Climate change is upon us....

[Sriram]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190730-the-animals-that-will-survive-climate-change

**********

With one in every four species facing extinction, which animals are the best equipped to survive the climate crisis?

“I don’t think it will be the humans. I think we’ll go quite early on,” says Julie Gray....

**********

[torridon]

So tell us how faith is going to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere within the necessary timeframe.

God's will can intervene in many ways - as can human will.

Despite valiant efforts which can be seen to be too little too late, human folly continues to dominate and produce ever increasing pollution.

It will indeed take a miracle to save this precious planet.

So let us pray …

So, nothing but vague assertions then.  Face it, God isn't going to remove a single molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere.

I don't see any evidence of divine intervention through faith stopping the problem building up in the first place.  Is it the case that people of faith have uniformly been refusing to eat red meat or drive cars or take flights over the last 50 years ?  Somehow God failed to communicate the perils of such a lifestyle to his faithful despite all their devotions.  No, it is science that has alerted us to this, not God; faith will not get us out of this mess; science might help.

[Nearly Sane]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190730-the-animals-that-will-survive-climate-change

**********

With one in every four species facing extinction, which animals are the best equipped to survive the climate crisis?

“I don’t think it will be the humans. I think we’ll go quite early on,” says Julie Gray....

**********

The god of the cockroaches would seem to be the powerful one.

[Christine]

Faith is the key to dealing with such problems.
As aptly recorded by Julian of Norwich amid the turmoil of the 14th century:

In her thirteenth showing, Julian receives a comforting answer to a question that has long troubled her:
“In my folly, before this time I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the onset of sin was not prevented: for then, I thought, all should have been well. This impulse [of thought] was much to be avoided, but nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed because of it, without reason and discretion.
“But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that is needed by me, answered with these words and said: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

(from Revelations of Divine Love)

Julian of Norwich was easily pleased, wasn't she?  What a pity Jesus didn't take the opportunity to answer with something convincing that his apologists could have used in debates with non-believers in centuries to come.

As for the climate, we've known about the dangers for decades and chosen to disregard them in favour of comforting nonsense and self-indulgence. Seems to be the default as far as humans are concerned.

[Nearly Sane]

Faith is the key to dealing with such problems.
As aptly recorded by Julian of Norwich amid the turmoil of the 14th century:

In her thirteenth showing, Julian receives a comforting answer to a question that has long troubled her:
“In my folly, before this time I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the onset of sin was not prevented: for then, I thought, all should have been well. This impulse [of thought] was much to be avoided, but nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed because of it, without reason and discretion.
“But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that is needed by me, answered with these words and said: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

(from Revelations of Divine Love)

So Jesus thinks the various people shot in the US in the last couple of days are collateral damage to his plan. Jesus is a cunt.

[Roses]

God's will can intervene in many ways - as can human will.

Despite valiant efforts which can be seen to be too little too late, human folly continues to dominate and produce ever increasing pollution.

It will indeed take a miracle to save this precious planet.

So let us pray …

Prayer isn't going to save this planet, the sky fairy doesn't give a monkey's if it exists. It will probably get an erection when witnessing the suffering climate change will cause.   

[Spud]

So tell us how faith is going to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere within the necessary timeframe.

So, nothing but vague assertions then.  Face it, God isn't going to remove a single molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere.

I don't see any evidence of divine intervention through faith stopping the problem building up in the first place.  Is it the case that people of faith have uniformly been refusing to eat red meat or drive cars or take flights over the last 50 years ?  Somehow God failed to communicate the perils of such a lifestyle to his faithful despite all their devotions.  No, it is science that has alerted us to this, not God; faith will not get us out of this mess; science might help.

God can give wisdom to scientists and people in charge. Apparently though the solution is quite straightforward: plant billions of trees!

[Roses]

God can give wisdom to scientists and people in charge. Apparently though the solution is quite straightforward: plant billions of trees!

Humans are much wiser than the Biblical god character.

[Outrider]

God can give wisdom to scientists and people in charge.

And yet, it seems, he chooses not to?

Apparently though the solution is quite straightforward: plant billions of trees!

There is no single solution - planting trees is merely delaying the inevitable if we don't change the manner in which we consume a range of limited resources.

O.

[torridon]

God can give wisdom to scientists and people in charge. Apparently though the solution is quite straightforward: plant billions of trees!

Bringing God into it is merely an abdication of our own responsibility.  If there is a God and he can solve the problem by imparting wisdom then why has he not been doing so already ? 

