Analysis: Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God

https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/clintel-essay-pope-francis-climate

By William M Briggs

This essay was by my brother in intellectual arms Jaap Hanekamp and Yours Truly. It appears at the Clintel site, whose motto is “There is no climate emergency”.

You will be doing me a great service if you pass on the link to the Clintel site so that others may see the truth of this motto. Here is a direct link to the PDF.

Here is the editor’s introduction to the essay.

By uncritically embracing climate catastrophism, Pope Francis, perhaps unwittingly and most certainly unwillingly, rejects the God he clearly tries to serve wholeheartedly. That is the main conclusion of the essay Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God, a tale of two encyclicals, written by Jaap C. Hanekamp and William M. Briggs and published by Clintel.

Pope Francis outlined his views on climate change in two encyclicals, Laudato Si’ (2015) and Laudate Deum (2023). Concisely, the Pope fears that the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point because of climate change. In fact, the Pope announced in his encyclicals that there is a “global climate crisis.”

In the essay Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God chemist and theologian Jaap C. Hanekamp and statistician and meteorologist William M. Briggs reflect on both encyclicals, though they do not assess the scientific information on climate change as such. Instead, they examine the Pope’s use and understanding of models, and delve deeper into the overarching philosophy that sustains both encyclicals. They conclude that the Pope, carelessly in their view, embraces scientism, and not science, which inadvertently weakens his position, and those that follow his scientistic prescriptions.

Scientism is the ideology that science alone is deemed capable of elucidating and resolving all genuine human problems, and that all human affairs can be reduced to science. Accordingly, scientism is the effort to expand science to all other fields of human affairs, even theology, and to usurp them in a reductionist fashion.

Hanekamp and Briggs conclude that the climate scientism Pope Francis peddles stands diametrically opposed to the Christian worldview. “Scientism of any stripe is incommensurable with not only the Christian faith but also with science.”

Here again is the link to the essay, which we thank you for passing to your nervous friends. Here is a direct link to the PDF.

Clintel essay: Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God

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