Some surprisingly well know signatories signed up to the Cornwall Alliance:
E. Calvin Beisner (founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance
for the Stewardship of Creation)
Dr. Roy W. Spencer (Principal Research Scientist in Climatology, University of Alabama, Huntsville,
Dr. Joseph D’Aleo (Executive Director and Certified Meteorologist, Icecap
Dr. David Legates (Associate Professor of Climatology, University of Delaware
Dr. Ross McKitrick (Associate Professor of Economics, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada,
Dr. Cornelis van Kooten (Professor of Economics and Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Expert Reviewer, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
Dr. Kenneth W. Chilton (Founder and Emeritus Director, Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment, Lindenwood College); Contibuting Writers.
:Rev. Richard S. Courtney, Expert Reviewer, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Methodist Preacher, Cornwall, UK
G. Cornelis van Kooten, Ph.D., Professor of Economics and Research Chari in Environmental Studies and Climate, University of Victoria, BC, CanadaAdvisory board
James A. Wanliss, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Physics, Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC
What they signed up to has some telling beliefs in particular the believe that Man can do no wrong with the environment especially CO2.
Can these signatories ever criticise mans environmental behaviour if they signed up to this?
WHAT WE BELIEVE
- We
believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and
infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust,
resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for
human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system
is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of
warming and cooling in geologic history.
etc
WHAT WE DENY
- We
deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products
of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to
dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric
chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally
rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution
to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.
etc
TheBiblical Perspective of Environmental Stewardship: Subduing and Ruling theEarth to the Glory of God and the Benefit of Our Neighbors
1. We
affirm that the Earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof (Psalm
24:1).
We
deny that the
Earth or anything else is the result of impersonal, blind chance over time.
2. We
affirm that the Bible—the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments—is the
sole, absolute, inerrant epistemological basis for mankind for all knowledge of
all things, seen and unseen, and that all claims of truth and moral duty that
contradict it are false and harmful.
We
deny that the
physical universe and human observations of it justify truth claims contrary to
those of the Bible, and that liberty, justice, and human dignity can be
sustained while rejecting Biblical truth and law.
3. We
affirm that the only true God—a spirit infinite, eternal, and
immutable—revealed Himself in creation (which He made out of nothing
and includes both physical and spiritual things), the Bible, and His one
and only Son, Jesus Christ, and that though God reveals His wisdom and power in
the creation, He is, always has been, and always will be absolutely distinct
from and transcendent over creation, which He rules at all times and places.
We
deny atheism
(there is no God), pantheism (everything is God), panentheism (God is to the
universe as the human soul is to the human body), animism (there are many gods,
and they indwell and animate physical objects as human souls indwell and
animate human bodies), and any other view that denies the Creator/creature
distinction, because those who hold them exchange the truth about God for a lie
and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed
forever (Romans 1:25).
4. We
affirm that human dignity, freedom, and justice can be sustained only
insofar as a society affirms the Creator/ creature distinction and embraces the
truth of Scripture, and that those who deny it become futile in their thinking,
and their foolish hearts are darkened (Romans 1:21).
We
deny that
societies built on atheism, pantheism, panentheism, animism (also called
spiritism), or any other rejection of the Creator/creature distinction can
flourish intellectually, morally, aesthetically, and materially.
5. We
affirm that the creation includes persons— conscious spirits capable of
reason, moral judgment, and affection, and therefore morally accountable for
their actions—and that some of these persons are bodiless (immaterial, e.g.
angels and demons) and some embodied (combinations of spirit and body, e.g.,
humans).
We
deny that the
material cosmos—“nature” and its parts, the created world of time and space,
matter and energy, planets and stars, energy and material elements—is personal,
either in its whole or in its parts; hence we deny that forests and trees,
mountains and rocks, oceans and lakes and streams, and animals are persons.
6. We
affirm that God made man, male and female, in His own image (Genesis
1:26–27).
We
deny that any
other terrestrial life form bears the image of God or is of equal value or
priority with human beings (Matthew 10:29–31).
7. We
affirm that though the Earth is the LORD’s, He has also given it to men
(Psalm 115:16) and mandated that they be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth,
subdue it, and have dominion over everything that lives in it (Genesis 1:28).
We
deny that human
dominion over the Earth is, in principle, sinful, and that the possibility of
its abuse negates the righteousness of its proper use.
