Western God

The dominant Western view of God has traditionally contributed to religious views of earthly stewardship at best, dominance at worst. The Genesis account has most often been interpreted as giving man dominance over women, animals, plants, and all other elements of the earth, with God acting as an external agent, outside of natural order and nature itself. Science and the progress of scientific understanding of our natural world has been positioned against God, as a fundamentally Other way of approaching the natural world and therefore contradictory to a truly religious approach to nature. Therefore, environmental ethics as they are presented by the scientific community are rejected as counter to God and a reliance on God’s wisdom. These views are not only dangerous to the planet, but bankrupt in their moral relevance. A truly ethical approach to the environment should be one of responsibility, connection, and mutual reliance.