Will Spencer [00:00:00]:

If we're to reach net zero, we have to stop using fossil fuels. But half the world depends a hundred percent on food grown using nitrogenous fertilizers made from natural gas. Stop using natural gas. We don't make those fertilizers anymore. Half the world's population dies, period. And about half of the remainder of the world. So a quarter of the world depends on heat and cooling and electricity and concrete and farming techniques and all these things that also depend on fossil fuels.

Will Spencer [00:00:54]:

Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly interview show where I sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes release every Friday. My guest this week is Dr. Cal Beisner. Cal established the Cornwall alliance in 2005, building on years of research and teaching in theology, economics, environmental ethics, and public policy. With a background in historical theology and social ethics, he has lectured worldwide teaching, testified before government bodies, and authored numerous books and articles on environmental stewardship and economic development. His early experiences in Calcutta, India, witnessing both the beauty of creation and the tragedy of poverty, deeply shaped his vision for Cornwall Alliance. Dr. Kyle Beisner, welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

Will Spencer [00:01:43]:

Thank you very much, Will. It's my pleasure to be with you today. And a privilege.

Will Spencer [00:01:48]:

Excellent. Well, I've been a big fan of the Cornwall Alliance's work. I was very grateful to discover that such an institution existed after I spent 20 years in the new age where nature worship is essentially one of the central pillars of that world. And so to discover that there was an organization pushing back from a biblical perspective, particularly in the realms of economics and culture and society, was like, oh, praise God. So thank you for your work with Cornwall.

Will Spencer [00:02:16]:

Well, it's been exciting work, fascinating work because it really involves all kinds of different areas of research and learning. The very meaning of the word environment kind of points that way. The word comes from a French word meaning to turn around. And so basically, environment is surroundings. Well, I haven't figured out anything that isn't part of our surroundings, from the hair on the back of my head to Alpha Centauri.

Cal Beisner [00:02:51]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:02:52]:

There's almost a sense in which environmentalism becomes everythingism. But for me, I mean, I've been an interdisciplinary sort of scholar all my life. And what that means is that I get to satisfy my curiosity in fields like physics and chemistry and history and economics and oceanography and all kinds of different things. I guess I said economics already, but particularly economic development for the poor, all of these. And I get to work with, consult with the just under 70 different scholars who participate in the Cornwall alliance in various different ways, thank God, all of them volunteers. But to me, it's just fascinating work.

Will Spencer [00:03:46]:

Maybe can you give my listeners a bit of background on the founding of Cornwall alliance? What inspired it and some of the work that it does today?

Will Spencer [00:03:55]:

Yeah, in a sense, the Cornwall alliance for the Stewardship of Creation was born out of a colloquium of about 35 scholars on environmental ethics, environmental stewardship that took place at a retreat center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, back in 1999. And following that, a handful of us came away and we thought, golly, that was fascinating discussion. We had a great time. We need to have something come out of that. We decided just a two page statement of basic principles. And as a writer, I got drafted to draft that. And then all sorts of guys went back and forth, critiquing and revising, and we had it ready for. For public consumption in early 2000. We sent it first to lots of different, especially religious leaders. At that point, we were focusing on religious leaders, even not just Christian, but others as well. And we had 1500 endorsements before we actually launched it in March of 2000. And at the time, we had the idea that, you know, we would eventually launch some sort of an organization to communicate those principles, to spread the idea, and to interact with others interested in the subject. And I was supposed to be kind of the point man for that. Well, at that moment, I was changing from teaching at Covenant College, where I'd been for eight years in interdisciplinary studies in economics, government, public policy, to teaching at Knox Theological Seminary. And so I was moving, I was changing subjects from those to teaching historical theology, social ethics and systematic theology. And I was just way too busy. So we put it off. And ultimately, after I had taught all my courses at Knox enough times, that prep time was whittled down a little bit, we decided, okay, now we can launch. So we did. We started out just as an informal network, no incorporation or anything. Started actually under a different name, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. And after the first couple of years, we realized, all of us in leadership in IT, realized we are ourselves, all evangelical Protestants. We all are committed to that particular approach to these things. So we took out the Interfaith. And then ultimately we decided, let's name it after the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which came out of that colloquium. So that's what we did. And the inspiration really is to provide guidance on what it means for mankind as a whole, but especially for Christian believers, to fulfill what God instructed. Adam and eve in Genesis 1:28, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over, well, everything in it, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, everything that moves on the face of the earth. And at the same time, to talk about how that meshes with. Though sometimes people think that environmental concerns really conflict with economic development for the poor, because we recognize that poverty is a huge threat to human thriving, to human health and life itself. And so we wanted to address both of those issues together, and we wanted to do it all rooted in solid biblical worldview and theology and ethics tied to the gospel. Because, frankly, until sinners like me are reconciled to the Holy God, we won't understand his world the way he made it to be understood. We won't use it the way he made it to be used. We will just not follow in his ways. So how can we fulfill Genesis 1:28 while we're in rebellion against God? Really? We can't. So the gospel then becomes crucial, the Great Commission becomes crucial to fulfilling the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:28 to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all things that I have commanded you, Christ says. So we put these all together, and our mission is to educate the public and policymakers on biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Christ, together with biblical worldview, theology, and ethics.

Will Spencer [00:09:11]:

There's so many directions I want to go with this. But first, I think where I want to start is I would imagine that you have as much instructing to do of Christians as you do of public policy leaders.

Will Spencer [00:09:23]:

Absolutely. Yeah. And partly. Oh, goodness, I might say, some dangerous things here.

Will Spencer [00:09:32]:

That's what we're about here on the Will Spencer podcast.

Will Spencer [00:09:34]:

Yeah. Partly it's because so much of the Christian church, especially among, and I hate to say this because I am one, Evangelical Protestants, Reformed. Evangelical Protestants, and I'm a Reformed theologian, we tend to focus so narrowly on a very narrow understanding of the gospel, which is basically getting souls to heaven.

Cal Beisner [00:10:04]:

Right? Yeah.

Will Spencer [00:10:05]:

And frankly, that is the central part of the gospel. Absolutely. And so if we don't focus on that, we're. We're doing the wrong thing. Okay. But we can focus on it so narrowly that we ignore other things. You know, the Apostle Paul basically gives us the definition of gospel. In 1 Corinthians 15, Christ died for our sins. According to the Scriptures. He was buried, he rose again from the dead according to the Scriptures. That is the gospel that he tells us in Romans 1, 16 and 17 is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. To the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written. The just by faith shall live. This is a righteousness from God to us. An alien righteousness is how both Luther and Calvin described it. It's not my own. Comes from God to me, and it comes entirely by faith. Now, this is crucial. And you know, golly, every human soul will continue through the rest of eternity, Right. Never ending, right? Yeah. That means any human soul outweighs any empire that's ever existed, any nation that's ever existed, any denomination that has ever existed. Every human soul does that because no empire is eternal. No denomination is eternal. No church congregation is eternal. So the gospel in that sense is very, very important. It's got to be central. But what's happened in an awful lot of cases is we've forgotten that the Bible doesn't only use the word gospel that way. The euangelion, the good news is broader than that. And Christ came preaching the good news of the kingdom of God. It's all about God's rule over everything. And so if we are to teach men to obey all things that God has commanded us, that means we got to go the whole counsel of God, from the whole word of God to the whole people of God for the whole of life, Genesis through revelation. And unfortunately, too many of our churches are so narrowly focused on that central gospel that we forget the broader gospel. And in particular, care for the environment has not been a major thing for most churches. And partly historically, I mean, as a former professor of church history, I think that makes sense. Because frankly, care for the environment was never much of a concern for the vast majority of human beings through all human history. Why? Because the main concern was how to stay alive. Until the Industrial Revolution, average life expectancy at birth was about 27 or 28 years. Half of all people born died before their fifth birthdays. And it didn't matter whether you were rich or poor. I mean, Queen Anne of England in the early 17th century, she had 19 children. None of them survived to adulthood. She was the richest woman in the world, and that was life or death. Nasty, poor, solitary poor, nasty, brutish and short was how Thomas Hobbes put it. So people worried about that and the concern about, okay, so now that we've figured out how to keep ourselves alive and now life expectancy at birth, around the world is around 73, 74 years. I mean, fantastic. It's tremendous change. Now that we've figured that out, we also recognize that, hey, some of the things that we do to keep ourselves alive, to have nice houses and things like that, those things can cause ecological damage. So how do we properly address both of those at once? That's very much a modern concern. And it's a modern concern primarily in the wealthy west, not in the developing rest, because the developing rest is still concerned with staying alive.

