Experts, Climate Change, and Religious Knowledge

Oxford is basically as I write floating away. It always has been one of the dampest places on earth but today it resembles Kevin Costner's Waterworld - and we know what a success that was.

Anyhow, as usual, climate change is being blamed. And I have to say any mention of this kind of environmental science leaves me head-scratching. Why? Because it is so inherently dependent on experts for information. We are utterly reliant on them one way or another. And if you want to oppose climate change thinking you have to produce your own expert. This is because the reasoning involved is way beyond the ordinary person, even the educated ones. I am not a climate change sceptic: but I am an expert sceptic (as in, I am sceptical of experts). I hate being so reliant on people whose knowledge I can't test, and yet I guess it is a fact of modern life (see Anthony Giddens on this). What alternative have I? But I can't help noticing the way climate change talk feeds into our primeval apocalyptic fears so well (and into the general English pessimism too!). It is what we want to hear, strangely enough. And it is coated in the priestly/sacred language of science, with all its totemic power.

This feeling of bewliderment and disempowerment is however something that many people feel towards theological and religious questions. They can see that there is a lot of disagreement; they know that there is an industry devoted to specialised knowledge that they could never hope to master; and they haven't time to go further. I remember teaching a bright class of 17 year olds - one boy threw up his hands in exasperation and said 'how can I know what is true when there is so much to know and there are so many different answers!' I guess having people like me studying away at university becoming experts doesn't help matters either...

The gospel however is not a piece of expert information. It isn't shrouded in the darkness of arcane knowledge that it takes years to acquire. Christians and their theologians have a call to present it not as a piece of expert knowledge but as something else...