On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for his National Basketball Association team, the Philadelphia Warriors, as part of a 169-147 victory over the New York Knicks. Supposedly, one of Wilt’s teammates told a reporter after the game, “Tonight will be remembered for all of history as the night that Wilt and I combined to score 102 points.”
The quote is made up; none of Chamberlain’s teammates scored exactly two points in the game. But maybe partly because the Knicks are again in the news—albeit this time for their winning ways—the phony quote has been echoing around in my head of late as a great illustration of the ways we can misattribute the magnitude of the various causes that have a significant impact.
And maybe the reason I’ve been thinking about the incorrect attribution of significance, which can be given to different causal factors, is that 2026 marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban and the Lord High Chancellor of England in the early 17th century. While Bacon’s titles would suggest that his most important labors were associated with English jurisprudence, his legacy has far more to do with his role in founding modern empiricism. Bacon argued that we could know things about the world purely through observing the natural world around us and reasoning, inductively, to conclusions based on those observations. Further, he argued that any other source of knowledge about the world (including knowledge based on faith commitments or rationalist logic) should be viewed with skepticism. Bacon’s argument, at least in its most general form, was a major driver of the scientific revolution.
So what has Bacon’s empiricism to do with the bogus quote about Wilt and a teammate scoring a combined 102 points? And why link the two to a question about incorrectly attributing the significance of something? Answering those questions will take a moment and involve a detour through Lynn White’s enormously consequential 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis.” Hang on with me for a moment.
White’s argument runs, roughly, like this: Christianity—or at least a particular and dominant flavor of Christianity associated with western thought—is largely responsible for the environmental crises of the 20th (and now 21st) centuries. At the root of this responsibility is the fact that Christianity is not only an anthropocentric religion but one that worships a god who is distinct and separate from the natural world. As a result, Christians not only identify with a supernatural “other”; they resist identification with the natural world and instead favor a dualism between human beings and nature.
This dualism, White argues, shaped western attitudes toward science and technology, that led to a time in which “no creature other than man has ever managed to foul its nest in such short order” and for which “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.”[1] And while White does suggest that other expressions of Christianity might have alleviated or mediated this guilt, had they been followed (he favors, particularly, a rather idiosyncratic reading of St. Francis of Assisi), none of those expressions have been dominant and so Christianity’s guilt remains.
When I write that White’s essay has been enormously consequential, I’m not hyperbolizing. Not only do I find reference to his essay in most of the books and articles I read that relate Christianity to contemporary environmental problems, but most of those books and articles that are written by Christian theologians treat White’s analysis as accurate and so begin their own arguments with a kind of confession/apology on behalf of an entire world religion. For that matter, when I’m teaching on faith and the environment in churches, I regularly encounter laity who are familiar with White’s basic argument, even if they don’t know who White is. His essay tried to move the church (or at least the mainline US church) in more environmentally-attentive directions during fraught times—and it does so at a time when moving in such directions is vital. Since many of us are aware of how fraught the present is (and many of us are committed to our faiths), White’s essay has given us ground to stand on, albeit uncomfortable ground.
But is the ground as solid as the impact of White’s essay suggests? Perhaps not.
There are a number of problems within White’s arguments in the essay. These include assumptions about the (unexamined) ways he relates religion to social and cultural power (White wasn’t really a scholar of religion, so we can maybe let that one go); the blurring of vast swaths of western history that should, at least for accuracy’s sake, be distinguished (White was a historian, so it’s harder to let that one go); and the idiosyncratic ways he connects metaphysics, technological changes, significant persons, and social movements (better to recognize that these things are related than not, but the essay leaves a whole range of assumptions about these relations under-examined or not carefully considered at all).
Setting aside the various internal weaknesses of White’s argument, though,[2] I propose that a fundamental problem with White’s essay—or at least its impact—is less that it gets Christianity wrong, but that it misattributes the weight of the causes of contemporary environmental crises. In so doing, Christianity bears more of a burden for those crises than does, say, a Baconian approach to science. Christianity, after all, can be rather anthropocentric—then again, most religions are to various extents—and some versions of the Christian faith have dramatically distorted the interconnectedness of human beings and the rest of creation. Together, maybe, Christianity and Francis Bacon combined to score 102 points in the game of environmental damage. However, Bacon and his ilk, I would argue, scored most of the points. It’s maybe just that a 16th century philosopher/jurist is less well-known than the world’s most dominant religious tradition and that far fewer people identify as “Baconian” than “Christian,” so maybe it is easier not only to heap more blame on the religious tradition but also to try to induce more people to change their behavior because they feel complicit in a problem.
Having cast a rather serious charge in Bacon’s direction, let me at least provide some context for my accusation. Recall that Bacon lived at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries and that these were dramatically turbulent times. The wars of religion in Europe—which were really also political wars over the formation of new nation-states—were raging. The new economic system of capitalism and the new technologies of the scientific revolution were emerging. Exploration, colonization, and conquest were reshaping European sensibilities about the size of the world and the constituencies of creatures who lived on it. Plagues ravaged Europe. And the “Little Ice Age” had begun, changing climate patterns throughout the northern hemisphere.
