In a strange twist of irony, an atheist who has never been to college is about to become a doctor of theology. The theology faculty at the University of Helsinki has decided to grant world-renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg an honorary theology degree on June 9, even though the 20-year-old activist does not believe in God and has been on a school strike for much of the past five years.

Dr. Martti Nissinen, a professor of Old Testament studies, knows that Greta is an unorthodox choice for an honorary doctorate but told the Helsingin Sanomat that “by choosing Greta as an honorary doctor, we declare that we want to be as bold and influential as she.”

The University of Helsinki’s decision should not be too surprising. Dr. Nissinen’s research interests mainly involve gender issues such as love poetry, homoeroticism, and masculinity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. Clearly, the university’s theology department is not a bastion of Christian conservation. Yet its ironic decision to give Greta a doctorate in theology highlights the vital fact that the climate-change movement is becoming a secular religion.

“As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age,” writes Joel Kotkin in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. “Christianity offered guidance for how one should conduct one’s personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people toward life in better harmony with nature.”

Activists like Greta preach a warning message that aims to redeem humanity from their environmental sins. They counsel people to abstain from having children or eating meat to reduce their “carbon footprint.” And they prophesy that Earth will perish in searing heat unless governments surrender sovereignty to a central planning committee. Some radical activists have even implemented their own version of confession.

Three years ago, the Federalist reported that students at Union Theological Seminary in New York were instructed to confess their sins to potted plants as an “expression of worship.” nbc News even has a website where guilt-stricken environmentalists can confess ecological sins like blasting the air conditioning, throwing away half their lunch, or grilling a steak.

Yet in many instances, the High Church of Environmentalism acts like the medieval Catholic Church. Even as it urges the masses to cut back on consumption, it offers wealthy elites the opportunity to buy a modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices. And it persecutes climate-change deniers with the same ferocity that the Spanish Inquisition persecuted heretics. Climatologist James Hansen has said that those who deny man-made climate change should face criminal trials for “high crimes against humanity.” And one professor from the University of Graz has suggested the death penalty for climate-change deniers. The environmentalist movement is abandoning scientific inquiry and rational skepticism in favor of religious dogma.

It also takes a lot of faith to be a disciple of Greta Thunberg. In an interview with the Swedish television channel tv4, she declared, “I don’t believe in God; I believe in the scientific consensus on climate change.” Yet the scientific evidence for God’s existence is far greater than the unseen evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet to heat up.

In The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power, British journalist Melanie Phillips writes that the universe is rational because it was created by a rational Creator who dwells outside the confines of time and space. “Western science grew from the novel idea that the universe was rational; and that belief was given to us by Genesis, which set out the revolutionary proposition that the universe had a rational Creator,” she writes. “Without such a purposeful intelligence behind it, the universe could not have been rational; and so there would have been no place for reason in the world because there would have been no truths or natural laws for reason to uncover.”

This is a logical, factual, evidence-based conclusion.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases act as they do because they were created to obey the laws of chemistry and physics. And according to the Heartland Institute, these laws show that the insulating effects of carbon dioxide are not linear. The first 20 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produces more warming than the following 400 parts per million. A certain amount of carbon dioxide is necessary to keep the planet from freezing. Yet nearly all the warming potential of carbon dioxide is realized at concentrations below 100 parts per million. Greta’s proclamations that humanity will go extinct unless they become vegan, buy an electric car, and give up air travel are as unscientific as the idea that the universe came into existence by random chance.

Greta may not know much about the laws of chemistry or physics since she spent so much of her teenage years skipping school so she could protest in front of the Swedish parliament building. But she might have still come to many of the same conclusions even if she had attended class. When people give up faith in God, their natural drive to have faith in something is often diverted into a wide variety of secular religions and irrational ideologies. Yet these secular religions and false ideologies bend facts to fit theories and never adequately explain the physical and spiritual laws God set in motion.

This is why the Apostle Paul wrote that those who do “not like to retain God in their knowledge” are given over “to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient” (Romans 1:28). Once you start rejecting the laws that God revealed in the Bible, it usually does not take very long before you begin rejecting the laws governing the physical universe as well. The Apostle Peter expanded on this concept when he wrote that those who “walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness” become as “natural brute beasts” (2 Peter 2:10-12). The Greek word for “brute” in this passage is alogos, which, depending on the context, can mean absurd, irrational, unreasonable, or even, against the Logos.

The Word (Logos) is the Being that God (Theos) used to impart rationality to the physical creation (John 1:1-3). Rebelling against God and His Word can cause a person to lose the ability to think rationally, giving him or her the limited reasoning skills of a “natural brute beast.” This is why so many people today believe socialism works, Donald Trump colluded with Russia, your biological sex is fluid, transgenderism is healthy, the world is going to end in a decade unless everybody gets an electric car, and that a 20-year-old atheist is a doctor of theology. They no longer care about logic, facts, evidence or truth. They only care about their own feelings, opinions and passions.

“Satan and his demons reject God’s authority,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in “A Dangerous New Age of ‘Worshiping the Will.’” “They do not believe in absolute truth; everything is relative to their will. Christ said the devil ‘abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it’ (John 8:44). When human beings reject God’s truth, they start worshiping their own opinions. They start thinking like Satan. When this type of thinking becomes entrenched enough, people stop even caring about the difference between true and false. They start trying to magically ‘create reality where no reality is.’”

There is a reason so many people are adopting insane ideas. They have rejected their Creator, so now they are accepting irrational faiths that only further obscure the difference between true and false!

When people do not sincerely love the truth, they believe lies (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12). To learn the truth about climate change, read Why ‘Natural’ Disasters?