Transcription
In America, 90% of the nation would claim to be religious. And you, you define this in a way that's unambiguous. You don't say, "Well, do you go to church every Sunday?" You don't ask that question. Plenty of people go to church who are not religious. They go to get a date, or they go for the cupcakes, or something. They don't go to be spiritually enlightened.
So you ask a different question. You say, "Is there a God that listens to your prayers?" If you answer yes to that, you're religious by anybody's definition, because your understanding of a deity is that that deity is monitoring your daily affairs. So that's unambiguous. And this number's dropped in the last couple of years, but it's about 90%.
Turns out, if you go to college and get an advanced degree, a master's or a doctorate, where these are degrees where you actually question the state of existing knowledge, the undergraduate degree doesn't really do that. You're learning from textbooks that are written by somebody else. Your doctrines are already there. The higher degrees imply that you are questioning the very fabric of the knowledge you had previously learned. Among that community, it's 60%. It has dropped. That's interesting. Let's keep going.
How about scientists of all stripes? So biologist, chemist, sorry, let's include engineers as well, people who have formal scientific training, mathematicians as well. Okay, what, what happens next? Drops to 40%. Now, if you look at this number, it looks like, "Wow, so scientists, the public is 90%, scientists are 40%." No, the drop is not that significant. Because every scientist has an advanced degree. So, in fact, the drop is not from 90 to 40. The drop is from 60 to 40. So becoming a scientist is not as big an effect on whether you're religious as you might otherwise think. Most of the drop comes because you're educated, educated beyond the level of college. So that's 40%.
So now you go to elite scientists, members of the National Academy, highly accomplished subset among scientists. The number drops to 7%. There was a headline in Nature, the British journal Nature, which said after the study was released, "93% of elite scientists reject God." That was supposed to be a shocking headline. And I look at that and I said, "That's not even interesting." That was the trendline anyway. What's more interesting, which was not the headline, is that 7% of elite scientists pray to a God. Isn't, isn't that a more interesting fact to you? Isn't that kind of interesting? The most accomplished scientists in the world, in that community, 7% of them still pray to a personal God. I think that is deserving of more study than the 93% who don't, because something's going on there. We don't know what.
And I have, uh, confronted people on this. I would say to the most, sort of, vociferous in the atheist community, I would say, "You're beating the public over the head saying, telling them why, why are you doing?" And I'm thinking, "Before you beat the public, why don't you beat them over the head?" Okay, no, I'm just saying, if you're going to rank, if you just, cuz that, I understand that first, because if you can't convert that 7%, you've got no hope in the general public. That's all I'm saying. This, this, this is among the ranks of the scientifically educated.
Now, philosophers basically invented atheism. And if you do this, if you check the statistic for philosophers, it's down. It's below 1%. There are no religious, the only religious philosophers there are, they're like theologian philosophers. All right, if you subtract the theologian philosophers, this number is essentially zero. All right, so they've basically birthed atheism, uh, the philosophers.
And there's this talk, uh, I, I don't know, here in, in Australia, what does the Bible in the public school class or not? No, is it by law or is it just by tradition? Is it by law? Okay. So in America, there's this understanding that the state and the church are separate. And by and large, that's been honored for, by and large, for most of the history of the country, by and large. And the, what's interesting about America, a point that was a little bit alluded to earlier today, is that it was founded on the principle that the state has no religion. The state is indifferent to what religion you might have. So that means there's no authority over you that's going to tell you who and what to worship. And that's a state that we all take for granted, but so many places in the world, that is not true.
Well, there's a case in New Jersey where a middle school kid was lectured to by the history teacher in a public school. And the history teacher said, "If you don't accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you are going to hell." There's a little Muslim girl there, said, "You were already damned to hell." First point. Second, that Noah had dinosaurs on his ark. Third point he made is that the Big Bang and evolution are just theories, and you can take them or leave them. So I, I don't, like I said, I don't get into these. I just don't. We've got people who do this. We've got the Four Horsemen. We've got, we've got our boy here, um, who's coming up after. We've got people who fight this stuff. I'm not one of those, really. I, I'm doing this 'cause, like, I know you, you all, this is the bone I'm throwing you. But I really, I don't do this.
So, but then I thought about it and I said, "You know, I have an op-ed. I can, I mean, a letter to the editor on this that I can write." And I left out the part about Jesus. I left that out because if that's how he feels, he wants you to be Christian, that's okay, fine. I left that out. I went to the rest of what he said. And this was my letter as it appeared in the New York Times: "People cite violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey, that's a separation of church and state, essentially. New Jersey school teacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs. The case is not about the need to separate church and state. It's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers. That's the [Applause] problem. If he wants to believe Jesus is a savior, that's not synonymous with being scientifically illiterate, because 40% of American scientists pray to a personal God. What is identical with being scientifically literate is that if Noah was a human being, he did not have dinosaurs on his ark, because humans and dinosaurs did not coexist. All right, every one of those scientists knows that, even the 40% who pray to God." So this is, this is how I've sort of split the kingdom.
