The Guardian has printed the full text of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ recent Ebor lecture, in which he argues that “God will not step in to save us from our own folly, greed and neglect” of the world:
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There is no guarantee that the world we live in will “tolerate” us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints. Is this – as some would claim – a failure to trust God, who has promised faithfulness to what he has made? I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin.
One of the things we as Christians ought to be saying in the context of the ecological debate is that human reasoning in its proper and fullest sense requires an awareness of our participation in the material processes of the world and thus a sense of its own involvement in what it cannot finally master. Being rational is not a wholly detached capacity, examining the phenomena of the world from a distance, but a set of skills for finding our way around in the physical world.
Andrew Brown responds to Williams, arguing, “If God does not exist, we must urgently invent one”:
If the global crises facing the world are to be solved, then this will demand something that looks very like a religion. It will be necessary to invent god because organised religions or things very like them are the only ways ever discovered to make millions of civilians co-operate whole-heartedly.
Rowan Williams thinks that the crucial insight into the nature of God is supplied by our discovery that the world, and other people, have an inalienable value quite independent of their use to us. Now, whether or not you take this as a hint about the existence or nature of God, it is certainly what we are going to have to believe if the burdens of the coming global crisis are to be fairly shared. The lives of millions, perhaps billions, of the world’s poorest people will soon depend on the solidarity of the more fortunate.