The Bible and ecology.

The Bible and Science

CHRISTIANS AND JEWS do not turn to the Bible to learn natural science. Four centuries of developing modern science underscore what Galileo insisted with the launching of astronomy: The Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. There is nothing there about black holes or astrophysics. That is also true with microphysics: neutrinos or quarks. This is true even with physics at ordinary ranges. Biblical writers never write equations such as (D = 1/2[at.sup.2],) where the distance (D) a body falls is a function of the acceleration (a) due to gravity and time (t), but not of mass. They did not know that in a vacuum the feather and the rock fall and reach the ground together, but that in the field air friction skews this result. Likewise with chemistry, geology, meteorology, and all the physical sciences. Biblical writers were prescientific.

In the biological sciences, this conviction continues, though more problematically. Biblical writers did not know any cellular, much less molecular, biology, nothing about ribosomes or DNA. There is no genetics, nothing about meiosis, or recessive and dominant alleles. The Gospel writers could not have entertained the question whether Jesus was a haploid. Darwinian biology proved so upsetting just because some theologians did think they knew from the Bible how the creation had taken place; and it has taken a century to relax that conviction, rather similarly to the way, four hundred years before, it took a century to relax the conviction that theologians knew astronomy from scripture. Biblical writers did not know about natural selection: the surplus of offspring with genetic variation, the selection of the better adapted fits, and the dynamic, incremental evolution of life over millennia.

The Bible and Ecological Science

If we continue this line of argument, it would seem a mistake again to think that there is any knowledge of ecology in the Bible. The British Ecological Society surveyed their members to rank in order the fifty most important concepts in ecology.(1) On that list we find concepts such as the ecosystem, succession, the niche, habitats, food webs and trophic levels, carrying capacity, territoriality, keystone species, energy flow, and life history strategies. None of these appears as such in the Bible. There is nothing about nutrient cycles or the Lotka-Volterra equations, which relate population size, the number of organisms that the environment will support, to time, growth rate, and carrying capacity. If so, is it the same with ecology as with astrophysics? Again, the Bible is not a science book. But then what could the Bible say that is of interest to our ecological concerns?

There is an important difference, however, between ecology and astrophysics, or microphysics, or cellular biology, or evolutionary biology. Ecology is a science at native range. Perhaps the biblical writers did not know how the heavens go, but they did know how the earth goes--not at planetary ranges, nor in soil chemistries--but at the pragmatic ranges of the sower who sows, waits for the seed to grow, and reaps the harvest. The Hebrews knew how to grow vineyards and olive trees; they knew how to prepare "wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine" (Ps. 104:15), although they did not know the bacteria of fermentation, much less had they any knowledge of unsaturated fats in the olive oil. They knew to let land lie fallow on sabbath. Abraham and Lot, and later Jacob and Esau, dispersed their flocks and herds because "the land could not support both of them living together" (Gen. 13:2-13; 36:6-8). The Hebrews worried about livestock trampling and polluting riparian zones (Gen. 29:1-8; Ezek. 34:17-19). Residents on landscapes live immersed in their native range ecology. We moderns, with our university degrees, might be too quick to think that the Hebrews knew no ecology.

Any science is an "abstraction," that is, it achieves its successes by a "pulling away" (abs-traction) from concrete reality. The scientist detects generalities in the particulars. The Lotka-Volterra equations (which formalize the problem of Abraham and Lot) take a part out of the whole, the lawlike or repetitively patterned aspect isolated out for the science, while in real nature law is mingled with the particulars of the local environment: the pastures "from the Negeb as far as Bethel," and on to where Abraham's tent was pitched "between Bethel and Ai" (Gen. 13:3), on which these nomads realized they were trying to keep too many sheep and goats. Here the textbook ecologist is likely to be able to learn a great deal from any people indigenous to a landscape for centuries.

Ecology is a rather piecemeal science; the ecologists' comprehensive abstractions, their equations, are often not all that …