Lesson video

Hello there.

My name is Mr. Robertson.

I really love RE, so I'm delighted to be learning with you today.

Today is the first lesson in a new unit of work.

And this unit of work has an inquiry question, and that is changing world: how should the Earth's resources be used? And in this unit, we're gonna be asking some really big questions about the current state of the environment and what different worldviews say about them.

This lesson is called Stewardship versus Dominion, and it sets the scene for some really detailed study about what Christians say about the environment.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain how Judeo-Christian beliefs about stewardship and dominion influence some human attitudes towards the environment.

We have four key words in our lesson today.

Our first keyword is stewardship, and stewardship is looking after the world on behalf of God.

Our second word is dominion, and that means having God-given power or control over the Earth's resources.

Our third word is anthropocentric, and this is a worldview which sees humans as central and the most important part of the universe.

And finally, we have the word Judeo-Christian, and these are beliefs shared by both Jews and Christians.

These words are gonna come up throughout the lesson, and I think you'll be really familiar with them by the end of it.

So this lesson about stewardship and dominion has two sections, and in the first section we're going to be looking at the two big concepts of stewardship and dominion.

Let's start, though, zooming right out as far as we can go.

Here we have an image of the Earth taken from space.

And I wonder what you might think when you see our Earth.

Humans have been in space now for many decades, but I wonder, looking at that image, what three words you might find to describe it.

Personally, I would choose words such as unique, special and precious, because as far as we know, this is the only intelligent life we've yet found in the universe.

I wonder if you think this planet of ours is worth protecting.

And I wonder whether you think that humans are special or part of nature, and what you think about the relationship between us as human beings and the rest of the world.

These are big philosophical questions, and today's lesson and this unit is gonna be asking these questions and thinking about how different people have answered them.

So philosophers are people who ask complex questions like these about the world, and they try and answer them using tools of reason and logical arguments.

The important thing here is the way that you argue will affect the conclusion that you come to.

So the different positions that you take, your chain of reasoning, will make a difference to what you think at the end, and we're gonna be examining these in a bit more detail.

So if we start with a big philosophical question like this, are humans the most important species in the universe? We might answer this in two ways.

If we answer yes, we then might go on to say, if we're the most important, what responsibility do we have to the environment? And what influences you to think what you do? Or you may answer no, and we might answer the next question, if we're not the most important, what responsibility do we have to our environment? You might want to take a few minutes to talk to the person next to you, or ponder for yourself, what do you think you would answer to this question? Do you think humans are the most important species in the universe or not? But whether you answer yes or no, do you then think we have a responsibility to the rest of the environment? And why do you think that? What influences on your own worldview lead you to think what you do? It could be really interesting to think about our own presuppositions, to then think about how we think when we come into contact with other people's worldviews.

Let's just check our understanding so far.

I have a true or false question for you here.

Philosophers explore questions about life and the world using careful thinking and clear arguments to come to answers.

Think about what we've looked at so far.

Pause the video, have a think.

Excellent.

That answer's true, isn't it? This is what philosophers do.

They ask important questions and they think carefully and use clear, logical arguments.

Lucas, Laura and Sam have been thinking about that big question about humans and the species and the world, and they've come up with their own different responses.

Lucas says, "Humans are the most intelligent, but are not more important.

We should use our power to care for the world." Laura says, "Humans are the most important species, so we should be free to use the Earth in ways that benefit us." And Sam says, "Humans are a small part of a delicate ecosystem.

We must live in balance with nature because everything is connected." So we've got three slightly different views there.

Lucas talking about intelligence, but not most important.

Laura saying, no, humans are the most important.

And Sam saying, well, actually, humans are part of an ecosystem in the whole planet and we're all connected.

I wonder what you think of these different ideas.

And I wonder why you think this.

Is there someone's view there you feel more drawn to than others? Which one resonates most with you? And why is that? So hopefully you've had a chance to reflect on some of your own ideas about this big question.

We're gonna think now about how the big worldviews of Judaism and Christianity have addressed this issue.

And we can see here a woodcut of the order of the days of creation from the Bible.

Now, many of our beliefs culturally about the environment are rooted in these ideas from Judeo-Christianity.

And this is because Judaism and Christianity have been part of the continent of Europe and of our own country for many, many centuries.

And so their ideas have percolated into politics and literature and art.

And even if we're not Christians or Jews ourselves, these ideas have become part of our thinking.

These big ideas originate in the book of Genesis, which appears in both the Torah and the Christian Old Testament.

And there are two main attitudes that historically describe how Jews and Christians believe humans should treat the environment.

One is the idea of stewardship and one is the idea of dominion.

And both of these ideas have their roots in the creation story in the Torah and the Christian Bible.

So let's start with the idea of dominion.

