Epistemological Roots of the Climate Crisis

{tinyurl.com/AZerocc} This post is based on a talk prepared for a National Conference on SDGs: Catalysts for Economic Transformation in Pakistan on Feb 29-Mar 1, organized by the Economics Department of University of Lahore. The original talk, in the video below, has been revised and updated in the blog post which follows it:

At first glance, industrialization seems the primary culprit of our climate crisis, driving rampant overproduction and overconsumption. However, these are merely the visible outcomes of a deeper, more profound shift in thought ushered in by the European Enlightenment. This pivotal era fundamentally redefined our relationship with the planet, transitioning from a view of Earth as a nurturing entity to a resource for exploitation. This blog post aims to unpack this transformation in thought, and how it paved the way for the environmental challenges we face today. To solve the crisis requires another revolution in thought, and foundations for such a revolution are provided by Islamic epistemology.

The European Enlightenment was deeply influenced by centuries of religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. It became clear to all that a peaceful society could not be built on theological foundations. Political Science was the first of secular social sciences to emerge. Theology had been universally considered as the foundation for all knowledge. Creating a secular social sience required a revolutionary change in epistemology. Tradition, intuition, emotion, and lived experience had been considered as reliable sources of knowledge. The European Enlightenment discarded everything known until then, and sought to rebuild the entire stock of human knowledge from scratch, trusting only in objective facts and logic.

The Enlightenment brought a significant metaphorical shift in how we perceive Earth, from ‘Mother Earth’ to a ‘dead machine.’ This shift, rooted in the widespread acceptance of Newtonian physics, marked a transition from a symbiotic and nurturing relationship with the planet to one focused on exploitation for power and profits. This change in metaphor is intrinsically linked to the epistemological shift of the Enlightenment, symbolizing a broader transformation in our understanding and interaction with the natural world, from mutual respect and coexistence to control and utilization.

The climate crisis we are grappling with is fundamentally a crisis of knowledge, an epistemological error at its core. To address the environmental challenges we face, it’s imperative to redefine our concept of knowledge. We need to alter our ways of knowing the world and reshape our relationships with all creations. This requires a monumental shift, a reversal of the ‘Great Transformation’ in European thought that has long influenced our understanding of nature and our place within it. For a more detailed summary of ‘The Great Transformation’, see The Great Transformation.

How can we reverse the Great Transformation? This task requires us to undo the epistemological shift brought about by the European Enlightenment. Merely rejecting Enlightenment thought is not sufficient. We must also reconstruct the accumulated human knowledge of recent centuries upon sound epistemological foundations. Islam offers such foundations. The final revelation of God to humanity imparts us with knowledge of unassailable truth. While Enlightenment philosophers rightly discarded Christianity, recognizing its corruption and role in perpetuating conflict, they overlooked the potential for other sources of pure, revealed knowledge.

Islamic epistemology presents a stark contrast to Enlightenment views. All of God’s creation is a family, and those who serve His family are beloved by God. The Quran teaches us that the heart is not merely a physical organ but an instrument of cognition, capable of moral discernment when purified through ‘Tazkiya’, the cleansing of one’s inner self. This purification is key to moral cognition, fostering a profound connection with the universe and instilling a natural abhorrence for harming the environment or any of God’s creations. Environmental degradation arises from the Enlightenment epistemology which ignores the heart and soul as sources of knowledge. This leads to individualism, which creates isolation and loneliness, breaking our connections with the environment and other individuals. Many studies show that these connections are the central sources of human happiness.

To repair the damage done by Enlightenment epistemology, we must have a deeper understanding of the sources of their errors. The most fundamental mistake is the idea that we can arrive at certain knowledge starting from a position of complete ignorance. Logical reasoning requires a starting premise to reach any conclusion. This mistake is clearly illustrated by the most famous line of reasoning “I think, therefore I am” from Descartes, the father of Western Philosophy. Descartes claimed to derive his own existence as completely certain, starting from a position of complete ignorance.  But the existence of “I” is already assumed in the premise “I think”, so the conclusion that “I am” follows trivially.

