The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a four-year-old organization of clergy, scientists and academics, claimed Dec. 3 that reducing reliance on fossil fuels would have negligible impact on global temperatures and that increased energy costs would disproportionately hurt the world’s poor.

“We believe global-warming alarmism fails the tests of science, economics, and theology,” Calvin Beisner, national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance, said in a press statement announcing the release of An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming.

Beisner, a former professor at Knox Theological Seminary now on the pastoral staff at Holy Trinity Presbyterian (OPC) Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said the whole notion of dangerous climate change rests on poor science and ignores the costs and exaggerates the benefits of reducing levels of atmospheric gases like CO2.

He said “global-warming alarmism” also rests on “poor theology, with a worldview of the Earth and its climate system contrary to that taught in the Bible.”

Beisner said Dec. 5 on the Richard Land Live radio program that theology is often overlooked in the debate over climate change. “Scientists are just as much shaped by their worldviews as anybody else,” Beisner said. “It’s not just a matter of taking measurements. It’s a matter of interpreting those measurements, and your theological worldview will determine largely how you do that.”

Beisner said “pretty much all of the scientists” warning about the dangers of global warming are “secular Darwinists” who believe the Earth came about by random chance. Because of that, he said, they view the world’s climate system as “very fragile, not resilient” and that “a tiny little bit of an influence on it could throw the whole thing into utter collapse.”

Beisner called that “a fundamentally anti-Christian worldview.”

“The biblical worldview tells us instead that this Earth is the product of God’s wise, intelligent design, and in Genesis 1:31 we read at the end of all creation God saw all that he had made and, behold, it was very good,” Beisner told Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

He reasoned that assigning catastrophic results to small shifts in atmospheric chemistry “assumes a fragile Earth instead of the well-designed Earth.”

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