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.