Creation: quotes & references
COP 29 / 30 REFERENCES
The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP29, took place in Baku from 11 - 22 November. COP 30 will take place in Belem, Brazil, form 10 - 21 November 2025.
There are three reasons for hope in this age of climate change: partnership, yeast and prayer. To find out why, click on :
To see a list of relevant websites, click on:
THE BIBLE
"How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all, the Earth is full of your creatures...When you send your Spirit , they are created, and you renew the face of the Earth." (Psalm 104, verses 24 & 30, The Holy Bible, New International Version)
"The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope. For the creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time......" (Romans 8:19 - 22, NIV)
JOHN BULLOUGH, Author & activist
"Ultimately, the climate and nature crisis is not a scientific problem but a human behavioural problem. It's about the way we choose to live, our dysfunctional relationship with the natural world. We urgently need a new code of being, and the Celtic saints embody numerous qualities which would be essential to that code - above all, in the way they reverences the natural world as an aspect of God...We're failing to reverence the world around us. I'm always heartened by talking to Christians who take this issue seriously."
(Church Times 18.10.24)
JOHN CALVIN, Reformation Theologian
"The creation is quite like a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the most exquisite, and at the same time, most abundant furnishings. Everything in it tells of God".
ELIZABETH COLE analytical chemist, businessperson , and author
There's nothing simple about making a universe, as the recipe book shows. The chances of ever getting a cosmos to work for a nano-second - never mind the billions of years needed to even start the evolution of life - are essentially mathematically impossible. So many constants, factors, and natural laws have to be just right to the nth degree for things to work, so even some atheist scientists have wondered if a super-intellect might have hand a hand in creation".
What amazed me as I was putting the book together was the very existence of the universe we live in. We're walking around in a miracle.
(Church Times 3 November 2023)
POPE BENEDICT XVI
"Respect for creation is of immense consequence, not least because 'creation is the beginning and foundation of all God's work', and its preservation has now become essential for the pacific coexistence of mankind."
"The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human existence: when 'human ecology' is respected within society, 'environmental ecology' also benefits".
"Respect for the human being and respect for nature are one and the same, but they will bot be able to develop and reach their full dimension if we respect the Creator and his creature in the human being and in nature."
POPE FRANCIS
"I like to think that a good omen can be found in an event that took place in 1224. in that year, Francis of Assisi composed his ' Canticle of the Creatures'. By then Francis was completely blind, and after a night of physical suffering his spirits were elevated by a mystical experience. he then turned to praise the Most High for all those creatures he could no longer see, but knew that they were his brothers and sisters, since they came forth from the same Father...Shortly thereafter, Francis added a stanza in which he praised God for those who forgive...I too, who bear the name Francis, with the heartfelt urgency of a prayer, want to leave you with this message:...with God's help, let us emerge from the dark night of wars and environmental devastation in order to turn our common future into the dawn of a new and radiant day." (Address to Cop28).
MAKOTO FUJIMURA artist and writer
"Creativity is given to us as a chief means to be caretakers and active stewards of the Earth"
("Art + Faith: a Theology of Making" Yale University Press 2020)
MICHAEL HARVEY, Chief Executive, God and the Big Bang (gatbb.co.uk)
"...in science, we-knowism is being taught: 'This is what what science has found, and it will basically solve all the problems'. We very rarely teach science as 'This is what we don't know'. On the the one end of the spectrum, we have 'science is fact'; on the other, we have the Genesis story, which is true but poetically so. In both areas, we don't appear to be equipped to look at the other side". (Church Times 24 May 2024)
BISHOP NICHOLAS HOLTAM former C of E Lead Bishop on Climate Change & author of "Sleepers Awake - getting serious about climate change" SPCK 2022
"Gus Speth, an American environmentalist, said ' I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy - and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation - and we scientists don't know how to do that'. In his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, Pope Francis days that care of creation will not just be a technical fix, important though that is. It is a spiritual issue connecting our beliefs, values and actions. And when the carbon footprint of the richest 1 per cent is equivalent to that of the poorest 50 per cent, there are moral issues involved that ought to shape public policy as well as personal lifestyles...This Advent...it is time for us to wake up and get serious about climate change. Our Advent hope is that ' the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.'" (writing in "The Times" 26 November 2022)
PROFESSOR IAN HUTCHINSON Nuclear Science & Engineering, MIT
To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of "nature"......is "the normal course of events". Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal.......the fact that the resurrection was impossible in the normal course of events was as obvious in the first century as it is for us. Indeed, that is why it was seen as a great demonstration of God's power.....a bare presumption that science has shown the resurrection to be impossible is an intellectual cop-out. Science has shown no such thing.
(www.peacefulscience.org/prints/ April 2016)
TOSA OSITELU Columnist
" The likes of James Clerk Maxwell, Johannes Keppler, and Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian priest who proposed the Big Bang theory, are among many who felt that theism was not at odds with the pursuit of scientific knowledge. For Lemaitre, his faith engendered the awe that inspired his research".(Church Times 24 may 2024)
CANON ANGELA TILBY columnist
The real lesson for us from Leviticus is that God has a purpose and a delight in those aspects of nature which are forbidden for us to consume. There is here the beginnings of an eco-theology that demands a boundary on the human appetite and empty curiosity, and a recognition that, whatever God intends by the complex created world in which we live, it is not all about us. (Church Timers 26 Jan 2024)
THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit bother and Director of the Vatican Observatory, is a powerful advocate of [the] consilience of science and religion. Interviewed by The Times today, he remarks of his astronomical observations, "When we show that the universe is rational and beautiful, we are telling you something about the personality of the Creator". Some will take issue with his identification of purpose in the universe, but his message that good science is a path to human understanding is vital.......But it cannot answer every question or satisfy the yearnings of the spirit. As the philosopher of science Philip Kitcher has written " Contemporary people must seek community. religious institutions are often the only places in which they can find it". A meeting of minds in the study of scientific, social and transcendent issues can hold nothing but benefit for our species. (Editorial Leading Article, 18 November 2024)