do you know this? Look it up. We'll check it out later. Perhaps the most important question of the entire interview, and I hope,

02:07:31

I hope, I hope you think carefully about this, because there are dozens of people who are gonna tune into this.

02:07:38

Does a straw have one hole or two? The straw has one hole. Right. Okay. Let me pray.

02:07:45

Lord Jesus, we come before you with humble hearts, thankful that you've given us the opportunity to have this conversation.

02:07:54

Thank you for Andrew, for giving him the ability to think so well about these things, and, and, and thank you for giving him the ability to write this book.

02:08:04

We pray that it will stimulate many sons and daughters in your kingdom to think about what it looks like to be maximally faithful in, in, in this world where you've placed us.

02:08:16

Lord, that's what we want more than anything. We, on the last day, we want to hear, well done, good and faithful servant in every area of our lives.

02:08:24

We want to be good stewards. Lord, help our gospel witness to be reflected in the well, in the way that we care for your creation.

02:08:32

Give us wisdom to sift through a sea of information, much of it apparently contradictory about what is good, right, and true, what's best for, for creation.

02:08:44

Give us more theologians to help us see the Bible clearly and what it has to say about this, and give us more scientists, preferably

02:08:54

Christian, but if not, just good scientists who can help us better understand this world where you have placed us.