soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

In the early decades of the present century, Christian
apologists were particularly anxious to establish that science
and technology were of Christianity's making, for science and
technology were widely esteemed as the secular saviours of
mankind. Now, ironically enough, Christianity finds itself
condemned-as the progenitor of a diabolic technology. If both
views exaggerate Christianity's historical role in this
regard, it is still not an accident that technology flourished
in the West for which nature was not sacred. We might in
general define 'the West' a as those civilizations whose major
ideas and attitudes derive from Greek and Hebrew sources.
Taken thus, it includes, of course, the Muslim regions.
It will at once be obvious that, in the Christian separation
of man from the animals and the Christian view that nature was
made for man, there lie the seeds of an attitude to nature far
more properly describable as 'arrogant' than the purely Old
Testament conception of man's dominion.
Christianity has encouraged man to think of himself as
nature's absolute master, for whom everything that exists was
designed. They are wrong only in supposing that this is also
the Hebrew teaching; it originates with the Greeks.
To sum up, so far as we can yet do so, the critics of Western
civilization are to this extent justified in their historical
diagnosis: there is a strong Western tradition that man is
free to deal with nature as he pleases, since it exists only
for his sake. But they are incorrect in tracing this attitude
back to Genesis. Genesis, and after it the Old Testament
generally, certainly tells man that he is, or has the right to
be, master of the earth and all it contains. But at the same
time it insists that the world was good before man was
createdj--and that it exists to glorify God rather than to
serve man. VJ (Passmore, 1974) .