Habitat of grace : biology, religion and the global environmental crisis
type: CreativeWork
description: The Fifth Mission Statement urges the Anglican Church to be, or become, involved in the world-wide effort by all thinking people, of any faith or none, to find workable ways to alleviate the global environmental crisis. As it stands, however, the Statement is an incompatible mixture of contemporary scientific and religious environmental concern set against a Biblical background that had no such concern. Therefore, public exhortations based on the Fifth Mission Statement taken at face value are unlikely to succeed, especially if addressed to secular audiences. The environmental crisis is a moral issue, because it concerns the process of reaching communal decisions about the allocation between competing groups of common resources in short supply, such as finance for conservation, access to forests, fisheries, clean water, clean air, etc. The relevant context for understanding the moral dimensions of environmental protection must include contemporary biological and philosophical knowledge, because we need to understand what decisions are required, and the origin and nature of the ethical context of those decisions, as well as the reasons why so many people ignore the interests of the environment on which we all depend. In this thesis I have explored some ways in which the insights of secular science can be incorporated into the Fifth Mission Statement, which will help Christians make a constructive contribution to the secular debate. From economics we can learn why the current free-market model is so subversive and why management of environmental common goods is so difficult; from game theory, why the personal restraint for which green activists plead is often not rational, except within the context of stable community life; from primatology, what are the evolutionary and social bases of morality and intelligence; from anthropology, how the combination of intelligence and socially-mediated morality as a conditional strategy has coaxed our primate and tribal human ances…
abstract: The Fifth Mission Statement urges the Anglican Church to be, or become, involved in the world-wide effort by all thinking people, of any faith or none, to find workable ways to alleviate the global environmental crisis. As it stands, however, the Statement is an incompatible mixture of contemporary scientific and religious environmental concern set against a Biblical background that had no such concern. Therefore, public exhortations based on the Fifth Mission Statement taken at face value are unlikely to succeed, especially if addressed to secular audiences. The environmental crisis is a moral issue, because it concerns the process of reaching communal decisions about the allocation between competing groups of common resources in short supply, such as finance for conservation, access to forests, fisheries, clean water, clean air, etc. The relevant context for understanding the moral dimensions of environmental protection must include contemporary biological and philosophical knowledge, because we need to understand what decisions are required, and the origin and nature of the ethical context of those decisions, as well as the reasons why so many people ignore the interests of the environment on which we all depend. In this thesis I have explored some ways in which the insights of secular science can be incorporated into the Fifth Mission Statement, which will help Christians make a constructive contribution to the secular debate. From economics we can learn why the current free-market model is so subversive and why management of environmental common goods is so difficult; from game theory, why the personal restraint for which green activists plead is often not rational, except within the context of stable community life; from primatology, what are the evolutionary and social bases of morality and intelligence; from anthropology, how the combination of intelligence and socially-mediated morality as a conditional strategy has coaxed our primate and tribal human ances…
author: King, Carolyn M.
license: https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstreams/e2ce8bd3-1ebc-4ace-938a-019f6cd9d25d/download
date published: 1999
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:57:36Z
provider: University Waikato
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Waikato