The recent papal encyclical on global warming, Laudato Si, asserts that climate change is real and caused by humans. Catholic Republican politicians, who have long claimed a symbiotic relationship between their religious commitments and their political views, have moved quickly to denounce the Pope. Rick Santorum, GOP presidential candidate and devout Catholic, said that the Pope is wrong about human-made climate change. The Pope, he said, should leave “science to the scientists” and focus instead on theology and morality. Jeb Bush, Catholic convert and GOP presidential candidate, chimed in:

I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinal or my pope. I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.

Santorum’s and Bush’s denunciations of the Pope reflect a remarkable lack of intellectual humility toward scientists, who merit respect by virtue of their well-earned expertise. Intellectual humility involves understanding who are the experts in a particular field and then acquiescing in their expert opinion.

Politicians are not experts in climate science. Climate scientists are. And so we should defer to them on the issue of the human contribution to global warming. In short, Santorum and Bush should in humility follow their own advice and leave “science to the scientists.”

What do the experts say? 97% or more of climate scientists hold that current warming trends are due to human activity.

Suppose Santorum and Bush are right that the Pope should restrict himself to “morality” and “making us better as people.” Isn’t it incumbent on Santorum and Bush, as Catholics, to heed the Pope’s indictment of the market economy, which, he claims, plunders the earth at the expense of the poor and of future generations? Aren’t those serious moral issues?

One suspects that Santorum and Bush have not actually read said 183-page document before assuredly denouncing it.

Intellectual humility requires submitting to the relevant experts and spiritual humility requires submitting to the relevant spiritual authorities (assuming one is spiritual in ways that ascribe authority to texts, say, or persons). Finally, moral humility requires looking into the eyes of the poor and the oppressed and responding to their needs.

Consider intellectual humility.

On my pre-college summer job as a janitor in a hospital, I often mopped and scrubbed with Leon. Although he was younger than I am now (I can’t think of myself as old yet), I thought of Leon then as a kind, old man. Since I would soon escape my plight as a janitor and head off to university, I also thought of myself, not to my credit, as superior to Leon. He had, I could see, many admirable qualities–he was a successful if not rich black man who grew up in pre-civil rights America, he worked hard at two jobs to support his wife and kids (he hauled junk when he wasn’t a janitor), and he was attractively honorable. He was a good man. I, on the other hand, was smart and headed to college (and so would be smarter).

One night Leon stopped me. He reached into his wallet, pulled out his drivers license and showed it to me. He told me that it was his first license, which surprised me as he’d been driving for years. He was clearly pleased to be legal, clearly pleased to have that license. He was so pleased that he asked me to read it to him.

You may have guessed–Leon was illiterate. Leon was asking “the college-boy” as they called me to read for him. I have never been so honored and humbled in my life.

As I read to Leon, his smile and pride grew wider. Leon had the healthy kind of pride that properly delighted in his gain in knowledge and skill. After all, he had grown as a person, father, and a citizen through the help of his wife and children and would use his newly gained legitimacy to help his family even more. The world was lighter and brighter and better. He was so rightly and unselfconsciously pleased, he was blissfully unaware that he was conceding his illiteracy to “the college boy.”

He had, with respect to knowledge and skill, a deep and natural humility, one seldom seen in the public domain.

I’ve come to think that a lack of intellectual humility, or humility of any sort, is an occupational hazard of gaining public office. When our culture’s valorization of status and power allies with our natural tendency towards competitive pride, humility is the first casualty.

Leon had a grateful sense of his dependence on others and a graceful sense of his intellectual limitations. In short, Leon was intellectually humble and Santorum and Bush are intellectually arrogant.

Our natural selfishness extends to our beliefs, making us arrogant, judgmental, close-minded, and even combative. There are deep and scary psychic connections between intellectual arrogance, on the one hand, and incivility, intolerance, and immorality, on the other. The only antidote, then, is intellectual humility.

Scientists say that humans cause global warming and the Pope, in intellectual humility, concurs (as should we all). The Pope says that ignoring the disastrous human consequences of global warming is immoral. We all should, in moral humility, concur and take immediate steps to prevent this impending disaster.