Afterthought: Of Maker’s Knowledge

Abstract

We have been invited to offer afterthoughts on the 2010 San Giorgio Dialogue: Protecting Nature or Saving Creation? The Dialogue’s manifesto urged that to move on from somewhat sterile past exchanges between science and religion we should explore the tension between doctrines of nature and of creation. The high tension had somehow to be discharged because the sciences have apparently been able to demonstrate imminent ecological threat but not mobilize an adequate response. Meanwhile, religions have an impressive track record in mobilization, even if their capacity to get to grips with natural phenomena seems a bit uneven. The very first thing I learnt during the Dialogue was the intricate relation between the (somewhat religious) language of apocalypse and messianism, and the (somewhat technological) language of geo-engineering and planetary boundaries. As the Economist recently cautioned in its commentary on the arrival of the anthropocene epoch: “the invocation of poorly defined tipping points is a well worn rhetorical trick, stirring the fears of people unperturbed by current, relatively modest, changes.”