Life, undoubtedly, felt chaotic: a turbulent mix of possibility, crisis, helplessness, and emerging power. It felt, quite possibly, somewhat like many of us feel today, as we experience the churn of the present world.
Into that mix, Bacon’s writing might be read as a kind of therapy for those living through chaos. They are attempts to tease out some process for regaining order and attempting to exert control over those parts of the chaos that Bacon thought human beings might seek to control.[3] And chief among those things, according to Bacon, is the non-human natural world. “Conquer and subdue Nature, to shake her to her foundations,” Bacon writes, “bind her to your service and make her your slave.”[4] And in still other places in the same text, Bacon calls on humans to wage war on nature.
When much of the natural world is decidedly vulnerable to human exploitation, such an approach seems appalling at best, if not cruel and (paradoxically) inhumane. But it is worth remembering that during Bacon’s time, the roles felt reversed; humans were vulnerable to nature’s exploits. Bacon was, if anything, arguing that we need to fight against, rather than retreat from or surrender to, nature’s awesome and often destructive powers.
And Bacon’s means for doing so align, rather cleanly, with modern scientific methods: Examine the world objectively and measure its elements and movements precisely, such that anyone in your shoes would arrive at the same answers about the forces of nature. Disassociate the researcher from the things being researched. Focus on solving those problems that most bedevil human beings. Publish your findings in ways that allow others access to your research (to both test it and benefit from it). Build from established and empirically-verified conclusions to shape new hypotheses to test and confirm through careful experimentation. Control variables.
When Bacon declares war on nature—when he seeks to make it a slave—and then describes processes for doing so, he isn’t so much repeating Christianity’s anthropocentrism as he is initiating modern science and, therein, modernity’s relationship with the non-human natural world. And it is modernity, I would argue, that carries much of the weight for the drivers of environmental degradation. Modernity, not Christianity, has scored most of the points in this destructive game.
To be clear, and a bit more charitable: it isn’t so much Bacon who is to be blamed for current environmental crises; it is a way of thinking that he initiated. After all, the same Francis Bacon who, in Novum Organum, called on human beings to “conquer and subdue nature,” also wrote, in the same document, that “Nature cannot be conquered but by obeying her.” There is, in the text, a sense that the best way of getting control over nature’s chaos is to work with nature. Since then, the “obey” part of his message has dropped away, leaving the “conquer” part to rule, as it were.
Why might all this matter to PASTCF (beyond the fact that our membership is composed of people who may nerd out on trivia like it is the 500th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s death)? There are at least a few reasons.
First, when we center concern for the environment in our present work, we need to not only think about complicity but also think about the forces that have made us complicit. White makes us complicit through the “P,” “C,” and “F” in PASTCF; attention to Bacon, on the other hand, reminds us that our complicity is more likely due to the “S” and the “T” in our name. As such, when the PASTCF pursues a pro-environmental agenda on behalf of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and its ecumenical partners, it ought to do so in a way that attends to the traditions and methods that have shaped many of its members’ work—the kind of work that is far more common to them than to the wider membership of the church. Confession, it is said, is good for the soul. That’s especially so if we are confessing the right things. Perhaps an edition of SciTech† that focuses on science’s complicity with environmental degradation might be in order?
Second, and perhaps paradoxically, PASTCF might leverage its awareness not only of complicity but of what to be complicit about to help the PC(USA) and the wider church think more wisely about how to address a vulnerable natural world, not just a threatening one. At least anecdotally, it can seem like parts of the church took White’s argument not as diagnosis but as operating instructions. Too much of the wider church—both within and beyond the denomination—continues to see the non-human natural world as something to subdue and conquer and they link their vision to their faith, as if Christianity says subdue and conquer. That vision, I would suggest, reveals less that they are servants of Jesus Christ than that they are subjects of modern thought. Perhaps PASTCF might dedicate some of its bandwidth to hearing from social scientists who are revealing linkages between, e.g., Christian fundamentalism, modernity, and the paroxysms of reactionary politics as the world exits the modern age. As Francis Bacon wrote near the beginning of his great tome, “[t]o be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action.”
Finally, we might all be reminded that identifying the causes of effects isn’t quite the same thing as identifying the various weights of those causes. This is especially important when so many of the drivers of climate change are not reducible to association with one religion, one nation, one industry, or one discipline. We all are culpable. We’re all scoring points against creation. At the same time, some drivers of behavior, some political bodies, some economic forces, and even some disciplines are far more culpable than others. Do we really want the 21st century to be remembered for all of history as the time that modernity and Christianity combined to score a record number of points against God’s creation?
Celebrating a 500th anniversary is a significant way to honor the past. Imagining a world 500 years into the future, though, is an even more significant task, and one vitally worth taking up.
[1] Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7; 1204, 1206.
[2] For a critique of White’s essay, see Willis Jenkins, “After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 2 (2009): 283–309.
[3] In this regard, Bacon’s writings perform, in an empirical way, a process analogous to the one that Descartes’s writing perform, in a more metaphysical way: distinguishing between things we can get a handle on and things we cannot and then emphasizing the parts of the world/our thought with the best “handles.”
[4] These and other quotes from Bacon come from his Novum Organum: sive Indicia Vera de Interpretatione Naturae (or “The New Tool for Interpreting Nature”—author’s translation).