The Enlightenment philosophers were trapped into making the same mistake. Since they claimed to start from zero, and build objective, value-free knowledge, they had to make HIDDEN assumptions. In particular, the hidden moral foundations upon which knowledge was built within the Enlightenment tradition, are toxic. It is this intellectual tradition which dominates university education today, and it makes false claims to objective and value-free knowledge. Post-modernists have been able to see past these claims, but they have made their own mistakes, and have not been influential in changing the Western educational paradigms. For instance, Michel Foucault argues that modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social) purport to offer universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in fact, often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a particular society. On deeper analysis, what passes for knowledge, and is stated as a universal scientific truth, is actually a defense of existing power configurations.

In attacking Enlightenment epistemology, our efforts must focus on revealing these concealed assumptions, and exposing their flaws. Since the Enlightenment was launched in response to religious wars in Europe, a critical foundational assumption is rejection of God. This is masked as “rational” by an epistemology which claims to believe only in what can be seen or derived from logic. However, this apparently reasonable stance leads to tortuous complexity when inferences to unobservables are admitted in physics, but rejected in religion. For example, it is permissible to believe in dark matter which is unobservable, because it accounts for the observable motions of the stars. But when we argue that the creation of a universe at a moment in time requires a creator, this inference is rejected as “unscientific”. The Philosophy of Science is the name of centuries of efforts to distinguish between religion and science. Early in the 20^th Century, the logical positivists claimed success in this project. They purported to demonstrate that science leads to truth about external reality, while religion is mere superstition and ignorance. See The Emergence of Logical Positivism for more details. However, later in the 20^th century, philosophers came to see the deep flaws in their arguments. A recent textbook entitled “What is this thing called Science?” documents how confusion reigns supreme. The Philosophy of Science has set itself the impossible task of rejecting inferences to the existence of God, while being certain about inferences which lead to the existence of electromagnetic forces.

One of the settled foundational premises of secular modernity is the rejection of God. This axiom cannot be disputed or discussed, but it has extremely harsh consequences. It is immediate that the universe was created by an accident. Life must have been created by an accident. Man is just another animal like others. Society is governed by the ferocious competition of the laws of the jungle. The only moral principle is the survival of the fittest. By definition, the scope of science is limited to the external universe which surrounds us. It cannot contemplate events prior to existence of the universe, since these are completely outside the possibility of observation. When we take science to be the only valid source of knowledge, questions regarding the existence of God cannot be discussed, ruling out the possibility of contemplating alternatives to this bleak view of meaninglessness of our human lives.

This axiomatic rejection of God has major consequences for how we build human societies. If there is no afterlife and no Judgement Day, then we should seek pleasure and power in this life. Individualism and Hedonism are natural consequences. Competition replaces Cooperation, and Greed is preferred over Generosity. These are ugly principles on which to build society. The consequences of these choices are visible in a world which fits the description of the war of all against all. These acids dissolve family and community, the fabric of society, and lead to loneliness, depression, and suicides, as well as war against nature. For the Islamic alternative, see Lecture 2 on Gratitude, Contentment, and Trust in my online course on A New Approach to Islamic Economics

With all this background, we can come back to original question. How does this epistemological shift to secular modernity create the climate crisis, and what is proposed line of attack to counter this problem?

In the wake of recognizing the limitations of secular modernity and its foundational assumption that discards the divine, we encounter the question: What fills the void left by the absence of God in our understanding of the world and our place in it? The secular narrative has led to a worldview centered on materialism and empirical validation, sidelining the profound questions about existence, purpose, and morality that have occupied human thought for millennia.

The repudiation of a higher purpose and the embrace of materialism have not only shaped our social structures but also our individual pursuits. In the absence of a transcendental goal, the pursuit of personal gain overshadows the collective welfare. The shift from communal to individualistic values fuels a society driven by consumption, where success is often measured by accumulation rather than contribution.