It is scientists (who in the main aren't particularly religious) that have alerted us to the climate change problem whereas it is some faith groups, particularly some American evangelicals, that have been among the most active in the climate denial industry concentrating their efforts on stamping out support for green initiatives.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340215599789

God has done nothing to prevent this problem growing in size and God will do nothing to help now.  Invoking God is a head in the sand approach to policy making, an appeal to ignorance, a symptom of a more broad tendency to reality denial when what we need most of all is to man up and face reality head on without recourse to fantasy beliefs.

[Roses]

Bringing God into it is merely an abdication of our own responsibility.  If there is a God and he can solve the problem by imparting wisdom then why has he not been doing so already ? 

It is scientists (who in the main aren't particularly religious) that have alerted us to the climate change problem whereas it is some faith groups, particularly some American evangelicals, that have been among the most active in the climate denial industry concentrating their efforts on stamping out support for green initiatives.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340215599789

God has done nothing to prevent this problem growing in size and God will do nothing to help now.  Invoking God is a head in the sand approach to policy making, an appeal to ignorance, a symptom of a more broad tendency to reality denial when what we need most of all is to man up and face reality head on without recourse to fantasy beliefs.

Good post.

[Spud]

LR,
I agree about recourse to fantasy beliefs, which do more harm than good. The belief that God gave stewardship of the earth to mankind is consistent with your point about our being responsible for limiting or stopping climate change, however. That would include stopping destruction of forests, or planting new ones, or limiting family size and using resources carefully.

[Roses]

LR,
I agree about recourse to fantasy beliefs, which do more harm than good. The belief that God gave stewardship of the earth to mankind is consistent with your point about our being responsible for limiting or stopping climate change, however. That would include stopping destruction of forests, or planting new ones, or limiting family size and using resources carefully.

There is no evidence god exists let alone is responsible for the things you wish to attribute to it.

[Sriram]

Why have we gotten into an elaborate discussion about God on a Climate Change thread....?!   God help us..!

[Roses]

Why have we gotten into an elaborate discussion about God on a Climate Change thread....?!   God help us..!

It wouldn't be R&E if threads didn't go off topic pretty swiftly.

[Spud]

There is no evidence god exists let alone is responsible for the things you wish to attribute to it.

There is evidence, but it seems you want to know more than it's possible to know, as a creature, that is, where did God come from, and so you dismiss the evidence.

[Stranger]

There is evidence, but it seems you want to know more than it's possible to know, as a creature, that is, where did God come from, and so you dismiss the evidence.

Where is this evidence? Remember evidence for something is some objective fact that would be consistent with your hypothesis (that your particular god exists) and not compatible with other hypotheses.

[Spud]

Where is this evidence? Remember evidence for something is some objective fact that would be consistent with your hypothesis (that your particular god exists) and not compatible with other hypotheses.

Hi Stranger, here's the way I see it:
Creation points to a creator. A flint house in Norfolk must have been once a disorderly pile of stones. They couldn't form a house unless moved into position by a human. In the same way, the first tree must, we would expect, have been formed from the elements of which it consisted. It couldn't form by accident. Trees did not evolve from lower plants.
We can't, however, see the creator of that tree. But Jesus once spoke to a tree and it withered. He also healed disease, and calmed storms, by speaking to them.
So we have eyewitness evidence that the order in the universe came through some kind of speech.
Hope that makes sense.

[Stranger]

Creation points to a creator.

Begging the question from the get-go and failing the first thing I said about evidence. Nobody disputes the existence of "creation", i.e. the universe - it is fully consistent with any story you want to make up about it.

A flint house in Norfolk must have been once a disorderly pile of stones. They couldn't form a house unless moved into position by a human. In the same way, the first tree must, we would expect, have been formed from the elements of which it consisted. It couldn't form by accident. Trees did not evolve from lower plants.

We have copious evidence for how life evolved - denying it is about as sensible as claiming the Earth is flat.

We can't, however, see the creator of that tree. But Jesus once spoke to a tree and it withered. He also healed disease, and calmed storms, by speaking to them.

These are just a stories from an incoherent, often contradictory, book of myths.

So we have eyewitness evidence that the order in the universe came through some kind of speech.

No, we don't.

[Outrider]

Creation points to a creator.

And all you need, therefore, is to demonstrate creation instead of, say, mere existence.

A flint house in Norfolk must have been once a disorderly pile of stones.

Technically, not necessarily, but for the purposes of this, OK.

They couldn't form a house unless moved into position by a human.

They could, theoretically, though you'd need a few goes at it.  Of course, without a human, why would you need a house?

In the same way, the first tree must, we would expect, have been formed from the elements of which it consisted.

By a slightly earlier tree-like organism, but yes.

