Light. God separated light from darkness. The Trinity is often described as a divine mystery, acknowledging that human language and thought are limited when trying to grasp the nature of God. And now, gentlemen, the proper subjects of this course are ended. And I think those are the 80 percent you want to reach. After all, we Christians can sit down with an Orthodox Priest or grow up in a Orthodox household and have a direct, personal contact with a tradition and understand how people who are part of it think and act. Gaia would think it important for us to save ourselves? It’s sheer hubris to imagine we can save Gaia. It’s quite beyond our capacity. It’s so compelling that it convinces even religious intellectuals: In his monumental A Secular Age (2007), the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor pretty much retold this conventional tale-even though there’s the twist of a possible re-enchantment at the end.

Even if they believe in these things, none of it enters into their calculations. Even if no major realignment takes place, the bond between evangelicals and the right might be loosened somewhat. Thirty years’ worth of experimental notebooks, however, reveal that Newton’s sights were set on far more than chemical reactions or even the promise of gold. Set aside the fact that religious belief has declined in the capitalist world over the last two centuries; one finds this to be the case in everyday life. The capitalist quest for profit not only relaxed medieval strictures against avarice and usury; it mandated that material reality had to be stripped of all spiritual significance. For we are not fighting against human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age. Of course, if people’s minds are entirely made up there is nothing you can do to change it.

For the one fact we reliably know about the future of the planet’s climate is that the facts will change. But while the pandemic dramatically altered religious practices for a period, there is little evidence of substantive religious change. So I try to engage them in a rational manner rather than in the religious manner. Maybe you could be more rational. It simply means that my argument is a lot more dangerous. But I continuously try to make this an argument about rationality. It fell to Hume to argue that the causal foundations of this argument were too weak to support the philosophical weight placed upon them. Lovelock and Lomberg, prophet and heretic, honored and reviled, one hoping for action today and the other expecting solutions tomorrow – yet each professes confidence in an eventual democratic endorsement of his plan. In this chapter, I get to see these players in action. From The Thinker and Venus de Milo to the Olmec Colossal Heads and Moai, see if you can match the famous statue to where in the world you’d find it. Instead, he argues that we should adapt to inevitable short-term temperature rises and spend money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, as well as other pressing world crises such as malaria, AIDS, and hunger.

Maybe you could spend your money in a better way. But then again I ask: why is it that we tackle it only in the way that current dogma talks about – cut carbon emissions right now and feel good about yourself? As climatologist Gavin Schmidt jokes, there is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100 percent accuracy: first, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 14 billion years. Something like five years ago in Britain they did a big poll. More able to deal with problems like incoming asteroids, volcanic outbursts and so on. After the death of Charles IX (30th of May 1574), Henri III was crowned on the 13 of February 1575. He refused the Malcontents’ requests but was soon obliged to deal with them as his troops were far fewer than theirs. And beyond politics, other longstanding positions may be shaken up. We do it all the time; the world sometimes demands it. According to Hume, all that the various religions in the world have in common is belief that there is an invisible, intelligent power in the world (NHR, Intro, 4.1). Although there is a “universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power” (NHR, 15.5), even religious belief of this limited kind is not entirely universal or any sort of “original instinct”.