Will Spencer [00:14:45]:

Or they don't have the same idea of stewardship. They don't have the same idea of the earth as being a creation of God. They see it as something eternal. Because this is sort of my background background with world travel and New Age and mysticism. The worldview is completely different inside Christianity of the gifts that God gives to us and what does that inspire in us as believers in terms of how we treat them, not casually. And the rest of the world just doesn't see things in quite the same way. Although, yes, in my limited experience, they are still very concerned around the world with the necessities of sustaining life beyond childhood.

Will Spencer [00:15:23]:

Yeah, yeah. You know, most of the environmental movement, the vast majority of it, really rests on one of two worldviews. One is either the secular humanist, naturalist. Matter and energy is all that exists. Materialist worldview, naturalism, metaphysical naturalism. And with that, you deny the creator creature distinction by simply denying that there is a creator.

Cal Beisner [00:15:55]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:15:56]:

And of course, the apostle Paul warns us about what happens when you deny the creator creature distinction. You start worshiping the creature instead of the creator, and then God gives you over to a reprobate mind and professing yourself to be wise, you become a fool and you do all sorts of really destructive things. So that's where that worldview leads. The other dominant worldview among environmentalists is either a pantheistic or a panentheistic or an animistic or spiritistic worldview. Pantheism. God is the universe as the soul is the body.

Cal Beisner [00:16:33]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:16:34]:

Panentheism. I'm sorry, Pantheism. God is everything. Panentheism. God is to the universe as the soul is to the body. Spiritism or animism, well, there are lots of little gods or spirits that inhabit rocks and trees and forests and streams and things like that. But all three of those varieties deny the creator creature distinction by identifying the Creator with the creation.

Cal Beisner [00:17:01]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:17:02]:

And so the same results come, right? So the biblical worldview says that the transcendent God, the infinite, eternal unchangeable spirit who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his wisdom, his power, his justice, his glory, his goodness, his love, and so on. That infinite God exists forever and made the universe out of nothing by the word of his power. He started with nothing, he got everything. He started with darkness, he made light. He started with chaos, he made order. He started with no life. He made life great abundance of life, varieties of life, and all of this, but all of it distinct from Himself. And he rules over it all, right? So this establishes and preserves the Creator creature distinction. And our task then, from a biblical worldview is to learn to understand his creation the way he designed it, to understand our role in his creation the way he intends it, and then start to live accordingly. Of course, sin gets in the way, right? Our sin gets in the way. And the fact that in response to our sin, God judged, cursed the earth, so that now it's by the sweat of our brow that we eat bread, you know, thorns and thistles it bears, instead of just all blackberries and, well, thornless blackberries even. Right, Right. Yeah. So we then have this challenge of trying to understand the world the way God made it and the purposes he has for it and our purpose in it. So, yeah, I guess. I think that's an answer to what you were saying.

Will Spencer [00:19:01]:

Yes, I think so. And I guess my next question would be, as you begin to bring these ideas into the evangelical Protestant world or other realms of Christianity, do you find that people kind of furrow their brows and they have to think really hard about it? Because I was reading on the Cornwall Alliance Statement of Faith or so the biblical perspective of environmental stewardship subduing and ruling the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors. So you're. I don't know if this is a statement of faith, but the affirm and denies as I'm reading through that, you know, even I've thought about these issues. Not for many, many years, but I've thought about them. And even still, I still found within myself things that I needed to pull out. But I've been thinking about it, and I imagine that many Christians have absorbed the world's perspective on environmentalism and nature, and so do they. Is this unfamiliar language, unfamiliar talk to them?

Will Spencer [00:19:56]:

To most, I think it is. Little by little that's changing. I hope that that's partly because of our own work in people. It's not terribly surprising when something like 90% of Christian children are sent to Pharaoh's Academy.

Cal Beisner [00:20:15]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:20:16]:

The government schools. As an aside, here I've always wondered who in his right mind could ever think that it made any sense whatsoever to entrust to the government the shaping of the minds of the people by whose consent it's supposed to be governed. I think government run schooling and government by consent of the governed are absolutely incompatible.

Will Spencer [00:20:42]:

Conflict of interest is going to tell.

Will Spencer [00:20:44]:

You what you think, therefore it's going to tell you what you're going to consent to. I mean, it all disappears. That's an aside. That's just one of my hobby horses. But when so many Christians children are educated in the government schools to a totally secularist or more recently a New age worldview that dominates so much in the public schools, it's not surprising that this is a new thing to so many Christians even. But I find that if we approach it sort of in a step by step manner, starting with the very earliest chapters of Genesis.

Cal Beisner [00:21:25]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:21:26]:

I mean, I once heard that Francis Schaeffer, who's one of my intellectual heroes, Francis Schaeffer, once said if he had only one hour to witness to somebody who'd never really heard of Christianity, didn't have any acquaintance with the Bible, he would spend the first 59 minutes on Genesis 1.

Will Spencer [00:21:49]:

Probably a good idea.

Will Spencer [00:21:51]:

Yeah. If we build from the ground up, I think all of this can make really good sense. Part of what we're needing to deal with is that over the last roughly 50 years there has been a drumbeat among a lot of environmentalists that has been carried through an environmental curriculum, whether in the secondary level or college level or graduate level. That it's basically Christianity that has been to blame for all of the abuse of the natural world. That's rooted in an essay published in Science magazine in 1967 by Lynn White Jr. He was actually a medieval historian, not an environmental scientist or anything like that. But in his essay on the historical roots of our ecological problem, he said basically it is Christianity in promoting the idea of Genesis 1:28, which says we're supposed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it.

Cal Beisner [00:23:13]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:23:14]:

That has taught us that human beings have every right to just abuse the earth in any way we want. Just use it all up, exploit it, have no care for it whatsoever. Now of course that is utter misrepresentation. You can go all the way back through all of pre Christian rabbinic commentary, all of post ad Christian comment. Nobody understands that that way. But Lynn White Jr. Said so. That essay has been republished in hundreds of anthologies and students of environmental stewardship, environmental science, et CETERA all over the world have eaten this. And so what we have is the challenge of, okay, how do we correct that? How do we show. No, that's not what that verse means at all. And I say, well, look, let's look at its context. God made Adam and Eve in his image, and so they're supposed to be his representatives. They should reflect who he is and what he does. As I said before, he started with nothing, made everything, started with darkness, made light, started with chaos, made order, started without life, made life, made great abundance of life. Our subduing and ruling the earth should look like that. We should be making more and more out of less and less. We should be making greater understanding light out of less understanding. We should be making greater order out of less order. We should be making more life out of less life. And we should promote abundant variety of life. So we kind of summarize it all. This. Genesis 1:28 calls us to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and to the benefit of our neighbors, so that we're really addressing the two great commandments to love God and to love neighbor. And when we put it that way, suddenly the whole notion that there's something inherent to Christianity that is antithetical to the good stewardship of nature can disappear.