8. We
affirm that the Earth and all its physical and biological systems are
the effects of God’s omniscient design, omnipotent creation and faithful
sustaining, and that when God completed His creative work it was “very good”
(Genesis 1:31).
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 causes, and consequently we deny
that wise environmental stewardship readily embraces claims of catastrophe
stemming from such causes.
9. We
affirm that by God’s design Earth and its physical and biological
systems are robust, resilient, and self-correcting.
We
deny that they
are fragile.
10. We
affirm that godly human dominion over the Earth means men and women,
created in the image of God, laboring freely and lovingly together to enhance
Earth’s safety, fruitfulness, and beauty, to the glory of God and the benefit
of our neighbors.
We deny that godly human dominion entails
humans’ being servants rather than masters of the Earth.
11. We
affirm that when God had created Adam, He placed him in the Garden of
Eden to cultivate and guard it (Genesis 2:15).
We
deny that the
Garden of Eden represents the whole Earth and that the instruction to “cultivate
and guard” the Garden ought to be reinterpreted to mean either that man is to
“serve and protect” the Garden or the Earth, or that man is to “worship and
protect” the Garden or the Earth, or that man is to “worship and hear” God
either directly or through the Earth or its parts.
12. We
affirm that a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between
God’s placing Adam in the Garden to cultivate and guard it (Genesis 2:15) and
God’s commanding Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth
and subdue and rule everything in it (Genesis 1:28) entails a growing
population that spreads out from the Garden to till the whole Earth and
transform it from wilderness to garden and ultimately to garden city
(Revelation 21:2; 22:1–3).
We
deny that
Biblical Earth stewardship, or godly dominion, is limited to keeping Earth in
the condition in which man finds it, i.e., we deny that, as many
environmentalists put it, “Nature knows best” and its transformation by humans
is in principle wrong or harmful.
13. We
affirm that the Bible normally associates wilderness or wildness with
divine judgment and curse (Exodus 23:29; Leviticus 26:22; Deuteronomy 7:22; 1
Samuel 17:46; Isaiah 5:2–4; 13:19–22; 34:1–17; Jeremiah 50:39; Leviticus
16:21–22).
We
deny that
wilderness is the best state of the Earth.
14. We
affirm that God placed minerals, plants, and animals in and on the
Earth for His pleasure, to reveal His glory and elicit man’s praise, and to
serve human needs through godly use (Genesis 2:5–16; 4:22; Numbers 31:21–23;
Job 38–41; Psalm 19:1–6; Psalm 104).
We
deny that
recognizing instrumental value in the Earth and its various physical and
biological components dishonors God or is idolatrous.
15. We
affirm that one way of exercising godly dominion is by transforming raw
materials into resources and using them to meet human needs.
We
deny that
leaving everything in the Earth in its natural state is proper Biblical
stewardship (Matthew 25:14–30).
16. We
affirm that because of man’s fall into sin, sinful human hearts often
fall prey to materialism, the covetous love of money, and the selfish
accumulation of possessions (Luke 12:16–21; 1 Timothy 6:10; Colossians 3:5).
We
deny that the
temptation to materialist idolatry entails that the production of wealth,
whether material from the Earth or immaterial from the human mind, is sinful in
and of itself.
17. We
affirm that man is accountable to God’s judgment in all he does with
the Earth.
We
deny that man’s
accountability to God justifies abolishing private property (Exodus 20:15, 17),
adopting collectivist economic institutions, or delegating to civil
governments—whether local, national, or global—ownership or control of land,
natural resources, or private property.
18. We
affirm that man’s fall into sin (Genesis 3) entails the possibility and
indeed the historical reality of human abuse of the Earth and of fellow humans.
We
deny that man’s
fall into sin completely destroys the possibility of godly dominion.
19. We
affirm that in response to man’s sin God cursed the ground so that it
would not, as before sin, yield easily even to godly dominion/cultivation, let
alone to ungodly, abusive domination (Genesis 3:17–19), and indeed subjected
the whole cosmos to decay and corruption until He restores it partially
in history by obedience to the dominion mandate (Genesis 1:28), whether by the
unregenerate through common grace (Matthew 7:11) or by the regenerate through
special grace (Romans 8:18–24) , and fully in the New Heavens and New Earth of
the eschaton (Revelation 21:1–3, 22–27; 22:1–5), all secured by the redeeming
work of Christ (Colossians 1:14–20).
