You cannot count that high
An attractive young woman, wearing a summery white dress and crowned with a tiara of flowers, was interviewed at a recent Earth Day event and her comments, couched in well-meaning platitudes on the importance of caring for the environment, were mind-boggling in the extreme. Her answer to how to heal the earth was to rid it of all fossil fuels. When challenged to provide an alternative means of transportation sans fossil fuels she brightly stated, “We have legs, don’t we?” Asked which represented the greatest global threat: terrorism or climate change, her immediate and confident response was “climate change”. When apprised that far more people have been killed by terrorism she stated with eye-opening candor and insouciant honesty, “That may be true but I’m really not a people person.”
The planet was made for man, not man for the planet
The antithesis of the belief in the nobility of man created by God is of course the secular ideology of man as a pestilential blight upon the world in which we reside. It ought to serve as a stark reminder of the increasing numbers of those who make manifest the belief that man is nothing but a virulent infestation that must be either eradicated or well-controlled for Gaia, the personification of earth, to survive and thrive.
Constructed upon a foundation of sophistry and demagoguery, this Gaian argument inexplicably continues to find gains in both popularity and adherents. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the desire to insure the long-term viability of the environment, those who place the planet before man are most assuredly guilty of egregious pretzel logic.
Their reasoning follows along identical lines as those of the Pharisees who, when disciples of Jesus were observed picking and eating grains of wheat on the Sabbath, objected to their unlawful actions. Jesus of course said in reply, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”[1] And so to paraphrase for those who insist that man is on par with a virus, “The planet was made for man, not man for the planet.”
In the beginning, after God had created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the sky, and the multitude of creatures in the sea, on the earth, and above the earth, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures the crawl on the ground.”[2] God did not say “Let the earth have dominion over man and all living creatures” for that would have made no sense, any more than the argument advanced by those who today proclaim, “Earth first”.
Those who reduce man to nothing more than an accidental conglomeration of molecules will find no intrinsic value associated with any human being. The question that we should ask is, “Of what value is the position of those who hold no value of themselves?”
The inestimable value of any life is predicated on the fact that we have been created in the image and likeness of God. Only God can determine the value of a life, and we simply cannot count that high.
