Beschreibung:
<jats:p>The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.</jats:p>