Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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communities” (pp. 20–21). He intends to help “close the door to a
certain style of irrationality . . . still sheltered from criticism in every
corner of our culture” (p. 223). In his view, religious faith, unmoored
from fact, data, logic, and the procedures of verifi ability, poses a mortal
danger to civilization. His book is rather like a stern reprimand
for the foolish and dangerous religious thinking that has pervaded
human cultures and now, with dispersion of weapons and means of
mass destruction, threatens to undo civilization entirely. This is not
the time, Harris writes, to preach tolerance of views that are patently
disgusting, violent, and dangerous on a global scale, but rather a time
to call religious extremists, Muslim, Christian, and Hindu alike, to
account. Scientist Stuart Kauffman similarly proposes a nontheological
sense of the sacred as “our own choice . . . in an emergent
universe exhibiting ceaseless creativity” (Kauffman, 2008, p. 257).
I am not prepared, however, to toss the proverbial baby out
with the bathwater. I believe that honest dialogue across our religious
views is, in fact, happening, albeit cautiously and slowly. And
there are points of obvious convergence, for example, between
evangelicals and environmental scientists. One such is the observation
that the doctrine of the end times bears a family resemblance
to the views of some environmentalists—both agree that things
are quickly going downhill. Earth systems scientists report almost
daily scientifi c research documenting the unraveling of one system
or another, habitat destruction, climate change, the ongoing loss
of species, the effects of pollution, environmental threats to health,
and the interaction of such factors as a larger cascade of bad news.
No broadly informed scientist can be very sanguine about the
long-term future of humankind without assuming that we will
soon recalibrate human numbers, wants, needs, and actions with
the requisites of ecology within the limits of a fi nite biosphere.
Although one can quibble about the details and the schedule,
most scientists are aware that climate change, biotic impoverishment,
catastrophic pollution, resource wars, or a combination of
all four pose a mortal threat to humankind. Evangelicals might