Are there environmental costs of a religious worldview?
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists. But there are certain religious points of view where it is not. In those apocalyptic religions, people actually believe that because they read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation, the world is going to come to an end some time soon. People who believe that say, “We don’t need to bother about conserving forests or anything else because the end of the world is coming anyway.” A few decades ago one would simply have laughed at that. Today you can’t laugh. These people are in power. Unlike other accounts of the evolution of life, “The Ancestor’s Tale” starts at the present and works back. Why did you decide to tell the story in reverse? The most important reason is that if you tell the evolution story forwards and end up with humans, as it’s humanly normal to do so because people are interested in themselves, it makes it look as though the whole of evolution we