This is an extract from Genesis and this talks through an idea of dominion.

I'm going to read it to you.

So we're in the creation story.

Humans have been created.

And now we're moving on.

"God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.

Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." I wonder what you think the phrases subdue and rule over mean.

Have you heard those words before? What kind of mood, what kind of image does that create in your mind when you hear those words like subdue and rule over? Do these words suggest a positive or negative attitude towards the environment? Izzy and Sophia are discussing the meaning of these words, subdue and rule over.

Izzy says, "These words could be positive if they remind us to respect all living things.

Humans have power but this power comes with responsibility to care for and protect the Earth." Sophia says, "Yes, but historically these words have often been used to imply that humans have the right and power to utilise nature and its resources to meet our needs and benefit ourselves.

So interestingly Izzy's saying we could have a positive view of these words, but Sophia's saying sure, but historically these words have implied that humans have power and right to take nature and use it as they wish.

I wonder which of these two views you think is probably more correct.

So this idea of dominion has roots, long roots historically, and using a philosophical argument, an argument for this idea of dominion might look like this.

Humans have God-given dominion over nature.

So in the Bible when it talks about the idea of ruling over and subduing, some people would argue that that means God has given human beings dominion over nature.

And this means they can use and control nature, the environment, for their own benefit, because as the most important species that's what God gave to us, the ability to use the rest of the world as we want.

And therefore if we create environmental damage, that's okay, because it benefits humans.

So for example in this photograph we can see a forest being cut down, a dominion based argument might say, well humans need this land to feed themselves, and therefore we can cut down that forest because it's more important that as humans we look after the needs of other humans.

Let's just think about that argument.

So a typical understanding of dominion is understood as showing care and concern for the environment.

From what we've seen so far is that true or false? Good thinking, philosophers, it's false, isn't it? Because actually when we talked about dominion we talked about humans using their power to control the environment and not necessarily having to show care or concern for it.

Brilliant if you got that right.

So moving on to this idea of stewardship, we can see this in another part of the story.

And in this part of the story we have this quotation, "The Lord God took the man," that's the human, Adam, "and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." Now, Genesis, this part of Genesis was written in Hebrew, and Hebrew words are often translated as to serve or to protect.

So do these words suggest a positive or negative attitude towards the environment? What do you think? How do they contrast with those earlier words of subdue and rule over? So we can see that we've got another idea emerging from the same story, and this is the idea of stewardship.

Izzy says, "Stewardship sounds positive because it focuses on caring for the Earth.

It suggests that humans should protect nature and not just use it for their own benefit." Sophia says, "Yeah I think so too.

It's like humans are caretakers of the Earth, looking after it on behalf of God.

It's not really ours to control, we're meant to care for it and keep it safe." I wonder what you think about these ideas.

The idea of being a steward, rather like a school has a caretaker who looks after it.

The school doesn't belong to the caretaker, but the caretaker makes sure things are working, makes sure equipment is there, makes sure the school's closed and is safe.

So this idea of stewardship says that human beings' role isn't to control and rule the Earth, it's to look after it and care for it on behalf of God.

So if we think about a stewardship-based argument, it might look like this.

Humans have a God-given responsibility to act as stewards, to be caretakers and protectors.

Stewardship means acting responsibly and protecting the environment.

Therefore, environmental damage cannot be justified as it goes against our duty to be good stewards.

So in contrast to a dominion argument, if humans were to do something which destroyed, like cut down a beautiful forest, then actually from a stewardship point of view, that argument would not be justified, because the damage to the environment would be more important than the benefit to humans.

I wonder which of these shows the ideas of stewardship, do you think? Look at these three images.

Which of these most closely aligns to what we've talked about with stewardship? Yeah, here we have an image of a car being plugged in, so we're using electricity, which is caring for the world, as opposed to flying and cutting down trees, which we know has a really big negative attitude to the environment.

Brilliant if you got that one right.

Okay, let's think about what we've learned so far.

We've looked at these big ideas of stewardship, which is a belief that God has given us the world to care and protect it, and a dominion argument which says this same world has been given by God specifically to humans, and they can rule it as they will.

We've got a continuum line here, so that means that the furthest end of stewardship focused would be an action that is really about caring and protecting the world, whereas the other end of the dominion focus is an action which would really put the ideas of humans over nature.

And here we've got six different things.

Continuing to use fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, recycling regularly and reducing single-use plastics, using animals for testing and eating a high-meat diet, switching to a hybrid car to reduce pollution, adopting a vegan diet to reduce harm to animals and the planet, and trying to reduce the amount of meat that is consumed.

What I'd like you to do is place these activities along that continuum line.

Do you think these actions are more dominion focused or more stewardship focused, and why, can you give an argument to justify what you've done? Doing some really interesting philosophical thinking here.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Brilliant work everybody.