Will Spencer [00:25:33]:

Yeah, that's basically from my time outside of the faith. That was the message that I would say that I absorbed, that civilization has been a net negative, white, patriarchal, male, oppressive. Civilization is, forgive the term, raping. Nature is a very commonly used phrase, and it's legitimized by Christianity or the Abrahamic religion. Religions is the phrase that's usually used. And none of that is found within scripture. A deep reverence for creation is actually what's found there, from Psalms to Genesis to the Book of Job and much more.

Will Spencer [00:26:09]:

And, you know, it's not just scripture that protests against that message. It's also history. You know, frankly, the people who make that claim tend to be very unaware of how the natural world is treated in Buddhist culture, Hindu culture, and so on. They say we worship nature. But let me put it this way. My friend, Vishal Mangalwadi. Do you know Vishal?

Will Spencer [00:26:39]:

Yeah, he was on my podcast late last year.

Will Spencer [00:26:43]:

Super. Vishal is an Indian Christian philosopher, and he says, you know, for Hinduism, how do we respond to the fact that the Ganges river floods over and over every year? Well, we build a temple and we bring sacrifices to the gods so that the God of the river won't keep making it Flood all the time. That doesn't seem to work very well from a biblical worldview. What do we do instead? Well, we build levees, we build dams, we do flood control, and we manage the movement of water through the Ganges river and the Ganges river delta so that some of that water can be brought out and used for irrigation. We stop the flooding. Suddenly, people's homes aren't destroyed over and over again. Now, is that harming nature in doing that to the Ganges? No, I think it is bringing order out of chaos. It is making it a more healthful place, not just for human beings, but for others also. And so many people in the environmental movement see economic growth, economic development, as always an endangerment of nature. I think the opposite is true. And history shows us that. I can illustrate it in two pretty simple ways. Super simple way is this. Why do you find graffiti on public bathroom walls and not on your bathroom wall at home? Well, some ideas, yeah. Public bathroom walls, well, they belong to the state or to the county or to the city. But what does that really mean? Who has inc care of those, right? Nobody really does. So they get abused, right? Your bathroom wall at home, that belongs to you, and you want to keep it nice because at some point you want to resell your home. You want good value out of it, so you have incentive to take care of that. This holds true, by the way, unless your wife is my wife who writes on our bathroom wall. Long live private property, right? Just to get my. But it's under a system with private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the rule of law that people rise out of poverty. Now, rising out of poverty enables you to take better care of the natural world around you because. And here's the second illustration, a clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good. And richer people can afford more costly goods than poorer people can. So you go to a city where you've never been before and you want to find the rich part of the city. What do you look for? Do you look for the filthiest places or the cleanest places? Or you want to find the poor part of the city? What do you look for? The filthiest places or the cleanest? And it's not because poor people don't care about filth. It's that cleaning up filth is expensive. So the wealthier people get, the better they can live in a clean place and keep the surroundings clean as well. So that's what we learn from economic history. And environmental history is what environmental economists call the environmental transition. In early industrialization, yeah, you get more pollution, but all the benefits of that industrial activity far outweigh the harms. But once you reach various different levels, moving up economically, you find out, oh, I can now afford to cut down on that smog. I can afford to prevent the emission of flammable chemicals into rivers so that the rivers don't catch fire anymore. That's how increasing wealth actually pays for better environmental stewardship.

Will Spencer [00:31:03]:

Thank you for saying that, because I actually spent six months backpacking through India alone in 2018 and 2019. And so I got to see up close and personal just how Indians treat their own environment. And certainly they were not the only ones. I've been through South America as well, and the levels of pollution in Varanasi, for example, and I loved Varanasi. I appreciated the religious traditions and the expressions there for what they were. And of course, but seeing the absolute overwhelming filth and pollution of the Ganges river at that point was overwhelming. North of Mumbai was shocking. And then of course, in the Daravi slums. And so to say that, you know, white Christian, heteronormative patriarchy is a scourge on the environment, which, you know, which is the usual claim. It's like, well, have you actually been to these other places that don't, quote, unquote, have any of that? Because it's far worse than any place in America except for Oakland.

Will Spencer [00:32:04]:

Yeah. You know, India actually plays a very crucial role in my own life. When I was a very little child, my father accepted a position with the US State Department that took us to Calcutta. And about three months after we got there, my mother contracted some sort of a disease that paralyzed her. And so I had to be farmed out all day, every day to an Indian family. A woman would come and get me very early in the morning and carry me to this family's home. And even though I was so young, this was between my first and second birthdays, right. For a six month period, this went on even though I was so young. I still have very clear pictures in my mind of what I saw every morning. First, as we went out of our apartment into the courtyard, there was this beautiful big green tree with a vine hanging out of it with red flowers all over it. It was just beautiful. And I still can see that in my mind. But then we walked out of the courtyard onto the street and we walked down number of blocks to the family where I stayed all along the way because we were out very early in the morning, she was carrying me over the bodies of people who died overnight of starvation and disease. This was mid-1950s. And those pictures have stayed with me ever since as well. Later when I became a Christian and later than that when I began to understand how much the Bible is concerned about, about the poor and the responsibility of Christians to help people to rise and stay out of poverty. And at the same time, well, about the same time in my life, we're now into the early 1980s when I realized that the Bible also teaches a lot about environmental stewardship. I realized those two things have to come together. And the memory of that beautiful tree with the red flowers and the memory of the horrors of that kind of poverty and the death, those together helped shape my mind as somebody who wants to say, all right, we've got to address together how to keep a beautiful planet and have people rise and stay out of poverty.

Will Spencer [00:34:43]:

What a moving story. And I can understand it very clearly. I was there 2018, 2019, and India has made remarkable progress from that point, you know, you know, particularly around issues of, of public defecation. That was the, that was the big topic before I got there. So they're making a concerted effort, and yet still the grinding poverty, the pollution, you know, in very, in just stark terms is so real. And so how do we, that is the question. How do we provide for the economic prosperity of millions, hundreds of millions of people while preserving our environment? And I think to that point, perhaps the, the, the environmentalists do have a point. How do we properly care for the planet? But we can't care for the planet at the expense of allowing people to suffer and die.

Will Spencer [00:35:31]:

Yeah, and unfortunately, a lot of environmentalists, especially really leading ones, leading voices, have essentially denigrated humanity. In the Bible, God creates mankind and only mankind in his image. And he makes us to be basically his vice regents over the earth. We are to subdue and rule the earth in his service as his representatives. And so there's a hierarchy in the Bible. God, humanity, and then the rest of creation. And we can even see some sub hierarchies within that last one. I mean, I think, you know, highly sentient animals should be valued more than non sentient animals, and animals should be valued more than plants and so on. But we also at the same time have to recognize the interdependency in there. I mean, yes, I value animals more than I value plants, but I also know animals need plants to live.

Cal Beisner [00:36:41]:

Right?

