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Saving Creation is the compelling story of Holmes Rolston III, known as the "father of environmental ethics."
Rolston is celebrated for his advocacy to protect the Earth's biodiversity and for his critical work reconciling evolutionary biology and Christianity. More than any other thinker in contemporary life, Rolston has a persuasive tale to tell about the place where God, nature, and humanity meet.
Christopher Preston documents the evolution of Rolston's environmental philosophy, from his idyllic childhood in the Shenandoah Mountains to his Presbyterian ministry and finally to his groundbreaking work reconciling biology and theology in the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
Rolston's pursuits have often been outside the mainstream and ahead of his time, leaving him an outsider among his peers and a figure of controversy. Rolston challenged the notion of a human-centered value system and looked deeper to embrace the intrinsic value of plants, animals, and ecosystems as core issues of science and religion.
Christopher J. Preston conducted countless hours of personal interviews with Rolston, his family members, and his close colleagues and friends to produce this straightforward this biography is both an engaging life story and a compendium of Rolston’s thoughts on the value of nature, resource management, aesthetics, international development, and the relationship of culture to nature, wilderness, and natural theology.
Preston deftly recounts how, despite criticism, Rolston continued undeterred:
"Almost all philosophers insisted that ethical philosophy be kept separate not only from religion, but also from natural science. Science, after all, was designed to provide just the facts. Scientists who wanted to keep their jobs carefully avoided making moral assertions. Ethical philosophy, by contrast, placed moral overlays on top of the facts. Earthquakes, drought, and disease were facts about the world studied by scientists. Care for the homeless, compassion for the hungry, and sympathy for the families of those killed by epidemics were moral sentiments designed to guide people in light of those facts. Scientists had traditionally been banished from these ethical arenas. To attempt to mix the two inquiries was to commit a serious philosophical error. Facts and values belonged in two separate domains, each with its own experts."
Rolston now found himself caught at the intersection of three disciplines, not two, pulled in a different direction by each. Science, religion, and philosophical ethics were unlikely collaborators. Yet it was precisely at their intersection that Rolston wanted to work.
In 1997 Rolston delivered the Gifford Lectures, an annual series at the University of Edinburgh that is a forum for the world's most influential thinkers in theology and nature. And in 2003 the Duke of Edinburgh awarded Rolston the Templeton Prize for discoveries in science and religion. Other prize winners have included Mother Theresa, Billy Graham and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. With this prize, Rolston's intellectual achievements and singular stature were recognized worldwide, and it was confirmation of his bold and profound contributions to the intersection of modern science and religion.
This brief statement from Rolston explains his work:
"I had to fight both theology and science to love nature. I took a philosophical turn and found philosophy of science. But philosophers said philosophy of nature was too romantic, so then I had to fight philosophy to love nature. My own personal agenda for half a century—figuring nature out—has during my lifetime turned out to be the world agenda, figuring out the human place on the planet. I didn't want to live a life outside nature. And it turns out that humans neither can nor ought to life separate from nature if we want to protect our planet. If anything at all on Earth is sacred, it must be its enthralling fruitfulness. If there is any holy ground, any land of promise, this promising Earth is it."
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