The Climate Change Debate and the Religion of the Sun

As the climate change debate progresses, it will increasingly be polarized to form two opposite sides: on one side is the argument that climate change is caused by humans (the scientific view on certain occasions, and the social-scientific view), while the other side will claim that it is a result of divine will. This debate will be the first time that religion and science battle one another in such a great, global scale, and this debate will surpass debate between religions only. As a battle that exists only between the developed western countries, between the religious and scientist populations within them, we can expect a mass mobilization of resources, as in the western World Wars 1 and 2. The resources that will be mobilized by each side in the conflict, however, will not be men and women in the armies, but images, research-based knowledge, media organizations; both sides will compose campaigns to convince ordinary people about the causes of climate change. This debate will begin and survive with religious and scientific propaganda, but by the end it may make apparent a crisis in science's and religion's conceptions of humanity.

If we imagine the planet as getting even more and more warmer/colder more rapidly, we can expect religion to take a different shape compared to today. No longer will there be religion based on texts and scripts, rather, a direct, divine intervention of God becomes apparent to religious people, God is not revealed by priests and temples, but God is directly acting through climate change, apparent before the people and impacting upon people. No longer will there be need of scripts, priests and temples, in their place is the direct worship of the elements of the universe, and there will form a religion of the sun, a direct worship of the sun, unmediated by protocol and formalities, but with each person as a kind of priest or prophet, utilizing his/her own spiritual depth to form a relationship with the sun. These new priests and prophets will be in dialogue with the sun. The newest worshipers won't ask for forgiveness, for a pacification of the sun's rays, but they will let their lives hang on the whim and will of the sun; they are not asking for earth's return to normalcy, but rather will be ready to give up their lives as a celebration of the divine intervention.

In the midst of this new religion will be the west's science-religion debate. Whereas science will continuously attempt to prove itself through its experiments and ever more meticulous research, religion will respond by providing the media and ordinary people with revelations of the prophets and priests who communicated with the sun; and they may even proclaim their subjective research practices, in the form of the 'ethnographic-interview' with the sun, to be more superior than the objective research of scientists. At least in this sense, religion may prevail as the more persuasive orientation towards climate change. But religion also can compromise, if it does not attempt to take the all-powerful element of the sun as a God, and rather focuses on something smaller, the earth, as a God. Between science and religion will rise the social sciences, since the social sciences seem to begin with the premise that the earth is a God and not the sun, and, in fact, even the hard sciences that are concerned with astronomical entities may secretly harbor the feeling that the sun is God and the earth is nothing. If the social sciences do indeed rise in this way, they will enable the study of the effects of climate change on the earth, on people, rather than seeing the earth purely objectively, which science is guilty of in its research endeavors, and religion is guilty of by proclaiming the sun as subject and therefore the earth as necessary object. But even if this 'social-scientistic' knowledge about the earth may be the solution to climate change, it may not be the solution to exploitative productive practices by powers: the social-scientist only applies a "science of government," developing a statistical, mathematical, scientific knowledge of the natural earth, with the ultimate objective of controlling it, in a Foucauldian sense. For the first time we are beginning to see a monitoring of the natural earth (the data on the "hottest year on record" is an example), and the surpassing of the argument that nature is too unpredictable and cannot be monitored. The earth is thus not an almighty God for social-science, but is rather a God to be crisscrossed with social-scientific, that is, managerial/administrative, knowledge.