Will Spencer [00:36:41]:

So we have to address all of these things together. But David Forman, for example, who was a longtime leader of the Sierra Club and then founded a new organization, Earth First. Back in the 1960s and 70s, David Forman said, look, if I'm out hiking in the forests and I see a grizzly bear attacking a child, you know, it's the grizzly bear's territory. I'm likely to favor the grizzly, grizzly bear over the child. The child invaded the territory, you know, wow. Ingrid Newman. Ingrid Newberg. Newberg, I think it was, was the president of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, for a long time. She once said, you're upset about aborting a million babies a year in America. Well, we kill 10 billion broiler chickens in America every year. As if that's worse. So we do have to recognize that human beings have to take precedence and we have to serve their needs. But when we want to look at, okay, how do we help? Or how does a whole society, not an isolated individual or family, but how does a whole society rise and stay out of poverty? Well, history has a real clear lesson for us about that. The only way it happens is with five different social institutions. Private property rights, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, and the rule of law. Now, if you want to, you know, if you want to adopt Karl Marx's term for that, you can call it capitalism. And that's a pejorative term, right? A more ethically neutral term, a free market. Okay? But that's basically it. History says us, and it tells us very clearly, no society has ever risen and stayed out of poverty without those five institutions, right? And in fact, any society that has, through those, risen and come out of poverty for a while, if it abandons those five institutions, it falls back into poverty. And so, you know, these things are very, very important for rising and staying out of poverty, but they're also important for good environmental stewardship for the very reason that I referred to earlier when I said, hey, look, why do you have graffiti on your public bathroom walls and not on your bathroom wall at home? Well, if everything belongs to the state, nobody's got any incentive to take care of it, right? And you can compare the environmental records, the pollution emission rates, the pollution concentration rates, the deforestation, the desertification, the ch pollution of rivers and streams, the overfishing. Compare any of these things between the more socialist communistic countries versus the more free market capitalistic countries. The latter have the better environmental records, hands down. There's no question about that. And by the way, within the latter, the worst environmental catastrophes are ones brought on by governments, not by private businesses, not by private owners of land, and so on. Governments have the worst environmental record, again, because no individual in that has a lot of incentive to take good care, right? So first we need private property, entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, the rule of law. And then we need one other thing. And this is not a social institution. It is a material constraint on the production of wealth. And of course, you don't rise and stay out of poverty without the production of wealth.

Cal Beisner [00:40:58]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:40:58]:

You know, naked came I into the world, naked shall I return. You know, poverty is the natural condition of humankind. So what is that material condition? It is access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy. Why? Because energy is indispensable to everything that we produce. Way back in middle school, most of us should have learned anyway, the definition of energy for physicists, it's the capacity to do work. Well, where do you get food from work, where do you get clothing from work, where do you get shelter from work. And everything else, it all comes from work. Well, energy is the capacity to do that. We have energy in our own bodies, but we have to get that energy by eating something, right? And frankly, the amount of energy in my body compared with the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline is minuscule. So we have to have massive amounts of energy. It has to be affordable and it has to be reliable. When you put that together with a free market economy, you have a society that grows and stays out of poverty. You deny people of abundant, affordable, reliable energy. And even a free market economy is not going to make them prosperous and truly flourishing. So that's part of the reason why in the Cornwall alliance, we actually have been highly critical of a lot of environmentalists who have demanded, well, we have to stop using coal and oil and natural gas, because when we use those that emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and carbon dioxide warms the planet, and that warming is a catastrophe waiting to happen, or maybe already happening. And so we just have to stop, right? And so now there's the demand for so called net zero emissions of CO2, where what we emit is matched by what we take out of the atmosphere. That's a recipe for disaster, a recipe for absolute disaster, not just for human beings, but also for the natural world. Because it takes a whole lot more resources to generate electricity from wind and solar than it does to generate electricity from coal or natural gas or to move vehicles down the road from liquid fuels made out of petroleum. It takes a whole lot more resources to do the former than the latter. And it's much more destructive to the environment, not just the visible environment. It's always just burned me that so called environmentalists are in love with wind farms. They're not farms. You know, on a farm you grow plants and animals. Right? No wind factories.

Cal Beisner [00:44:17]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:44:17]:

These wind turbines all over the landscape, they're ugly as sin.

Will Spencer [00:44:24]:

Yeah.

Will Spencer [00:44:25]:

And environmentalists like these things. Sorry, no. If we're to reach net zero, we have to stop using fossil fuels. But half the world depends 100% on food grown using nitrogenous fertilizers made from natural gas. Stop using natural gas. We don't make those fertilizers anymore. Half the world's population dies, period. And about half of the remainder of the world. So a quarter of the world depends on heat and cooling and electricity and concrete and farming techniques and all these things that also depend on fossil fuels. Stop using them. Another quarter of the population disappears. Well, if you're into population control, you might think that's a good thing if you're a Christian. I don't think so.

Will Spencer [00:45:28]:

Yes, yes. When I was traveling, particularly in Southeast Asia, I remember seeing so many men whose sole job was to basically use a little Moto taxi to drive people from point A to point B. And the gasoline. And that moto taxi funded the entire family's prosperity, such as it was, or a small washing machine on the side of the road. And to think about net zero, no fossil fuels at all, means massive, increasing, crushing poverty for so many communities around the world that are struggling to get above subsistence. And once I saw that for myself, it was a big blow to my worldview at the time.

Will Spencer [00:46:09]:

Yeah, right. And I would so much encourage so many Americans, especially American Christians, somehow or other, go spend some time in sub Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in East Asia, in the poorer parts of Latin America. Spend some time there, maybe on a mission trip. Although frankly, mission trips don't usually put you into the filthiest areas, the poorest areas. But go and watch the way people live and die there and then come back and ask yourself, can I in good conscience demand that these people not have access to electricity from coal and natural gas to transport fuels from petroleum that lifted and keep the west, my place, out of poverty? Can I demand that they not have that access, that instead they have to use much more expensive wind and solar or other so called renewable fuels and slow their rise out of poverty, or even stop it or even reverse it? I mean, go spend some time there. Yes.

Will Spencer [00:47:28]:

It's really not that difficult to visit the nations around the world and punch out of the tourist bubble to go see it. You can do it in Mexico quite easily actually. You get outside of the tourist zone with the resorts, and you can actually see the way the rest of most of the rest of the world lives. And it's a shocking thing to witness, but I think more Americans, particularly American Christians, need to see it.

Will Spencer [00:47:48]:

Yeah, yeah. Do you mind if I ask a question back to you here?

Will Spencer [00:47:52]:

Of course.

Will Spencer [00:47:53]:

With your background in the New Age movement, how did you observe the way New Age thinking shaped the thought of people about both environmental stewardship and economic development for the poor?

Will Spencer [00:48:13]:

Oh, yeah. I mean, so about environmental stewardship, I would say the New Age movement takes a very absolutist perspective, meaning that human activity needs to be absolutely minimized and harmonized with the environment first and foremost. So you live by quote, unquote, natural rhythms and you, you dial back your own need for prosperity or a house or anything. Which is why a lot of the New Age communes tend to be in very temperate kind of areas. It's like, okay, well, it's not going to snow on the beach or anything, or get 120 degrees. So we go live in a place that's convenient to live in and we're going to dial back our needs massively for food, don't eat meat, vegetables and fruits only. It sort of goes in that direction. And in terms of concern for the poor, it doesn't really exist because the thought of, first of all, the New Age movement is generally an upper middle class phenomenon. And so the perspective on the world's poor is not really thought much about. But I would say that there's a general anti human, nihilistic, anti life perspective that we're trying to escape this, this illusory earth. So, you know, I'm on my, I'm on my horse trying to get out of town, and other people need to get on theirs. But there's not really any concern for global prosperity, justice, or anything like that.

Will Spencer [00:49:34]:

Yeah, yeah. And what I see is sort of a great shortsightedness for a lot of these folks. I mean, you talk about, okay, so they'll locate their communes in very temperate places where they think they can just live off the land from the fruits and the vegetables and so on. What they don't realize is that subsistence farming basically was what the vast majority of humankind did from shortly after Noah and the flood until the Industrial Revolution. And that was the condition under which life expectancy at birth was 27 or 28 years. And half of children died by age 5. If that's what you want to go back to, okay, but fess up, make that clear, don't hide that. What they also don't realize is that frankly, I mean, many of them would like us even to go back before agriculture to the most so called natural way of living that's actually a natural way of dying. Hunting and gathering cannot support more than one or two people per square mile in the very best natural habitats in the world. So what are you going to do? Even about sub Saharan Africa where the average population density is, oh, I don't even remember now exactly what it is today, but back in the 1980s when I was writing my book Prospects for Growth, A Biblical View of Population Resources in the Future, Sub Saharan Africa was around about 40 to 45 people per square mile. You're going to have to get rid.