Then, then you get the billboard wars. Okay, this was fun. "Big Bang Theory? You've got to be kidding God." All right, this goes on. This is what we, we put up with. All right, um, so then we got to, then there was like, "Let's come back. Praise Darwin. Evolve beyond belief. Freedom from religion." Founding. So the billboard wars are, are in progress here. There's some people who are like, okay with God and okay with sort of how things evolve. So they ride the, the fence. So here's a bumper sticker: "The Big Bang Theory. God spoke, and bang, it happened." You know, so they, they're excited about both God and the Big Bang.
But then we had this idiot back in May. "Judgment Day." Did this, did this Judgment Day stuff reach below the equator? Jeez. Okay. Uh, yeah, it was, it was. Now, the good thing at this, unlike other predictions, like Jesus will come one day, this had a date. Okay, okay. You could test this. This was like easy to test. You just sort of wait around for it. All right. So now it turns out that May 21st was only the day Jesus was supposed to show up. The actual end of the world is October 21st. So the end of the world is still to come this year. This is directly from the website. So I had to tweet. So this is May 21st. So on May 21st, or May 20th, I tweeted this: "If Jesus actually arrives May 21st, it'll be easy to convince skeptics. If he doesn't show up, do the faithful become atheists?" That was my question.
Now, in a Twitter stream, it's a, it's a live conversation with complete strangers, everybody depositing their 140 characters worth of thought. So here, this is, there was a huge reaction to that tweet. Now, you would expect that most of my followers, or at least a big fraction of them, would be sort of atheistic. So you'd expect people to say, "This guy is an idiot. Why are we even spending any time on them?" Well, one such person did make such a reply, but not in the way you might think. "No, anyone who's read the Bible knows this camping was full of from the start." Okay. So what do you do with that? So, so this is somebody complaining about the prediction of Jesus coming because he says this other guy doesn't know jack about the Bible, but this guy does. And went on. There are other places where people quoted that one can't know when Jesus comes. So the fact that this guy's saying he knows means he doesn't read the Bible. So this, so, so this is what's out there. People who are ready to vociferously argue about who knows the Bible the least.
September 11th, 2001. We just had our 10th anniversary of that. I happen to live three and a half blocks from what became known as Ground Zero. Uh, these, this image was taken outside my dining room window. Uh, the North Tower is on fire. These are 110-story buildings, the World Trade Center towers. Uh, this image is the instant the South Tower was hit. It was hit from the left. You cannot see the entry point because we're blocked by this other black building. It's a hotel, a 50-story hotel, which is just kind of in the foreground. You see part of the South Tower punching out. This is before the jet fuel had ignited. And when you ignite jet fuel, you set a deflagration wave, not a, not a, a bomb wave. It's a different kind of wave. It's not accompanied by a shock. Um, this is a split second after that. The fuel has ignited, creating more pressure, and within a split second of that, the entire South Tower was engulfed. And this is fragments of plane and bodies and office coming out the other side.
Now, why am I dragging you through this? Uh, okay. 62 minutes later, both buildings had collapsed, and there was blue sky where there were once these buildings. This is directly outside of my apartment building. And the emergency vehicles had come. This is the pulverized World Trade Center dust that had settled, several inches of it. I say this because shortly after this, this gentleman got up, president of the United States, George W. Bush. This is actually my photo of him. I was in that room at that time when he spoke. See the medals there on the table? I was on a committee to tell him who to give those medals to. They, the Presidential Medal of Science. And so he actually gave them to everyone we told him to give them to, except he didn't read their citations. He's smart enough to know not to pronounce any of the science words that were in the citations. So he put the medal around the neck, somebody else read the citations. Shortly after September 11th, he gets up, I don't remember where he gave the speech, and he says, in an attempt to distinguish "we" from "they," he says, "Our God is the God who named the [Music] stars." This is before I was on his Rolodex. You know, I could have saved him from himself. Okay. It's a loose quote from Genesis that says God named all the stars in the sky. Okay. First of all, it's the same God. So he's got that wrong. But, but Allah, God of Islam, and God of the, the, the Jewish, they're all, it's the same God. They got, they call them different names, but it's the same book delivering you the same God. Apart from him getting that wrong, he says, "Our God is the God who named the stars." What he, he just didn't know two-thirds of all stars in the night sky have Arabic names. Two-thirds of all stars that have names have, these are all the Arabic star names. All of these.
