De Profundis: Religion, Science, and the Climate Crisis

The climate crisis re-situates the often-fraught relationship between religion and science in a new, shared context. Theology, as critical, open-ended reflection on faith, can no longer avoid profound existential questions posed by the issue of planetary survival. Science, as the peer-reviewed, data-driven, non-ideological quest to understand physical reality, cannot ignore that the climate crisis poses a threat of non-being. Irreducibly different in method and aim though united—in their best moments—by a quest for truth, religion and science now find themselves sharing a context when all the resources of both approaches to life must link in common cause before the real possibility of humanly caused ecocide. This moment opens us to the fact that we all stand before the depths of being, and one twentieth century theologian, Paul Tillich, perhaps more than any other, offered in his work a comprehensive understanding of the category and language of ‘depth.’ This conceptuality is relevant to both science and religion, helping them understand each other as well as providing a language that both need to deal creatively and cooperatively with our global environmental emergency.