“Anthropocentric creation: the cosmos made for inevitable human persons?”
The article to be presented at the workshop aims at relating the arguments for the fine tuning of the universe together with Simon Conway Morris’s ideas of humans as an inevitable consequence of the evolutionary process with the accusations that the Christian Doctrine of Creation provides an anthropocentric and utilitarian account of nature. Such an accusation has been a paradigm in environmental science since the highly influential article by Lynn White in 1967, in which he stated that “we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man”. Our main goal will not be to deeply evaluate the validity or scientific accuracy of those claims (however we will briefly explore if they can be, in fact, considered scientific) but instead we will analyze whether the acceptance of these two arguments (fine tuning and Morris’s idea of “inevitable humans”) in favor of a teleological universe conducive to humanity will or will not necessarily lead to an anthropocentric and utilitarian view of nature or creation. In other words, if Christians believe in such teleology, informed by these ideas stemming from science, does that automatically make them anthropocentric in their view of nature or creation? Besides, can such anthropocentrism be warranted by these ideas and by the Christian doctrine of Creation, or is it possible not to have anthropocentric views even though accepting such conclusions?