Cal Beisner [00:51:36]:

Of.

Will Spencer [00:51:39]:

About 40 out of every 45 people just to go back to that kind of living. You sure don't love your neighbor when you think that way.

Will Spencer [00:51:50]:

Yeah, that's the moral incoherence of the new age worldview, which was ultimately part of my exit from it was recognizing that the sort of pantheistic or a panentheistic or even animistic worldview can't satisfactorily answer many pressing moral questions of our day. In fact, people just kind of shut down when you present them with that kind of conundrum that, okay, you want us to go back to a hunter gatherer mode of being, fine, so again, 1 to 2 people per square mile, we have 6, 7 billion people on Earth, you know, you want to take US down to 500 million? So is genocide good now? And then that ends the conversation usually.

Will Spencer [00:52:33]:

Yeah, that does seem to be the way it goes, isn't it?

Cal Beisner [00:52:37]:

Yeah.

Will Spencer [00:52:41]:

So when you would raise this to people, I mean, you said it tended to be the end of the conversation, but I'll bet really there was interaction, right? I mean surely they tried to defend their thinking somehow. What did they do?

Will Spencer [00:52:56]:

No, they actually, many cases they would change the subject or they would say things like love and light. I very rarely found somebody who had thought all the way through the moral implications of what they believed. They didn't take it that far. It was a. I don't know quite how to describe. It wasn't. The theology wasn't grounded in practical realities. It was a lifestyle choice or a set of convenient beliefs or, you know, some rejection. You probably a rejection of their parents in Western civilization. So it was, it was a negative perspective. It's that, not that. And so this other alternative is presented to them. That's not atheism, so it's mysticism instead of atheism, but they had never thought all the way through the implications of what they believed. Neither had I. And so it took me a while to get to that point, like, well, wait a minute, if I believe this, then that means this, this and this. And I don't like that. So I worked it all the way back. Most people in the New Age, I don't believe truly have. There are those who have, but not the majority.

Will Spencer [00:53:58]:

Okay. And it's not only the people in the New Age movement who make that mistake. Okay. I assume you've probably read Megan Basham's book, Shepherds for Sale, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. The very first chapter of her book deals with the so called creation care movement among evangelicals. And she points out, for one thing, that most of the creation care groups are heavily funded by leftist billionaires and their foundations and have been led down the primrose path of saying, oh, climate change is a disaster and we have to do whatever is necessary to stop it, even to reverse it. And so we gotta substitute wind and solar for fossil fuels and all of these different things. So partly she's addressing, okay, what are the evidences that money and prestige have influenced where these folks are going? But she also points out a basic failure in thinking, and she does this throughout her book, that over and over you hear the mantra, well, if you love your neighbor, you're going to do X, Y, Z, Right? Well, if you love your neighbor, you're going to want to fight climate change because climate change is going to kill people. All right, well, the problem is this, and it can be summed up in the words of one of my favorite economists of all times, Thomas Sowell, who said, love Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions. There are only trade offs. That is, if we're going to fight global warming, we have to ask at what cost? And I don't mean by that just dollars and cents, although frankly, you know, that's fairly important. I mean, at what cost to human health and life?

Cal Beisner [00:56:16]:

Right?

Will Spencer [00:56:17]:

If we're going to do that, we have to ask that question. And it turns out from thorough, thorough studies, and this is backed up in all the refereed literature in the field, it turns out that trying to slow, stop or reverse global warming not only costs more in money, but costs more in human lives lost, life, years lost, right, than adapting to changing temperatures. And that shouldn't be terribly surprising to us. I mean, the average person around the world adapts to a change of about 18 degrees per day between nighttime low and Daytime high. I live in Phoenix to an average. Okay, right, yeah, you've got a bigger one there. I mean, you're going from down in the 50s or 40s in the night because of the super arid, you know, the dry air, to 105, 110 in the day.

Cal Beisner [00:57:30]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:57:30]:

And we adapt by an average range of about 40 degrees between winter low and summer high.

Cal Beisner [00:57:43]:

Right?

Will Spencer [00:57:44]:

No, it's much more than that. So it's 100 and something degrees between those two. We adapt to that. Now we're being told that the fact that the average global temperature has risen by about 1.2 degrees Celsius. So that'd be slightly over 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1850. This is a disaster. Hey, nobody experiences global average temperature. It's a meaningless. I mean, not totally meaningless. It is a consequent less datum.

Cal Beisner [00:58:26]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:58:27]:

What's important is the temperature where you are when you're there. That's what's important. Global average temperature isn't. And we know that people live in everything from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert to the Brazilian rainforest. So clearly we are highly adaptable folks.

Cal Beisner [00:58:47]:

Right?

Will Spencer [00:58:48]:

Turns out adaptation makes much, much better sense than mitigation, than trying to slow or stop global warming. That's a major theme of the book Climate and the Case for Realism, which the Cornwall alliance organized. Our director of research and education is Dr. David Legates. He's retired longtime professor of climatology at the University of Delaware. He and I edited this book. We've got 16 contributors, some of the world's top climate scientists, as well as energy engineers and energy management specialists and economists and whatnot. And a fundamental point of that book is, look, it makes much better sense to do what we need to adapt as climate changes, which it has always done, than to try to control climate.

Cal Beisner [00:59:42]:

Right.

Will Spencer [00:59:44]:

And that book, by the way, is available over our website through our online store@cornwallalliance.org that's cornwallalliance.org if I can put a little commercial in there, please.

Will Spencer [00:59:58]:

No, I think those sort of perspectives are so important for people to hear because the climate change propaganda is so intense and has been for so long. The belief. In fact, I want to try and see if I can find it on your website. There was a passage about tiny causes. Let's see if I can find it on the, on the, on the statement that I had read earlier. Yeah, okay. We affirm that the Earth and all its physical and biological systems are the effects of God's omniscient design. Omniscient create omnipotent creation and faithful, sustaining. And that when God completed his creative work, it was very good. Genesis 13, I think it says, or Genesis 131. We deny that an infinitely wise designer, infinitely powerful creator and perfectly faithful sustainer of the earth would have made it susceptible to catastrophic degradation from proportionally small concepts, causes. And consequently, we deny that wise environmental stewardship readily embraces claims of catastrophe stemming from such causes. What a powerful statement to make.

Will Spencer [01:01:00]:

Yeah, let me make that a little more concrete again, referring to climate change. Okay? Now, people who are uptight about climate change will tell you, hey, we have increased carbon dioxide's concentration in the atmosphere from, from by 50%. And by the end of this century, we'll have increased it by a hundred percent. It will have doubled since before the Industrial Revolution. That's true. Sounds kind of scary. 50%. I mean, golly, if we're talking about my weight as a human man, I don't want to gain 50%. If I weigh 200 pounds, I don't want to go to 300. That would be really bad for my heart. Right, yeah, but wait a minute, 50% up from what? That's the crucial question. Well, CO2 constituted about 28,000ths of 1% of the atmosphere before the industrial revolution. That's 280 parts per million.

Cal Beisner [01:02:13]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:02:14]:

Today it's all the way up to about 243 parts per million. It's roughly 50% up.

Cal Beisner [01:02:23]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:02:25]:

But that's still just. I'm sorry, did I say 243? No, it's up to 423 parts per million. It's up 50%. 423 parts per million. That's still just 42,000ths of 1% of the atmosphere. And we're being told that this is driving such rapid and high magnitude warming as to threaten even human survival, or maybe the survival of all life on Earth to bring on the sixth great extinction. Okay? Now, as a Christian, I have to think, I have to incorporate into my understanding the whole of a biblical worldview in order for me to think properly.

