It is rare that religion and science find agreement, but that is what happened when Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke at a meeting on saving the earth from climate change.

“The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson published a book in 2007 called “Creation”, subtitled An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” Sacks told leaders of all the major faiths meeting at Lambeth Palace in London on Thursday.

(Photo: A partially dried reservoir in Yingtan, Jiangxi province, China, 29 Oct 2009/stringer)

“I thought that was a very good book. E.O. Wilson is known not to be religious, but what this book was was a call to religious people and scientists to call off the war between religion and science and work together for the sake of the future of life on earth.

“And I felt that was a very generous and appropriate call by a non-religious scientist.”

He said “that science and religion despite their apparent friction actually converge on a profoundly scientific and at the same time religious idea that there is a kinship of life and hence a covenant of life”.

Not only did such a high-profile religious figure agree with the scientific world, but faith leaders found harmony among themselves at the same meeting.

Sitting next to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Church, was the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who only days earlier had delivered the Pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans the chance to convert to Rome.

Also attending were faith and community organisation leaders including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i, Jain and Zoroastrian.

(Photo: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 23 July 2006/Paul Hackett)

Organised by Williams, the leaders issued a joint statement in which they “recognised unequivocally that there is a moral imperative” to tackle the causes of global warming.

They agreed to work together to raise awareness about the effects of “catastrophic climate change”, saying it was the poor and vulnerable who most suffered from the ensuing droughts, floods, water shortages and rising sea levels.

Quoting from the book of Genesis, Sacks said man was placed on earth to serve it and protect it. “Man was a guardian, not the owner using and abusing the good things on earth,” he said.

“We are taken from the earth and therefore owe it a sense of kinship and responsibility. We believe our very existence as human beings come wrapped up in environmental imperatives and ecological responsibility.”

Drawing on the story of Noah’s Ark where all animals, including the lion and the lamb, had to survive side by side, he said we would all drown if we failed to work together.

Of course, if everybody kept the Sabbath, when nobody drove cars, flew by plane, or switched on any electrical appliances, the environmental problem would be solved, he said.

But more realistically, a new set of rituals would have to be devised that recognise the importance of the environment.

“What religion allows us to do is take the big ideas and translate them into daily rituals,” he said.

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What difference does this make?

The role of faith communities in mitigating the effects of climate change is very much flavour of the moment. I have already attended part of one conference on the subject. Next week I shall be at the big event being mountd by the Alliance of Religion and Conservation and the UN Development Programme at Windsor.

There are questions: will any of this make any difference? And if so, to what, to whom and by when?

Grassroots transformation

Whatever is actually happening to the world's climate and whom or whatever is responsible for the changes that are clearly going on, the essential truth in all of this is that we all bear responsibility for the planet and its peoples. At the moment, "we all" tends to mean "nobody" or "what's in my best interest", but the Baha'i teachings propose a long-term, sustainable transformation in villages, towns, streets, neighbourhoods that motivates individuals, families, communities to embrace human oneness and to accept their moral responsibility to care for each other and for the planet.

Idealistic? I don't think so. It's a long haul and challenging. And it starts with what Baha'i literature refers to as "stirrings at the grassroots" - changes of consciousness by people in villages, streets, etc about what's needed and what's possible.

Frank Furedi Getting God to do their dirty work In seeking to use religion to force people to change their eco-unfriendly behaviour, greens are debasing both religious belief and scientific truth.

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We live in world where the cynical manipulation of people’s fears and anxieties often overrides informed public debate. Principles and beliefs seem to have become negotiable commodities, and all too often the search for truth gives way to doing ‘whatever works’. In recent decades religious figures have, at various times, embraced the authority of science, therapy and the environment as a way of communicating their messages. Indeed, the old statement ‘our faith demands…’ has increasingly given way to the claim that ‘the research shows…’. If Christian fundamentalists can reinvent their dogma in the language of ‘creationist science’, how long before atheist scientists seek to justify their moral crusade in the language of religion?

Well, Lord May, president of the British Science Association, has risen to the occasion with his call last week to mobilise religion as part of the crusade against global warming. May said that mainstream religions should play a key role in convincing people to become more aware of environmental issues and to change their behaviour in order to ‘save the planet’. By making this opportunist demand for the effective rehabilitation of God, an atheist moral entrepreneur has shown that it is possible to debase both religion and science at the same time.

Was Michael Crichton right to characterise environmentalism as the religion of choice for urban atheists?

And is Frank Furedi right in his claim that Lord May is debasing both religion and scientist simultaneously in his call to mobilize religion as part of the crusade against global warming?

I think one can make the argument that both Crichton and Furedi are right. If so, people like May are idolaters. They have elevated their own understanding to the position that God occupies in monotheistic religions and they are trying to coopt a simplified "God" to take part in a kind of moral blackmail to push people to adopt their version of "environmentalism"

Another example of this kind of mindset is the increasing tendency by the government in the UK to see religion as a tool of policy. God wants you to adhere to this or that government agenda is the message.

But religion is sui generis. The Baha'i understanding is that God's will is expressed through the Revelation brought by the Manifestation of God, "the All-Knowing Physician", for the age in which we live.

Baha'u'llah says, "Every age hath its own problem... The remedy the world needeth in its present day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in..."

One of those needs may be to find ways of mitigating the effects of climate change (whether human-caused or not), but it is not for "moral entrepreneurs" like Lord May to abandon their atheist principles and to try to use religion to serve their particular ends.