James Inhofe (R-OK), the new chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, delivered something of a surprise last week when he joined 97 of his colleagues in voting that climate change exists (eppur si muove). The author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (2012) allowed as how the â??hoaxâ? did not concern the existence of climate change â?? for which, he said, there is archeological and biblical and historical evidence â?? but â??that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man canâ??t change climate.â?
That denial was easy to make fun of, and many did, but rationalizing doing nothing about carbon emissions on religious grounds is no laughing matter, not when it results in the Senateâ??s inability to go on and acknowledge even a modest degree of human responsibility for global warming. Under the circumstances, it behooves us to try to engage Inhofe and his fellow disbelievers on their own terms, and try to persuade them to rethink their understanding of what the Bible says about the Earth and its climate. For in fact, their inerrantist approach to reading Scripture does not warrant the position they take.
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