Cal Beisner [01:03:16]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:03:18]:

You know, those who see science as an absolutely naturalistic methodology, all we can do is empirical measurements, and that's all the data that count.

Cal Beisner [01:03:32]:

Right?

Will Spencer [01:03:33]:

Right. They're dealing with a naturalistic worldview. Matter and energy and motion is all that is. But we Christians believe that there's God and that there's humanity, and that humanity is not just material, but also spiritual. We have spirits, souls.

Cal Beisner [01:03:50]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:03:51]:

And so we recognize that there are more data sources than just empirical.

Cal Beisner [01:03:57]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:03:58]:

One of those data sources is what God says in his special revelation, His Word. Now, the scripture tells us that an infinitely wise God designed, an infinitely powerful God created, an infinitely faithful God sustains the earth and all of its natural processes. This very God said after the flood in Genesis 8:21, as long as the Earth endures seed time and harvest, summer and winter, day and night, cold and heat will not cease. Poetically, that's what's called merism, where you take the opposite ends of a spectrum. And the point is. Yeah, that and everything in between. And this is four merisms piled on top of each other. The idea is, yeah, all the cycles on which life depends on this earth, God promised himself they would not cease as long as the Earth endures. So then we ask ourselves, does the notion that increasing CO2 from 28,000ths of a percent to 43,000 or 42,000ths of a percent, does the notion that that's going to cause climate disaster fit well with this? I don't think so. That's like saying, okay, I'm an architect and I design a building so that if I lean against a wall, all of the feedback mechanisms in that building's structure multiply the stress from my body weight exponentially until the whole building collapses. Would I say I'm a brilliant architect? No, we'd say I'm a fool. Well, that's the implication of the climate alarmist message. And what's so sad to me is that so many evangelical Christians in the creation care movement didn't recognize that tension and think to themselves, oh, I really need to look twice at this claim before I embrace it. So you had the Evangelical Environmental Network launching what was called the Evangelical Climate Initiative, which put out the Evangelical Declaration. Let's see, the evangelical. What was the title of it now? Major sort of a statement on climate change saying, if you love your neighbor, you have to get on the bandwagon to stop global warming. And they didn't step back and more carefully look at first what scripture, what special revelation might tell us to expect, and then to look more carefully at the empirical data. And that's just sad. I think that's changing bit by bit, but it's been a long upward battle on that score. By the way, the document that you were just quoting from there, the competing worldviews of environmentalism and Christianity, we've just put that into a booklet. It's been revised from what you see online there. We've expanded it. We've, I think, improved it considerably. We've put it into A booklet. And right now, for any of your listeners who would like to get a free copy of that booklet, it.

Cal Beisner [01:07:33]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:07:33]:

As our way of saying thank you. As our way of saying thank you. When they make a donation of literally any size. Any size, Right. Which they can do@cornwallalliance.org donate. Or they could be part of another thing here, too. This is our 20th anniversary and a number of donors have pledged to match anything up to $100,000 given to us during this month of August or shortly thereafter. If they go to CornwallAlliance.org anniversary.

Cal Beisner [01:08:10]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:08:11]:

And they make a donation of any size, as our way of saying thanks, we'll send them a free copy of the booklet and it'll provide for them what you've been diving into there.

Will Spencer [01:08:26]:

It is a wonderful statement to read through it and to see the thoroughness that the biblical worldview is squared up against so much of the environmentalist propaganda that we've all been steeped in, probably through my whole life and perhaps much of yours as well, just to say, like. Well, let's think through point by point, the claims that are implicit in so much of what the news says, what movies say, what the media portrays as the fragility of nature. There's a statement in there about the fragility of nature, about the catastrophic feedback loops. And before I move on from the subject, I would like you to explain. This isn't often surfaced in discussions about climate change that at the bottom of it is an apocalyptic worldview based on small causes leading to giant disasters. I wonder if you could explain that for the audience. It was stunning the first time I heard it.

Will Spencer [01:09:20]:

Yeah. Leading to giant disasters through positive feedback loops.

Cal Beisner [01:09:26]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:09:26]:

Which gives you runaway feedback.

Cal Beisner [01:09:29]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:09:30]:

So the idea is to stick with climate change Here as an illustration, if you warm the surface of the earth a little bit, that will result in more evaporation of water, which puts more water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor is a so called greenhouse gas. It's a gas that absorbs infrared, that is heat, as it bounces from Earth's surface back out towards space and it radiates that back out from every molecule of water vapor. Some of it continues upwards, some of it goes sideways, some of it goes back downward, which means that it warms the surface of the Earth.

Cal Beisner [01:10:09]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:10:10]:

Well, so positive feedback loop.

Cal Beisner [01:10:13]:

Right?

Will Spencer [01:10:13]:

We warm the surface, we get more water vapor. We warm the surface more, we get more water vapor. We warm the surface more, we get more water vapor and so on, and the whole thing just goes on and it becomes this exponential Curve.

Cal Beisner [01:10:26]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:10:26]:

Well, water vapor isn't the only greenhouse gas. CO2 is as well. So if we add CO2 to the atmosphere, that will cause a warming of the surface, which causes more water vapor, which causes more warming of the surface, and you get the whole cycle going on.

Cal Beisner [01:10:43]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:10:44]:

That's what leads to the notion of potentially catastrophic warming from the use of fossil fuels or anything else that adds CO2 or methane or nitrous oxide to the atmosphere. What's wrong with that? Well, what's wrong with it is that it's myopic. It focuses just on that sort of feedback and it ignores other feedbacks. This, by the way, is why all of the computer models and these are incredibly complex. They're some of the most complex, brilliant programming feats of all of what we've done in computer work. Right. They're magnificent. But the average for those simulates two to four times as much warming as actually observed over the relevant period.

Will Spencer [01:11:49]:

Oh, models.

Will Spencer [01:11:50]:

There's only one out of over 120 computer model families.

Cal Beisner [01:11:55]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:11:56]:

There is only one that has simulated close to the actual temperature of the past 40 years or so. When you run it backwards, all the rest simulate far more. And many of them simulate as much as 6, 8, even 10 times what's actually observed.

Cal Beisner [01:12:17]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:12:17]:

Now, what that means is the models, as brilliant as they are, they're wrong. Why do they do that? Because they all assume that positive feedbacks outweigh negative feedbacks. And the most important feedback that they're assuming that about is clouds.

Cal Beisner [01:12:38]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:12:39]:

So I gotta do a little excursion here. Right. Please. Side jaunt. Okay. Low level clouds cool the surface of the earth a little bit by reflecting sunlight back into space before it reaches the surface. High level stratospheric cirrus clouds, they actually warm the surface of the earth slightly. So the assumption written into all of the computer climate models is that as the surface warms, water vapor added to the atmosphere will cause an increase in stratospheric clouds and a decrease in low level clouds, which means more warmth. That's written into all of them.

Will Spencer [01:13:28]:

That's a bold assumption.