So you may have arranged this in the way that you want to.

I've got some ideas for you here.

Put that using fossil fuels, put that at one end as a very dominion focused thing, because that's quite an extractive activity, whereas recycling regularly, put more towards stewardship.

Using animals for testing and high-meat diet is back towards dominion focus, because you know that creates harm and suffering.

A hybrid car, more stewardship.

Adopting a vegan diet has even more stewardship focus, because then we're really reducing harm to animals, to the planet.

Reducing meat is towards a stewardship, because it's an action taken in that direction.

Your ideas may look quite different from this.

What's really important is you've thought about this.

You've understood this idea of stewardship and dominion, and you've thought about where and why you might put things where they are.

I hope you've enjoyed thinking some of these ideas through.

So in the second part of this lesson, we're going to build on these ideas and look at Mary Midgley and her ideas of anthropocentrism.

This is a photograph of Mary Midgley.

She was a British philosopher, a very famous British philosopher, and a woman as well, which is really important in a world which is so dominated by men in this field.

And she wrote about ethics and science, and she had a particular interest in how we as human beings treated animals.

She used this word anthropocentrism, and she argued that this is a belief that humans are the most important beings and the centre of the natural world.

And we saw that argument advance as a dominion-based argument.

She really felt that that no longer made sense.

She said we needed a new way of thinking and that that places humans as part of nature and not above it.

So what Mary Midgley did was she used philosophical thinking to re-argue how we should see human beings, not through a worldview of anthropocentrism, but a radically different way of humans part of nature.

So we're gonna explore her ideas in a little bit more detail.

Let's just check our understanding first, though.

Thinking about this term anthropocentrism, what does that mean? Does it mean that a, humans are responsible for protecting the planet? b, humans are responsible for protecting the planet? c, all living beings are equally important and interconnected.

Which of those fits what we know so far about what Mary Midgley has said? Excellent, b, humans are central and most important within the universe is what Mary Midgley meant by anthropocentrism, which she argued very strongly against.

Brilliant for understanding that term.

So one of the things that Mary Midgley did was she explained how these ideas have changed over time and that helps us understand a little bit about where she felt we should go in the future.

She started with, as we have done, the Judeo-Christian worldview.

And when she read that text, she says that the Book of Genesis teaches that humans are made in God's image and have been given dominion over nature.

And she felt that this idea of dominion, which we've looked at already, this idea of ruling and subduing, is the starting point of anthropocentric thinking.

And so the Bible, the Torah, has a big influence on the way particularly Western humans have seen the world.

She builds on that by looking at this image here.

And I wonder what you think you can see here in this image.

So here we're talking about a Middle Ages worldview.

And in the Middle Ages, this is an ancient map from that time, the Earth was seen as the centre of the universe.

At that time in the Middle Ages, people in the West believed that the Earth was the centre of the world and the Sun and all the other planets went around it.

And the point of this worldview is that it puts the world, the Earth, as the most important thing in the universe and humans as above it and the most important thing there as well.

So again, we're putting the needs of humans as more important than the rest of everything else.

I wonder what you can see in this painting.

What might this be showing? What might be going on here? So this image is a way of talking about what Mary Midgley called an enlightenment worldview.

Well, what do we mean by the enlightenment? Well, this was a period of time in the 1600s and 1700s.

And at this point in time, belief in God began to fade as new discoveries were made.

First of all, we had the Renaissance and then we had the growth of science leading into discoveries such as the theory of evolution and fossils.

All of this period of time meant that more philosophers argued that humans were important because we have reason and intellect.

But still this was arguing that humans were superior.

It wasn't about necessarily believing in God any more, but these beliefs in the importance of science and still put humans at the top.

And Midgley says this kept old ideas alive that some people or nations have the right to dominate others.

So, for example, we see that as the Spanish, the British, the French went out into the rest of the world, into the continents of Africa and America, destroying a lot of cultures there, thinking that their ideas were superior.

And so she sees the old ideas of dominion continuing even into this scientific and rational way of thinking, still carrying on this idea of human superiority.

What can we see in this image here? Look very closely.

What might this be talking about? So for Mary Midgley, this talks about an industrial worldview, and this is really within the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution happened, humans, machinery, technology began to increase.

We have railways, canals leading into modern developments such as computing.

But still, Mary Midgley asked, even though science and machinery improved, nature was still treated like a tool for human use.

So we have the huge growth of fossil fuels, we have cutting down of forests, mining of coal, extracting the natural world, animals becoming endangered, because human beings have carried on, trying to create more and more things and more and more destruction to the planet.

Midgley says that even famous thinkers like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud still believed it was normal for humans to control nature.

And so modern thinkers into the 19th century still thinking that human beings were the centre of the world, and therefore we can really treat the world how we want.

