In this daring work, Edward O. Wilson proposes an
alliance between science and religion to save Earth's
vanishing biodiversity.
Dear Pastor: We
have not met, yet I feel I know you well enough to call you
friend. First of all, we grew up in the same faith. Although
I no longer belong to that faith, I am confident that if we
met and spoke privately of our deepest beliefs, it would be
in a spirit of mutual respect and goodwill. I write to you
now for your counsel and help. Let us see if we can, and you
are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in
order to deal with the real world we share. I suggest that
we set aside our differences in order to save the Creation.
The defense of living Nature is a universal value. It
doesn't rise from nor does it promote any religious or
ideological dogma. Rather, it serves without discrimination
the interests of all humanity.
Pastor, we need your
help. The Creation—living Nature—is in deep
trouble.
The Creation is E. O. Wilson's
most important work since the publications of
Sociobiology and Biophilia. Like Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring, it is a book about the fate
of the earth and the survival of our planet. Yet while
Carson was specifically concerned with insecticides and the
ecological destruction of our natural resources, Wilson, the
two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, attempts his new social
revolution by bridging the seemingly irreconcilable worlds
of fundamentalism and science. Like Carson, Wilson
passionately concerned about the state of the world, draws
on his own personal experiences and expertise as an
entomologist, and prophesies that half the species of plants
and animals on Earth could either have gone or at least are
fated for early extinction by the end of our present
century.
Astonishingly, The Creation is not a
bitter, predictable rant against fundamentalist Christians
or deniers of Darwin. Rather, Wilson, a leading "secular
humanist," draws upon his own rich background as a boy in
Alabama who "took the waters," and seeks not to condemn this
new generations of Christians but to address them on their
own terms. Conceiving the book as an extended letter to a
southern Baptist minister, Wilson, in stirring language that
can evoke Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham
Jail," tells this everyman minister how, in fact, the world
really came to be. He pleads with these men of the cloth to
understand the cataclysmic damage that is destroying our
planet and asks for their help in preventing the destruction
of our Earth before it is too late. Never a pessimist,
Wilson avers that there are solutions that may yet save the
planet, and believes that the vision that he presents in
The Creation is one that both scientists and pastors
can accept, and work on together in spite of their
fundamental ideological differences. 25 line drawings.
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