Quotations too good to die

One of the many almost-quotations everyone knows is the one Paul Johnson uses here:

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense.

Like the spurious quotation from Dostoevsky about all things being permitted if God is dead, the quotation accurately reflects the thought of the writer. In this case, it mimics Chesterton's paradoxical style as well. However, it's just as well to point out that Chesterton, in all his millions of words, never wrote exactly that.

I admire Johnson, but he goes on to commit a common error among conservative Christians:

The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect.

The global temperature has been rising, if not all that rapidly, for quite a long time now; barring some revolutionary discoveries, it is not reasonable to disbelieve in "global warming." Feel free to disagree with man-made global warming (AGW or anthropogenic global warming), or more reasonably, disagree that the warming is 100% man-made; it is also a fine position to take that the warming is not all that big a threat compared to other environmental problems.

The reflex rejection of global warming tout court is embarrassing, but it is borderline lunacy to throw in the greenhouse effect, which is a well-confirmed theory about the insulating effect of atmospheres. Venus is otherwise terribly hard to explain, and we ourselves would be v. v. cold. Johnson most likely means the bundle of policy recommendations popular with the people who talk most about those things, but flabby writing like that is what helps further the stupid caricature of conservatism as the enemy of science.