Stewardship

Stewardship is an obligation in many aspects of life, and stewardship over the health of the ecosystem is our obligation to our grandchildren. It’s really difficult to have stewardship over something if you don’t know how it works. Therefore it should be goal one of every person to learn as much as he can about how the ecosystem works. If he takes his responsibility to his grandchildren seriously.

Scientists know a lot about how the ecosystem works; religious people are more likely to be seriously interested in stewardship. Therefore, if we want to find a way to stop trashing the earth, it would be good if the religious people and the scientist would come down out of their respective ivory towers and talk with each other.

Nothing stops us from talking with each other. Understanding each other is a bit more difficult, but any two groups of people can talk with each other if they have the same goal and if they remember what that goal is. And stop themselves from introducing fake debates. A fake debate is a debate over something that is not relevant to the goal.

The first goal of ecosystem stewardship is to understand the system so we can stop trashing it. Scientists know a lot about how the ecosystem actually functions. Science is the study of measurable facts using the scientific method. Therefore, if we want scientists to share their professional expertise we have to talk about things that can be evaluated using measurable facts.

What is the average size of a domestic cat?

How much does this cat weight?

What is she thinking? Not measurable.

God is also not a measurable fact; if you can’t talk about physical phenomena such as gravity (weight, mass), for example, or the flow of energy in the ecosystem, or the sexual reproduction that makes life possible as we know it. Well. Then. I wonder if you really want to fulfill your obligation as a steward, because those things exist and are discussable among peoples of any faith. That is the power of science. Measurable facts are discussable. They are not universal – they are not everythiing – but they are important and they are discussible.

And you can’t ask a professional scientist to professionally discuss science in the absence of measurable facts, because there is no such thing as science in the absence of measurable facts. Science IS the study of measurable facts. Technology is not science, but technology is a very good evidence for the validity of scientific discoveries, because technology uses the basic laws of nature (that science learns about) to make things. If the scientific information were wrong — the things wouldn’t work. So some of what scientists believe might be wrong, because scientists are only human, but most of it does tell us facts about how the ecosystem functions. And we cut ourselves off from the greatest body of knowledge that humans on earth have ever assembled when we refuse to talk to scientists, just because we (also humans) don’t like whatever scientists might be saying.

If we do that, I would doubt if our real motivation is stewardship, because if we genuinely want to fulfill our obligation as stewards, then we wouldn’t cut ourselves off from the information we need. We would do whatever it takes to learn the facts that we need to do the best possible job.