However, the consequences of such a worldview are not restricted to social dynamics alone. They extend to how we engage with our environment. If life’s purpose is bound to material success and personal gratification, then the natural world becomes a mere backdrop for human activity, valued only for what it can provide rather than what it inherently is. This utilitarian approach has facilitated an unprecedented exploitation of natural resources, leading to ecological imbalances and a climate in peril.

In the search for a more holistic understanding of our world, one that integrates the spiritual with the empirical, we turn towards alternative epistemologies. Islamic thought provides such an alternative, offering a framework where knowledge is not divorced from the divine, where the material is interconnected with the spiritual, and where the pursuit of knowledge is not just for worldly gain but for a greater, more profound understanding of our place in the cosmos.

The challenge before us is not merely to adapt to new environmental policies or technologies but to undertake a more ambitious journey—a reevaluation of the very foundations upon which our knowledge and society rest. It calls for a re-engagement with the spiritual, an acknowledgment of the divine, and a reconstitution of our moral compass, informed by the rich heritage of Islamic thought.

As we consider the path forward, we must ask ourselves how we can construct a future that respects the delicate balance of our world, that recognizes the intrinsic value of all life, and that seeks to align our earthly endeavors with a higher purpose. The path is complex and requires not just a change in action but a transformation in thought—a return to an epistemology that sees the world not as a machine to be mastered but as a creation to be cherished.

Epistemology & Loss of Meaning

{bit.ly/AZelm} I recently gave a talk to students of Modern Money and Economics of Sustainability at Torrens University. The original talk has a Q&A session, which has been removed from the slightly modified version given below:

The following writeup provides some details and background missing from the talk, and also links to related materials:

The transition from a traditional Christianity-based society to secular modern society which took place in Europe over the course of two centuries has been studied by many authors. Radical changes took place in all dimensions: politics, economics, society, education, environment. In this talk, I will focus on a dimension that has not been studied heavily: epistemology, or the theory of knowledge.  An article entitled “Wikipedia: Getting to Philosophy” shows that in 97% of the cases, clicking on the first internal link in any article, and repeating the process, eventually leads to an article categorized as philosophy. That is, all human knowledge is founded on philosophy, even though we are generally unaware of this.

The trigger for change in epistemology was centuries of devastating wars between Christian factions. It became clear to all that Christianity could not provide the basis to build a peaceful society. Hobbes was the first to devise a political science based purely on rational considerations. The Biblical approach of the scholastics was rejected. But this meant that all knowledge had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Two schools of thought emerged. Empiricism sought to build knowledge on the foundation of observations, while Rationalism did so on the basis of logic. In the early twentieth century, the two were combined in a theory of knowledge known as Logical Positivism (LP). To simplify, LP asserted that science led to certain truths. Furthermore, Science, based on observations of external reality, was the only valid source of knowledge.     

LP became spectacularly successful because it fulfilled a deeply felt need to replace the lost certainties of faith with the certainties of science. However, there were some major flaws in this philosophy which led to an equally spectacular crash in the late 60’s. Because it is central to our story, it is worth explaining this in greater detail. Ever since Christian epistemology was rejected, European philosophers were searching for a way to prove that religion was superstition and error, while science led to certain knowledge. Intuitively, it seemed clear that religion was based centrally on unobservables, while science dealt with what one could touch and see. However, efforts to differentiate between science and religion on this basis had failed because science also posited unobservables like gravity and electrons. Logical Positivists thought they had found a way out of this dilemma. They argued that one could replace unobservables in science by their observable manifestations, and preserve scientific truth. For example, the invisible gravity could be replaced by the observable manifestation of gravity in the elliptical orbits of the planets.  For a more detailed discussion of LP, see blog post The Emergence of Logical Positivism and the longer article “Logical Positivism and Islamic Economics“.