It couldn't form by accident.

No-one has said that it did.  The theory of evolution is not a random process, it's a natural selection amongst spontaneous variation.

Trees did not evolve from lower plants.

They didn't? You've a paper that conclusively undermines almost two centuries of solid evidence in support of the currently understood Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection? Citation required, methinks...

We can't, however, see the creator of that tree.

There are a number of possible explanations for that, we might hold to different subsets of those possibilities.

But Jesus once spoke to a tree and it withered.

So we can't accept two hundred years of gradually more and more refined scientific enquiry into evolutionary biology, ancestral DNA analysis and the like to accept the conventional wisdom of the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the OBSERVED PHENOMENON THAT IS EVOLUTION, but we should accept the Big Boy's Book of Jewish Bed-Time Stories' account of the magic plant-unwhisperer?

He also healed disease, and calmed storms, by speaking to them.

But then Bagpuss went to sleep, right, and when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all critical thinking has to go to sleep, too...

So we have eyewitness evidence that the order in the universe came through some kind of speech.

So even forgoing the fact that the testimony you're relying on isn't reliably eye-witness accounts, and even forgoing the fact that eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and even forgoing the multitude of selective bouts of editing by vested interests that have been undertaken on those accounts, and even forgoing the poetic translations that have been perpetrated on those edited accounts, and even forgoing the cultural differences that mean there are some concepts within the original that have no categoric equivalents in reality modern Western culture...

... it does not follow that because Jesus spoke to a tree and caused it wither, therefore Creation was conducted by way of verbal instruction.  If nothing else, prior to the creation of everything, there was nothing to say any words, and no medium for those words to be conveyed through.
 

Hope that makes sense.

Hope is all you got, because sense went on holiday before you started.

O.

[Spud]

"Begging the question from the get-go"

Nope, I meant 'creation' in the sense of 'that which exists'.

[torridon]

According to Jonathan Franzen writing in the New Yorker, we are delusional to imagine we can stop or mitigate climate change; we should get real about it and focus on post-apocalypse planning instead

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending

[Spud]

Hi Stranger, here's the way I see it:
Creation points to a creator. A flint house in Norfolk must have been once a disorderly pile of stones. They couldn't form a house unless moved into position by a human. In the same way, the first tree must, we would expect, have been formed from the elements of which it consisted. It couldn't form by accident. Trees did not evolve from lower plants.
We can't, however, see the creator of that tree. But Jesus once spoke to a tree and it withered. He also healed disease, and calmed storms, by speaking to them.
So we have eyewitness evidence that the order in the universe came through some kind of speech.
Hope that makes sense.

Ok, I'll try again. Many people are convinced that the order in the natural world points to a creator. The problem is, they can't see him. Many people pray, hoping that he will hear them, and sometimes they might believe he has answered them. But in order to really know that he's there we need him to reveal himself. This is what the Bible is about.
The Bible says that Jesus' coming was announced centuries in advance, and that he had power over the entire natural world, including death.
The evidence for God is therefore two-pronged: he chooses to give us two lines of evidence so that we can be sure. The natural world and the Bible.

[Roses]

Ok, I'll try again. Many people are convinced that the order in the natural world points to a creator. The problem is, they can't see him. Many people pray, hoping that he will hear them, and sometimes they might believe he has answered them. But in order to really know that he's there we need him to reveal himself. This is what the Bible is about.
The Bible says that Jesus' coming was announced centuries in advance, and that he had power over the entire natural world, including death.
The evidence for God is therefore two-pronged: he chooses to give us two lines of evidence so that we can be sure. The natural world and the Bible.

The Bible says a lot of things, much of which are not in the least bit credible, particularly the god character.

[Stranger]

Ok, I'll try again. Many people are convinced that the order in the natural world points to a creator.

Many people are foolish. Positing a god to explain order is a giant leap in the wrong direction: the explanation for order is something even more ordered but because we label it "god", we magically don't have to think about how come it exists.

A god that creates an ordered universe is no less strange and unexplained than an ordered universe by itself.

The problem is, they can't see him.

The problem is that there is no reason to take the idea seriously.

But in order to really know that he's there we need him to reveal himself. This is what the Bible is about.

The bible is an incoherent, often contradictory, mess. If it's a message from a god, said god is seriously messed up or has a terrible communication problem.

The Bible says that Jesus' coming was announced centuries in advance, and that he had power over the entire natural world, including death.

And we should take this seriously because...?

The evidence for God is therefore two-pronged: he chooses to give us two lines of evidence so that we can be sure. The natural world and the Bible non-existent.

FIFY