Mick Hartley

The scientific revolution, with Copernicus and Darwin the two names most commonly cited, has managed over the past few centuries to overturn the view that humans are somehow separate from, and above, nature. Certainly that was always the position of Christianity, with the beasts of the field just walking packages of meat and unpaid labour supplied by God to help us in our journey through this vale of tears. It takes some nerve, then, to blame our despoliation of the planet on humanism, and suggest that we need to move away from our worship of science towards a new religious sensibility. But Mary Midgley – renowned Dawkins-basher – takes up the challenge:

Reports of damage have long been coming in, and we have long had the scientific tools that would have shown us what they meant. But comprehensive trouble on this scale, caused by human behaviour, was simply the last thing we were looking for. And as our official religious outlook gradually moved away from Christianity towards various kinds of humanism, we became even less likely to look for it. Humanist sages, from Comte through Julian Huxley to recent exponents of the anthropic principle, have steadily encouraged us to build up our appreciation of the human race into a full-scale edifice of self-worship. Science itself has seemed to be a central shrine within this temple, certainly not an iconoclastic force that might disturb it. Thus progress (smoothly dove-tailed with evolution) has increasingly appeared as an escalator, powered by our own remarkable abilities and bearing us – perhaps with cybernetic additions and perhaps becoming immortal – reliably on towards a distant and mysterious Omega Point.

So vast is the scale of this dream that no actual downturn in human affairs has yet really managed to dent it. Wars, famines and political disasters have been treated as mere surface blips. Today, however, things are surely changing. Any detached observer can see that our earthly prospects are becoming ever bleaker and that – whatever other causes for this are involved – human contributions to those prospects have been, and still are, fearfully destructive. The escalator myth has nothing to do with reality.

And the escalator myth has nothing to do with humanism either. Stephen Jay Gould was the most eloquent debunker of the idea that we humans are in some sense the final result or end product of evolution, but it's a point endlessly repeated by other scientists. The Omega Point, on the other hand, was proposed by Teilhard de Chardin, a Christian, if rather an eccentric one, and its best-known current advocate is Frank Tipler, very definitely a Christian. What she's blaming on "humanist sages" is in truth a religious theme – which is not to deny that various utopian thinkers have taken it over and used it for their own secular purposes in the name of some socialism or another, but that's a whole different story, and not, I think, what she's talking about here. Julian Huxley was, as I recall, no radical firebrand. Her target seems to be modern science and its supposed part in helping to produce "a full-scale edifice of self-worship": a charge which gets it exactly backwards.

[T]he Greeks, cocky though they were on many subjects, acknowledged and revered the earth, Gaia, as the all-giving mother of gods and men. Nor was this unusual. Indeed, as we look at the endless procession of human cultures, we may find it striking that on this point they almost all seem to be out of step with ourselves. Comte said that this is indeed so: the irreligious actually are the only mature grown-ups. Other humans are mere children because they have not yet substituted science for religion. But this kind of cockiness may look less impressive today.

Christian thought, by contrast, does, of course, allow of reverence for the physical world because God created that world and still pervades it. But various historical chances have placed much less emphasis on this than on the central role of man. It is no disrespect to man to suggest that today we must quickly reverse that emphasis.

Never before in history has so much attention been paid to the environment. The ecology movement probably attracts more young idealists than any other cause. Talk about Gaia and "saving the planet" are everywhere. And it's entirely – or almost entirely – a non-religious movement. So why talk about Christian thought and its reverence or lack of reverence for the physical world? It's not relevant. You can have respect, love, for nature – reverence even – without invoking Christianity. Do we really need to point that out?