The work of Thomas Kuhn in his “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was critical to the eventual rejection of Logical Positivism. There was a “Received View of Scientific Theories” which held that science proceeded by accumulation of truths, in ever-expanding circles. One could hope that eventually all truths would be discovered through this process. However, Kuhn showed that science proceeded via revolutions. A theory – like Ptolemaic Astronomy – would emerge and become popular. Then, slowly, puzzles and problems would start piling up, in conflict with the dominant theory. Eventually, this would lead to a “revolution” – the old theory would be discarded and a new theory would emerge to take its place.  Kuhn’s work itself was a revolution in the philosophy of science. The received view on theories had been widely believed for centuries, but was now abandoned. The automatic equation of “science” with “truth”, which was the central claim of logical positivism, was also abandoned.

One would think that the rise and fall of an obscure philosophy about scientific knowledge would have no impact on our lives. Surprisingly, LP has been of enormous significance in shaping the modern world. Even though the philosophy has been rejected and abandoned, it reshaped the social sciences and university education in the early 20th century. In a book entitled “The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality”, Julie Reuben describes the influence of logical positivism on university education. Traditionally, universities had focused on the development of character, leadership skills, and civic and social responsibilities, as the central element of education. However, Logical Positivism asserted that these were not scientific and hence not “knowledge”. These aspects of university education were gradually abandoned as universities turned towards a purely technical education, providing job market skills to students, without any attempts at teaching them morality. This continues to be the case today, even though positivism has been rejected by philosophers.

Even more disastrous was the impact of logical positivism on the social sciences. The prestige of the physical sciences soared as a result of amazing technological developments, accelerated by the World Wars. However, the Wars had the reverse effect on the prestige of the traditional historical and qualitative approach to the social sciences. If the traditional approach to the study of human societies could not create peace and harmony, a new approach was in order. There was consensus that use of the scientific method to study human society – as signified by the term “social science” – would lead to remarkable progress in this area. But this was an illusion. Methods of great value for studying objective reality fail at understanding the complex and hidden forces that drive human behavior.

The idea of ignoring unobservables, and modeling observable behaviors using mathematical equations, led to a grotesque caricature of human behavior embodied in homo economicus. For a survey of the overwhelming amount of empirical evidence against this model, see Behavioral vs Neoclassical Economics. Since the fundamental unit of society is the human being, abandoning the attempt to understand the unobservable sources of human welfare and behavior is tantamount to abandoning the effort to understand human societies. The results of failure to understand human welfare are apparent in the manifold crises in every dimension of human existence, unfolding around the globe today. Defective social science has led to family breakdown, continuous wars, enormous cruelty, extinction of species of flora and fauna, and environmental crises.  

So how can we begin to repair the damage done by a defective theory of knowledge that asserts science to be the only valid source of knowledge? Perhaps we should start with the most fundamental question that life poses to all of us: how to make the best use of these infinitely precious few moments we have been granted on this planet? Logical Positivism holds that this question is meaningless, since it cannot be answered by science. Capitalism teaches us that we should spend all our time chasing after wealth. Both of these answers are absurd, but are widely believed. The third answer is the half-truth of existentialism, which is extremely popular because it is aligned with the individualism and hedonism that is the spirit of the times.

To put it in popular language, Existentialism holds that I must create meaning for my own life; no one else can define it for me. This is certainly true – our lives are unique, and we must find our own meaning for ourselves. However, wise men have traversed this path for centuries, and have accumulated wisdom, which can serve as our guide. To ignore this advice would be akin to someone ignoring accumulated wisdom in biology, physics, medicine, etc., and trying to recreate this knowledge on his own, starting from zero. Logical Positivism ignores two critical aspects of knowledge: knowledge is socially generated as a collective effort by communities, and knowledge is experiential. Experiential knowledge, like driving skills, or sports, cannot be reduced to propositions, but can be transmitted by experts. If we search for meaning on our own, we will never get beyond kindergarten. The process of social change begins with ourselves; see Alternative Models of Development: Becoming the Change You Want to See