Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Coulson Center on Johnstone Street. Twenty years ago, Al Gore released the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. After premiering to a standing ovation at Sundance and earning twenty five million dollars at the box office, it earned an Oscar for Best Documentary.
Well today, twenty years later, Gore still stands behind the film. Quote, from my perspective, the movie's even more relevant today than when it first came out, he recently stated at an anniversary ceremony for the film, adding that global warming is not yet solved. And Gore's primary claims today are the same as they were a generation ago, that climate change is happening, that it is human-caused, and that it presents an existential threat to the human race. Unless the nations of the world took immediate and drastic steps to alter economic and political structures, he argued then, the runaway effects of warming would doom us all. In the documentary, Gore evoked a line from Mark Twain, saying, quote, what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
In other words, the world was not too big for humanity to mess up as so many believed. Maybe that was true at one time, he said, but it's not anymore. An inconvenient truth is the most consequential documentary of the last half century. Gore's prophecies had a profound impact on Western culture, from Hollywood to DC to the sciences. Even the humanities in most universities.
And for quite a while, to even question his claims was the same as being a flat earther. Not so much anymore. A recent article in National Review outlined Gore's failed prophecies. He promised, and I quote, a world besieged by floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, wrote author Bjond Lamborghin. The data, however, tell a different story.
Over the past century, as the global population quadrupled, deaths from climate-related disasters have plummeted, end quote. According to Lamborghin, Gore was wrong about the catastrophic rise of sea levels, the cause of shrinking glaciers, extreme weather events, and the polar bear population. Even left-wing journal Slate published critiques for Gore. Saying, quote, considering the multiple times Gore has given his greenhouse slideshow, he says thousands, it's jarring that the movie was not scrubbed for factual precision, end quote. Also, as Cornwall Alliance founder and President E.
Calvin Beisner has argued, the widely believed and repeated assertion that all scientists agree with Gore's version of climate change has never been true and is simply not so to day. An inconvenient truth was always more philosophy than it was science. Gore over-catastrophized his facts and figures in terms that did not allow for dissent. He was right to claim that ultimately this is not really a political issue so much as a moral issue, but in fact, to be more precise, it was always a worldview issue, specifically what we believe about the kind of world we live in and our place within it. If, as naturalistic worldviews demand, there's no God overseeing and superintending the flow of history, we're all here by accident.
As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said, and I quote, we're here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures, because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age, and because a small and tenuous species arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago has managed to survive by hook and by crook. In other words, the whole thing's an accident.
So one little slip up by us could bring the whole thing crashing down. In fact, that's the same vision behind most catastrophic visions like Gore's. And what is our place in the cosmos?
Well, Francis Schaefer wrote almost 60 years ago that a Christian-based science and technology should consciously try to see nature healed while waiting for the complete healing of Christ's return. It's an incredible difference whether or not we're divinely appointed as stewards of this world with a role to play or simply problems that need to be solved. An inconvenient truth described a world that was on the precipice of a disaster that we caused and probably really couldn't fix. The Christian vision is that we aren't alone and we're not ultimately in charge. were responsible, were valuable creatures, created to meaningfully care for the rest of creation.
In other words, between the Bible and Gore's film. is all the difference in the world. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Thanks today to William of Bozeman, Montana. Thanks for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center and for making this episode of Breakpoint possible.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org. Across the country, Christians are asking how to respond to growing confusion about identity, truth, and what it means to be human.
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