Will Spencer [01:13:29]:

No. One of my board members is Dr. Roy W. Spencer. He's been a senior fellow of the Cornwall alliance since before we got the name Cornwall Alliance. Right. Literally from the very start of what was then the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. Roy is a principal research scientist in climate at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He's an award winning scientist, climate scientist for NASA. He and his partner, John Christie, both of them strong Christians, manage the data from the NASA satellites that bring us all kinds of observations about weather and climate all over the world. 247365. He is like one of the leading climate scientists in the world. Roy literally was thinking about Genesis 1:31, you know, when God saw all that he had made, behold, it was very good. And he was thinking about, so why, and this is almost 20 years ago now, why is it that the climate models are so far wrong? And he looked at what they all assumed about clouds and he said, you know, I can use NASA satellites to measure changes in cloudiness all over the world, all latitudes, all longitudes, all altitudes, 24, 7, 365. And I can use them to measure temperature at all places all these times as well. I can use the satellites to figure out how clouds really do respond to changes in surface temperature. So he did, and he wrote an article published in, if I remember correctly, it was in the journal Climate Change back in 2007. And that article reported the results of his experiment. Turns out clouds respond to warming at the surface of the Earth exactly the opposite way from what is assumed in all those climate models. Lower clouds expand, stratospheric clouds shrink, so they cool. They are therefore a negative feedback on surface warming. So the whole positive feedback loop thing turns out not to exist. By the way, this should not surprise anybody, at least who knows physics, because in physics there's something called Le Chatelier's principle. Le Chatelier's principle, Right. That principle is that any natural system that is in equilibrium, or actually no natural system is ever in exact equilibrium. But any natural system in equilibrium, if it is perturbed by something, will naturally revert toward equilibrium. So if you heat something that's naturally at such and such a temperature, it will naturally return toward that temperature. If you chill something that's naturally at such and such a temperature, it will naturally return to that temperature. Le Chatelier's principle is understood by physicists everywhere. That should have guided the theorists about climate change.

Will Spencer [01:16:56]:

But their theory is based on a religion. It's not really based on empirical observations, is it?

Will Spencer [01:17:03]:

Yeah, for many, what I think is happening. And this could open up a whole nother discussion, by the way, the rise of what's called post normal science. Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman has a clip. He didn't put it there because this was before the Internet existed, but there was a video of his lecturing to a class at Cornell University back in the early 1960s. And the the basic content of this is also included in one of the books that he published. But he tells these students, look, when scientists want to understand how something in nature works, when we want to discover a law of nature, here's how we do it. First, we guess. And the students kind of laughed because they're thinking, well, science, that doesn't have anything to do with guessing, right? So we said, no, no, no, don't laugh. This is what we do. We guess. Then on the basis of our guess, we make predictions of what we should see in the natural world, in the real world around us. If our guess is right, then we go into the real world, whether it's in the laboratory, whether it's out in the forest. We go into the real world and we look and we see if what we observe matches or contradicts what we predicted. If our observation contradicts our prediction, then our guess was wrong. And it doesn't matter how smart we are or how beautiful our guess was, I would add, or how many people agree with us.

Cal Beisner [01:18:55]:

Right?

Will Spencer [01:18:56]:

If the observations contradict the predictions, then the guess is wrong. Wrong. That's fundamental scientific method. And by the way, it comes out of Scripture, 1 Thessalonians 5, 21, the apostle Paul says, test all things, hold fast what is good.

Cal Beisner [01:19:12]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:19:13]:

That also comes from the fact that scripture tells us that an infinitely wise God designed, an infinitely powerful God created, an infinitely faithful God sustains this world around us, and so it should be acting in predictable ways, rationally understandable, right?

Cal Beisner [01:19:29]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:19:30]:

So that's why science arose historically only once and in only one place, and that was medieval Europe, saturated by the biblical worldview. And then crazy people in the 19th century start talking about the warfare of science with Christianity, which never existed. Okay, but that's another subject too. So the. What's happened is that a whole lot of people have been trained up as scientists without the worldview basis, the philosophically epistemological basis of scientific method. And they have grown to depend on computer simulations instead of on real world observations. You know, prior to the mid-1970s or thereabouts, if a scientist wanted to model something in the natural world, he did it with pencil on paper. And you didn't write a program that had millions and millions of lines of extremely complex code. You modeled things in fairly simple ways, and then you took your model and you made your predictions based on that, and you went out and you observed and you tested your model that way. Starting in the late 70s, computer time began getting cheap enough that students beginning to learn science to become scientists could use rented computer time at their universities. And, and construct models that were much more complex. This led to an increasing dependence on virtual reality instead of real reality. You know, in the world of computer games and whatnot, we talk about young people who have become so totally immersed in virtual reality that they don't know the difference between that and the real reality. Well, this has happened with a lot of scientists, too. In, I believe it was 2006, a sociologist of science named Mayana Lassen published an article in a journal of the sociology of science. I forgot the journal's name right at the moment, but the main title of the article was Seductive Simulations. And it was based on months that she spent at the national center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which is the home of the primary climate modeling of the US Government and universities around the country.

Cal Beisner [01:22:38]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:22:40]:

And her aim in being there was to study the scientists. And she had one fundamental question. Do these climate scientists who construct these models keep in the forefront of their minds the fact that the information that the model spits out is not the real world? And she discovered through interviews with them and through watching their work that they don't, or they didn't. Anyway, maybe some of them have begun to learn to do so since then. But she would ask, so a computer modeler would say, well, so we tweak this particular input in the model in this particular way, and the ocean responds this way. And she says, now, do you mean the real ocean or your modeled ocean? And there would be this nervous look on the face like, oh, I didn't think about that. And so what's happened is we've divorced science from that fundamental commitment to observation, must test prediction, and then things get driven by. By ideologies instead. And that's yet Another subject which Dr. Legates tackles in his chapter on the history of climate change, where he points out, it's not about the science. It never has been about the science. It's always been about politics. It's always been about politics driven by the population control ideology that says there are too many human beings, so we have to somehow constrict the growth of human population and indeed reduce human population. Well, it's our access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy that supports this big population. So we have to deprive people of that. We have to have an excuse to deprive people of that. What will that be? Well, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, it was. Well, when we burn fossil fuels, we put soot and small particles into the atmosphere, and those particles block some sunlight, and that cools the Earth. So we were going through global cooling, which might have led to the next ice age. And so we have to stop using fossil fuels. And then in the mid-1970s, the temperature turned around and went up instead. And all of a sudden, now we have to stop using fossil fuels because they put CO2 into the atmosphere and that causes warming. All along, it was driven by a predetermined agenda. And Dr. Legates describes that brilliantly in chapter two. I think it's chapter two of our book, Climate and the Case for Realism.

Will Spencer [01:25:54]:

So we. So we talked earlier about the education of Christians around the notions of scholar, of stewardship. Maybe we can talk for a moment about the education of environmentalists in the Christian worldview that says very different things from the, say, presuppositions that many are working with, namely that, you know, great, like, positive feedback loops are not really a thing that you have to test observation. You have to test theories against reality, that God makes certain promises to us. I imagine that that work of the Cornwall alliance causes maybe a lot of opened eyes, but probably a lot of friction as well.

Will Spencer [01:26:31]:

Yeah. What I think what I see is so many environmentalists are really so focused on sort of end results that they don't really want to discuss very much how you get there. And so basically, what I've experienced over and over again when I'm speaking to crowds of people, okay, when I say, look, what the Bible wants us to do is to enhance the fruitfulness and the beauty and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors. Wow, that sounds wonderful. Sign me up. You know, all at once, the shield comes down and people begin to say, oh, well, then you're not the nasty guy I thought you were. I've had times when I've gone for speaking engagements and there are people picketing outside, upset that some organization, a church or a school or whatever, the Illinois Family Institute at this particular time had me there to speak, and they were picketing. So I went out and I talked with these picketers. They were all young people, you know, very idealistic college students. Right. Led there by a college professor who, by the way, had zero understanding of climate change. But I talked with them and I communicated to them what we're after, and they began to kind of embrace that idea. The college professor didn't like that very much. And then I started asking them some questions. I said, tell me, do you know what is the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere right now? None of them had any idea. Do you know how much we've increased the concentration over the last couple hundred years. None of them had any idea. Do you know how much global average temperature has changed in the last 150 years? None of them had any idea. And so I said to them, so you're out here picketing somebody, and you yourselves know that you don't know the facts about this. I would invite you to come in, come on inside, and I'll try to give you some facts. And some of them responded very positively to that, and some of them just blew me off. But I generally find that if I'm able to get people to hear that what we're after is more fruitfulness, more beauty, more safety. As I said, the shields come down.