We
deny, due to
God’s faithfulness to His covenant, in which He proclaimed, after the Flood,
that He would sustain the cycles on which terrestrial life depends for as long
as the Earth endures (Genesis 8:22), that God’s curse on the Earth negates
either the dominion mandate (Genesis 1:28) or the robustness and
self-correcting resilience of the God-sustained Earth.
20. We
affirm that human multiplication and filling of the Earth are
intrinsically good (Genesis 1:28) and that, in principle, children, lots of
them, are a blessing from God to their faithful parents and the rest of the
Earth (Psalm 127; 128).
We
deny that the
Earth is overpopulated; that “overpopulation” is even a meaningful term, since
it cannot be defined by demographic quantities such as population density,
population growth rate, or age distribution; and that godly dominion over the
Earth requires population control or “family planning” to limit fertility.
21. We
affirm that when the Bible speaks of God’s judgment on human societies
because they have “polluted the land,” the “pollution” in mind is consistently
not chemical or biological but moral—the pollution of idolatry, adultery,
murder, oppression of the weak, and other violations of the moral law of God
expressed in the Ten Commandments (Psalm 106:38; Jeremiah 3:1–10; 16:18).
We
deny that
Biblical prophets’ concerns about the pollution of any land focus significantly
on chemical emissions from agriculture or industry, although prudent study of
the risks those pose to human and ecosystem health is a worthy task and can
lead to proper efforts to balance risks and benefits.
22. We
affirm that cost/benefit analysis (Luke 14:28) is a proper and
critically important aspect of godly dominion over the Earth (Proverbs 14:4).
We
deny that
cost/benefit analysis is unprincipled pragmatism or indicates a lack of faith
in God.
23. We
affirm that, pursuant to sin and the curse, risk is inherent in every
human activity (Hebrews 9:27) and therefore that it is lawful in principle to
balance risk against risk.
We
deny that the
mere existence of risk in an activity makes it immoral in principle.
24. We
affirm that proper environmental prioritization will address greater
risks before lesser risks and take into account the opportunity costs of
fighting various risks—i.e., that it will recognize that since resources spent
to reduce one risk cannot be used to reduce another, it is wise to allocate
resources where they will achieve the greatest risk reduction.
We
deny that
spending vast resources to reduce small risks, when those resources could be
spent to reduce greater risks instead, is good environmental stewardship.
25. We
affirm that environmental policies that address relatively minor risks
while harming the poor—such as opposition to the use of abundant, affordable,
reliable energy sources like fossil fuels in the name of fighting global
warming; the suppression of the use of safe, affordable, and effective
insecticides like DDT to reduce malaria in the name of protecting biodiversity;
and the conversion of vast amounts of corn and other agricultural products into
engine fuel in the name of ecological protection—constitutes oppression of the
world’s poor.
We
deny that the
policies named, and many others like them, are morally justified.
26. We
affirm that, because a clean, safe, healthful, beautiful environment is
a costly good, wealthy societies can better afford environmental protection and
restoration than poor societies.
We
deny that
economic development is, per se, a threat to environmental quality.
27. We
affirm that private ownership of land and other resources, because it
harnesses God-given human incentives to overcome the “tragedy of the commons,”
is the best institutional economic system for environmental protection.
We
deny that
collective economic systems are equally good at protecting or improving natural
environments.
28. We
affirm that local, constitutionally limited, responsive governments by
the consent of the governed are better suited to environmental stewardship than
central, unlimited governments without regard to the consent of the governed.
We
deny that
socialism, fascism, communism, and other forms of collectivist, expansionist
government offer better solutions to environmental risks than limited, free,
constitutional governments with market economies.
29. We
affirm that truth-telling is a moral obligation and that sound
environmental stewardship depends on it.
We deny that intentional exaggeration, as
practiced by many environmental advocacy organizations, or minimization, as
practiced by many industries, of environmental risks or of the effectiveness of
various means of addressing them is righteous.
30. We
affirm that godly dominion is a responsibility for everyone at all
times.
We
deny that the
expectation of divine judgment, in whatever eschatological framework, negates
the need for Biblical Earth stewardship.
Cornwall Alliance Statement of Faith
