Henry Browne
Week 1 commentary
Christianity did give creation to modern ecology but that does not mean it has an particular characteristics that helped science. It was just a semi-viable substrate, which in the right place and time science could root itself in . Science and religion have the same essential goals, to explain the world, so it only stands to reason that a religious man like White would lay down some of the scientific basis for ecology. It seems like the evolution is for one person to find the root truth in earlier works and embrace them and advance science until his own views take him on some convoluted direction. Then someone else will take his root truths and contributions and take it further and in another direction. Science like corals grows on its ancestors skeletons.
Despite the religious context Whites views are very Pagan and therefore non-Christian. Worster argues that Christian pastoralist gave way to a mechanical point of view that we should accredit to Christianity, but this is only after the church had relaxed its views to adapt to the times. Is it not possible that that if we had been pagans that they would not too have changed there religion to conform to the times and perhaps from there conceive the non pagan idea of a mechanical world. Furthermore even if the Christian view is directly responsible for scientific categorizing the anthropocentric views of Christian pastoralist is definitely to blame for are destructive effects and attitudes towards nature. What good is advancing your knowledge in something if the price is killing it. Linnaeus’s categorization was useful but led to an understatement of everything’s connection and over emphasized individualism. I think this is why he viewed everything as one perfect system apposed to giving thought to the reason everything worked perfectly being that everything that didn’t work died. His ideas about the circular nature of the world seem very insightful and very non Christian. Christians typically having a more linear view considering god started the world on a particular day and Armageddon depicting the world ending on a certain day.
Thorough draws on the knowledge of his predecessors and brings it together and takes it forward. Thorough takes Linnaeus’s logical divisions but brings it full circle with whites Pagonistic understanding of nature as a whole and its divinity , not seeing nature as just to serve man. He was aware of humans destructive nature. In fact his comprehension of succession stems from mans destruction. “Thank god men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste to the sky as well as the earth.” - Thorough p.73
I think that science is an evolutional component of understanding the world and that ecology could have grown out of many different belief systems, but by the random occurrence of the universe came from Christianity. Though nowadays it has completely separated itself from the pile of dung it grew out of.