CLIMATE: Merging of different minds

Can religion and science unite on one important issue? Consider this.

Andrew Farley is a pastor of the Lubbock Bible Church in Texas. He was raised in a conservative family that equated environmentalism with “the hippie, liberal-left agenda.” In the mid-1990s he married Katherine Hayhoe. Both found jobs at Texas Tech.

Katherine earned a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences — the field of climate change. Now, Rev. Farley was facing that his wife was “connected with a movement I’d grown up learning to resent and oppose.” But because they wanted to stay happily married, they had to work it out.

One day, “she just sat me down in front of the computer and took me to the NASA website on climate change.” She guided him through the information and encouraged him to do his own fact-checking. He did, and came away persuaded that the science was sound.

Katherine knows people don’t like hearing bad news. But, she says, “If a doctor gave you a full-body scan and found some potential issues or abnormalities, and didn’t tell you, can you imagine how angry you’d be? It’s the doctor’s moral responsibility to tell you. Climate scientists do full-body scans of the planet. It’s our moral responsibility to tell people what we’re finding.”

It’s in people’s best interests, she suggests, to listen. “We have a narrow window of time to address the problem… We can’t afford to wait until we reach perfect agreement [on all issues between science and faith] to act.”

BILL IRVING

Hayden