Will Spencer [01:29:19]:

What do they think that you're after?

Will Spencer [01:29:22]:

Oh, what they think we're after is just subjugating the whole Earth to destructive mankind. Back to What Lyn White, Jr. Said, Genesis 1:28 is the excuse for raping and pillaging the planet.

Cal Beisner [01:29:38]:

Right?

Will Spencer [01:29:39]:

That's what they think we're after. And once I can set that to rest, we can communicate a whole lot better. And that's very important for a lot of Christians to understand. And especially there are some whose eschatology tells them, well, it's all going to burn up in the end anyway. Therefore, why polish brass on a sinking ship? Just go ahead, waste it all. There was one young man who went through Liberty University. His father was a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. His name is escaping me at the moment, which may be a good thing, but while he was at Liberty University, he said, I heard him say in giving his testimony later at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, when he and I were both speaking there, he said, you know, I would drive down the road and I'd toss my McDonald's bag out the window and do all these things, because after all, I just figured, you know, who cares? The Earth is all going to disappear anyway, you know, be burned up anyway. Later on, he began to think differently, and he. He started to value the Earth. But then what happened was he got sucked in by the general environmentalist perspective, and he went overboard the opposite direction. Jonathan Merritt is his name. Okay, I've said it. And he embraced all sorts of environmentalist claims about catastrophe in the environment without carefully testing them, either by scripture or by empirical observation. And so he then put out what he called the Southern Baptist Climate Initiative, Environment and Climate Initiative, sbeci, which raised all kinds of stink, because all sorts of people in the SBC were saying, wait a minute, that doesn't represent us. You know, it was a rather Bright, controversial thing. But anyway, is that a. Oh, please, go ahead, go ahead. No, you go, go.

Will Spencer [01:32:00]:

Is that. Is that a common occurrence where they go from not caring about the environments at all, due to eschatological, theological reasons, to jumping into a more modern, we have to protect the environment at all costs kind of attitude?

Will Spencer [01:32:16]:

I think it can be, and I think it happens primarily with much younger people. And praise God for idealism. I'm all in favor of it. Wonderful. We should all be motivated to strive toward what we think of as good ends.

Cal Beisner [01:32:30]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:32:32]:

But we also need to try to learn. Jeremiah talks about the importance of returning to the old paths. We can learn a lot by doing that. We need to really test all things. Hold fast what is good. 1 Thessalonians 5. 21 says. And so what I think happens is that young people will grasp onto a particular ideal for a while, and then they'll begin realizing over time, over a period of years. And this is totally natural. I mean, after all, it takes time to learn more.

Cal Beisner [01:33:08]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:33:09]:

Then they'll begin to feel like, oh, you know what? There are other things that I have to consider too. And there are trade offs in life. What I spend on X, I cannot spend on Y. If we're going to spend trillions of dollars trying to transform the world's energy systems so that we can prevent a tiny fraction of a degree of global warming, well, we can't spend that same money doing something that might lift people out of poverty.

Cal Beisner [01:33:40]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:33:41]:

So we need to just gain this wisdom that comes partly just with longer life, with encountering these trade offs that just cannot be avoided in life.

Will Spencer [01:33:57]:

Yeah. The crusading for high ideals is a wonderful privilege of youth, but focusing on the practicalities of life is what comes from a greater degree of maturity.

Cal Beisner [01:34:08]:

Yeah.

Will Spencer [01:34:09]:

Yeah, sure is.

Will Spencer [01:34:11]:

So just quickly, you've been very generous with your time today. Just quickly, you mentioned it's the 20th anniversary of the Cornwall Alliance. Congratulations. And that you have a funding drive going on right now. I'd like to hear about what the future of the Cornwall alliance looks like, what the horizons you're looking at right now. And you have my permission to pitch my audience as hard as you can to help support the Cornwall Alliance. So just a fastball straight down the middle.

Will Spencer [01:34:36]:

All right. Well, the first thing I'd mention is that, as I said a little while ago, some people have pledged to match anything up to $100,000 donated as a part of this campaign. And so we're really pleased by that. So anybody who goes to CornwallAlliance.org anniversary and donates through that their gift will be matched. And, and that is very helpful to us. Also, if they'll ask for it, we'll be glad to. Actually, we decided we're going to send it to everybody who gives, regardless whether they ask for it or not. That booklet on the competing worldviews of environmentalism and Christianity. So if they'd like a copy of that, it's just our thanks when they give any amount. Literally. What's in store for us? Well, we have really shifted our focus to communicating more and more with younger people. Roughly 40% of Gen Z and millennials who do not have children. Americans, okay. Who do not have children and they're married, they're couples, but don't have children say that that an important part of why they've chosen not to have children is their fear of climate change. Roughly 39% of Gen Z around the world say they intend not to have children because they're afraid of climate change. Either they don't want to have children who would contribute to climate change, or they don't want to have children who would suffer from climate change or both. That's so sad. You know, the Bible says children are a gift from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is his reward. Like arrows in the hands of a mighty man. So are children in the days of one's youth. Happy is the man whose quiver is full of them. Psalm 127.

Cal Beisner [01:36:41]:

Right.

Will Spencer [01:36:43]:

This is a tremendous blessing that we can have, especially if we're Christians. And as we raise them up in the faith, there's nothing, nothing can compare. And yet people are depriving themselves of that blessing because of these fears. So we have focused more and more of our work on reaching younger and younger audiences. We're going to homeschool conventions and private Christian school conventions, association of Classical Christian Schools, things like that. We've also launched an online course, free course, Basic Climate Science. Basic Climate Science. If you go to CornwallAlliance.org and look over toward the right of the top bar, you'll see a tab for courses. You can sign up, register for that course. This is taught by former professor of climatology. It is outstanding stuff. It's really understandable by anybody, say, you know, late high school through college. If you're in a school where you can apply for credit for an independent study course, you could apply to have credit for this. So Basic Climate Science, that's the first of our online courses. We'll be adding others as well. And we have a podcast created Terrain Podcast Created to reign. That's R E I G N, not R A I N. Right. We are created to have dominion over the earth and to use it in a way that glorifies God and that benefits our neighbors. So that's the topic of that podcast and we discuss all of the things that we've been discussing here and a whole lot more as well. And of course we have an email newsletter that people can sign up for for free. And the website has literally thousands of articles on it teaching all sorts of different subjects related to environmental stewardship, economic development for the poor and the biblical worldview. So I mean, that's what we're doing. And I think we're very excited about the future. We're excited to expand particularly our work in helping people to understand how environmental and developmental issues affect people in the developing world. We are planning to bring on to our staff a full time scholar as our fellow for developing countries. And that I think is going to be quite exciting too. And he has a great way of communicating with young people.

Cal Beisner [01:39:30]:

People.

Will Spencer [01:39:32]:

Wonderful. Such incredibly needed work today. We all live within this environmentalist kind of worldview with its presuppositions pushing back from a biblical perspective and a multimedia, multi dimension, multi platform approach is so very needed. I'm very grateful for your work, Dr. Beisner.

Will Spencer [01:39:50]:

I should mention we're also on Facebook and X so people can follow us there as well on X. We are at Cornwall Steward and of course on Facebook. We're Cornwall alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and we have a bunch of videos on YouTube as well. Cornwall alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. So I just invite your listeners, your viewers to come to CornwallAlliance.org and get acquainted with us.

Will Spencer [01:40:18]:

Wonderful. All those links will be in the show Notes and congratulations on your 20th anniversary and God bless your funding drive.

Will Spencer [01:40:24]:

Thank you. Thank you very much. Will God bless you. Such a privilege to be with you.