Environmentalists miss the mark -- we are the universe come alive

By Aussiegirl

"In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved. Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example."
Dr. Sue Blackmore, quoted in Mark Steyn's column from today's Chicago Sun-Times, posted right below.

The environmentalist sees the universe and the world as a purely material manifestation of a Godless universe set into motion by forces unknown, but somehow having intrinsic intelligence in the form of the theory of Gaia, whereby nature itself is imbued with wisdom and intelligence. In a sense, it is a return to the nature worship of pre-Judeo Christian thought. While there may be some truth in the idea, in that the universe is indeed imbued with intelligence and undoubtedly operates on a logical set of laws and principles, the difference lies in the perception of what is behind these immutable laws and physical principles. If one looks only at nature worship, one sees but one part of the creation. Yet they forget that man too is a natural product of the evolution of the universe. Man evolved on the planet Earth just as surely as the rocks and waters and eventually plant and animal life evolved. So how can man be a pestilence if he himself is a product of this all-wise Gaia? This is a question they fail to ask themselves, or probably conveniently overlook.

There is something of the God complex in these ideas, especially the chilling notion of selecting who is fit to live and who must be allowed to die. Unfortunately, this is the natural outgrowth of the idea of Darwinism unleavened by any moral or spiritual outlook on the nature of the universe.

And there is something Marxist about the idea that man is wise enough to know how to manage the global environment and manipulate it to his desired ends. We can do little more than responsibly manage the environment. It is of course incumbent on mankind to nurture and take care of the world that God has created for us. The Bible tells us that God gave man dominion over the world, and thereby entrusted its care to us. But the essential element missing from these calculations of the environmentalist extremists is their failure to acknowledge the deep mystery and spiritual significance of the fact that what truly differentiates man from any other species on our planet, and indeed from any other creation in the heavens, is the divine gift of free will.

It is as if, in some mysterious way, the universe itself was created by the Prime Mover, the Prime Creative Force, in that explosive event of the Big Bang where everything that was before contained in a tiny speck, expanded into the complex and highly ordered universe we see -- a universe which seems to have been geared to eventually produce life, and life which seems to have been geared to eventually yield mankind, a creature made in the image of God. But what does that mean? To me, it means that we are all tiny shards of that universal consciousness that was the start of all things, the Prime Wisdom which pervades the universe and expresses itself in the immutable and perfect laws of physics and quantum electrodynamics.

And the mysterious dance we are involved in, the dance that includes our own divine free will and ability to choose between good and evil, is the ultimate dance of the universal consciousness exploding and expanding itself into billions of shards and then enfolding itself back into the ultimate unity of existence, piece by piece. In the end, however, it is up to each man's individual choice whether he chooses the path of reunification -- or the path of separation. The path of love -- or the path of hate. The path of good -- or the path of evil. The path of life -- or the path of death.