Tim Ball in his
2014 talk at Skagit Education Outreach
The Climate, Science Based on Evidence, Mt Vernon Washington. From the 15 minute mark.
There’s one other thing with environmentalism because if you look at the bookshelves you’ll see there’s a lot of books about Darwin, Richard Dawkins talking about Darwin and is God dead. That’s one of the debates that’s going on in the academic world about all of this and certainly with the young people. Now Darwin of course was an atheist and for the reason that most men become atheists he had a young daughter who died, and Darwin said ‘I can understand a God that tests adults, but I cannot understand a God that would test children’, and that, as I said, is why most men become atheists.
But Darwin was used by science to defeat religion and I’m not here to argue pro or for or whatever...but in defeating religion of course then you take away the reason for humans being here...we’re here because God put us here...well, you get rid of that and then, why are we here?
You know what change that makes to the world? Enormous, because if you went to the university in Darwin’s day [the library was about humanities and natural sciences] the social sciences emerged because that was the scientific world's way of trying to justify why humans are different than all the other animals...[but the distinctives sought keep disappearing] they decided that what makes people different than other apes is that we can tell lies...thus homo sapiens sapiens: the double knowledge of lies. The distinctive is we think of afterlife...but is that not religion? Back to where we started.
Once you've got rid of God and religion, for most of the young people...a student said I don’t believe you...I don’t believe you Thomas...my names isn’t Thomas...how many in the room know what I’m referring to? Two students in 150 knew the references. I believe our distinctive is that we are a moral being. We have to have a belief system of some sort, so young people are vulnerable to environment as the new religion.
