Dr. Craig Responds to Jordan Peterson on Christian Environmental Ethics

Does Christian theology teach us anything about environmental ethics? Dr. Craig compares sound theology to the criticisms of the Left and the thoughts of Jordan Peterson!

JORDAN PETERSON: Accusation number two: Human activity (particularly that undertaken in the West) is fundamentally a planet-despoiling enterprise. The human race is a threat to the ecological utopia that existed before us and that could hypothetically exist in our absence. We might well be construed even as a cancer that threatens the very viability of the complex systems that make up the ecosystem of the Earth that shelters and supports us. We are facing a Malthusian catastrophe of overpopulation and biosphere degradation, and we have to place extreme limits on our wants, even our needs, so that survival itself, even in a much reduced form, can be guaranteed.

DR. CRAIG: I'm not qualified to speak to the scientific credibility of global warming, and I think that we're all concerned about the environment and that Christians do have a sound basis for an environmental ethic, in that God has given us a stewardship to care for and nurture the Earth. But this doesn't imply the sort of anti-human rhetoric that I think Peterson decries here, the sort of anti-natalism, that human beings are a poison on the Earth and it would almost be better if our species went extinct and the ecosystem turned back to simply sub-human forms of life. Because on the Christian view, again, humanity is created in the image of God and therefore intrinsically valuable. It is God-like in a way that the rest of creation is not. But that doesn't sanction an abuse of creation or the environment. Rather, we are stewards of the world that God has entrusted to us. Unfortunately the Scriptures also teach that we are terribly fallen, and therefore we do abuse the beautiful creation that God has given us. So Christianity – it's such a wonderful worldview in that it sees honestly the problems identified by the critics on the left (human sinfulness and tyrannical patriarchy and illegitimate use of power), but at the same time it recognizes human beings as intrinsically valuable and good, and provides a means of forgiveness, redemption, and transformation that just isn't available apart from God himself.