And in our modern worldview, science shows that humans are not the centre of the universe.

Midgley argued that humans should see themselves as part of nature and not separate from it.

Midgley says that harming nature is like sawing off the branch we're sitting on, which I think is an amazing phrase, isn't it? Izzy and Sophia discusses Mary Midgley's imagery of the environment and damage to it, like sawing off the branch we're sitting on.

Izzy says, "It's like she's saying we're destroying the very thing that keeps us alive.

If we keep cutting down nature, we're only hurting ourselves.

We're part of the system, not above it." Sophia says, "The image makes it easy to understand.

We're being careless and short-sighted.

Instead of trying to control everything, she thinks we should act more responsibly, like caretakers.

I wonder whether you agree or disagree with Mary Midgley's views.

What do you think about her description of the way that humans have, throughout history, still taken ideas of dominion and using nature for their own purposes? And what do you think about her idea of the way we've treated the world so far, like sawing off the branch we're sitting on? Let's just check our understanding of what we've learnt so far.

Which of these ideas did not contribute to anthropocentrism? a, religious beliefs that humans were in control of nature.

b, scientific thinking that nature is a tool for human use.

c, philosophical thinking that reason makes human superior.

d, ecology which sees humans as interconnected with nature.

Which of those did not contribute to this big idea anthropocentrism we've been talking about? Excellent.

It's E, isn't it? All of the other ideas were part of anthropocentrism, religious beliefs, some scientific thinking, philosophical thinking, but actually modern scientific and ecological ideas which saw humans as interconnected with nature did not agree with this idea of anthropocentrism.

Okay, let's think about all of what we've learnt so far.

I've got a table for you here.

And in this table we've got a list of different worldviews that we went through.

We've got the Judeo-Christian worldview, Middle Ages worldview, Enlightenment worldview, Industrial worldview and Modern worldview.

What I'd like you to do for each of those is describe whether you think it's anthropocentric or not, based on what Mary Midgley argued.

And then I'd like you to have a short explanation of why that is.

Could you create a sentence or two to say why did Mary Midgley think the Judeo-Christian worldview was or wasn't anthropocentric? You might want to go back through the slides to remind yourselves of each worldview so you can understand it.

You might want to work with some other people so that you can do a little bit of it between all of you.

Think about what she said so far.

Think about that word anthropocentric and what it means, the idea that humans dominate and have the right to rule over and use nature as they will.

Really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Excellent thinking so far.

So actually, if you look at them, Mary Midgley thought that all of the worldviews were anthropocentric apart from the modern world at the end.

So for the Judeo-Christian you might have talked about the idea of Genesis and the Torah supporting belief in dominion, which we talked about at the beginning of the lesson, that humans are different and superior to animals.

You might have mentioned words like ruling or subduing.

In the Middle Ages, if you remember, we had that image of the Earth at the centre of the universe.

And so, yes, the Middle Ages had an anthropocentric worldview because it put humans and the Earth at the centre of the universe and then within the Earth, humans were a special category and more important than the rest of it.

The Enlightenment worldview, if you remember, this was the idea that there was a decline of belief in God, but philosophers at the time said that reason and intellect were most important and therefore humans were most important and dominate and could dominate the rest of nature and indeed other cultures which might have different ideas.

And the industrial worldview as well was thought to be anthropocentric by Mary Midgley because it still talked about using resources.

With science and technology progressing and building and new things, nature was still treated as though it wasn't important and that humans were more important.

But finally, Mary Midgley talks about the modern worldview where modern scientific ideas and ecological ideas have shown that humans are part of nature and not a separate category and actually this challenges that anthropocentric worldview because it means that we need to see humans in a different way as part of and interconnected with nature.

So if you've managed to say some things that sound like that, that's brilliant and I hope you've enjoyed thinking about those ideas of Mary Midgley and how she challenges this idea of anthropocentrism.

So let's summarise what we've been thinking about today.

We've been thinking about these big ideas of stewardship and dominion.

We began by talking about the idea of philosophy and the fact that it can help us explore big questions about how we treat the world using reason and logical thinking.

We talked about this idea of dominion, that it comes from this Judeo-Christian belief that humans were given power by God to rule over the Earth and that this worldview has often contributed to environmental destruction.

We looked also at the idea of stewardship and said this is another idea with roots in Judeo-Christian beliefs, that this teaches that humans have a responsibility to care for the world.

And finally we looked at Mary Midgley, who was a philosopher who argued that anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are the most important beings, is no longer a sensible way to see the world.

She argued that we should see humans as part of nature and not above it.

I hope you've enjoyed looking at these really big ideas.

I hope it's given you a chance to reflect on what you think and how you see we should see the world.

And I'm looking forward to working with you in another lesson soon.

Thanks very much.