I don't think this is the point he wanted to make. I, I think he figured that out, like I said, it was before I was on his Rolodex. And so you say, "Well, how does this happen? How does, how do you get, how do you get a culture where two, where stars in the night sky are named by them?" What was going on? How did that happen? And you have to go back a thousand years and you get to Islam, in what's the golden period of Islam. In that period, algebra was invented. Algorithm is an Arabic word. All these words, they begin with "al." Ten to one, it's an Arabic word. Arabic. Our numerals are Arabic numerals. Did you pause and reflect on why we call them Arabic numerals? We just call them that, right? But somebody did good stuff with these numerals. It was in Baghdad a thousand years ago where they invented algebra, and there were advances in mathematics, agriculture, engineering, men, all of these fields, all at a time when Europe was disemboweling heretics.
So something changed. 12th century. This gentleman came around, Al-Ghazali, a Muslim scholar. Learned at this point, Islam is maybe just a few hundred years old. People are reading the Quran and interpreting it however they sort of want to and feel like it. There's not a coherence to the practice of Islam until he comes around and codifies the behavior of a good Muslim. In much the same way, St. Augustine, in his book *City of God*, codified what it is to be a good Christian. How do you burn the witches? There's a recipe for that. You got, they got to be upside down so the blood does, you know, it's a whole, whole itinerary for how to be a good Muslim. And in, in his writings, contain the assertion that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the devil. Two actions that you see in nature are the will of Allah. Well, if you drop a stone and it falls, Allah will. If that's your explanation, your curiosity stops. You combine everything happening in nature being the will of Allah to the manipulation of numbers being the work of the devil, and the entire enterprise of that golden era collapses.
Now, historians, when they look at that era, they say, "Well, the Mongols came and they, you know." So historians think of the world in terms of wars and kings. They think less about it philosophically, about intellectual movements or the absence thereof. Islam rose again after this period. Didn't have science associated with it. No new inventions in math. You look at the period of Islam in Spain, the period where the great Alhambra was built. There is no attendant science going on there. It's done. It's gone. And it is a, it is a cost that exists to this day. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world today who are not participants on the frontier of scientific discovery. What's the best measure of this? Just check out the Nobel Prizes. I tally them. Okay. How many Jews have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences? Here they go. 25% of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences are won by Jews. How many Jews in the world? About 15 million, tops. 15 million. How many Muslims in the world? 1.3 billion, which is huger, way huger than 15 million. How many Muslims have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences? Two and a half. Two. I can't bring myself to call economics a science. I'm sorry. I just, I just can't. I've tried. I've really tried. I'm sorry. That's how many. And the physics one was a Pakistani physicist, not a Middle Eastern physicist. So Jews have 50 times the number of Nobel Prizes. The 180th of the population of the Muslims is 4,000 times the impact. I lose sleep every night wondering how many secrets of the universe lay undiscovered because 1/5th, no, 1/7th, what's the population? 1/6th of the population of the world is not a participant on the exploration frontier. What thoughts have gone undreamed of?
Yes, the moral of the story or discussion that Neil just gave is that let's focus on improving literacy levels and access to education across the world, and the question of blind faith or religion should solve itself, man. And I all agree for my part. And no guys, I'm not anti-people having faith or believing there must be a greater work of force in the universe that we can't even begin to comprehend. Call it physics, call it being, whatever, man. But I wholly disagree with however is organized religions like Christianity, Islam, and etc. I can actually confidently say that throughout the less than two millennia that these religions have been mainstream, they've done more harm than they've helped anyone, man, in terms of oppression, lives lost, and etc. Try changing my mind in the comment section. And let's get out. Man, even in this day and age, man, the number of people in regions like my home country who elect a politician that's clearly morally bankrupt simply because they identify as a strong Christian is baffling and disturbing. And when these politicians go on to make their lives a living hell, inevitably, in every sense of the word, these people still fail to own their mistakes. And you usually hear something along the lines of, "Man can fool us, but he can never fool God." So we leave it all up to God. And oh, not to forget, when the next election cycle rolls around, if the corrupt candidate just aligns himself or herself with the country's religious leaders, you can rest assured he'll be elected again by the same people. You can't make this kind of stupidity up, man. And it's a trend you'll find across Sub-Saharan Africa, man. I don't know about other regions around the world, so I won't really. I understand the importance of religion in societies, from the social cohesion it fosters to the emotional and spiritual fulfillment it offers a lot of people. And people grieving that humans still had all these before religion, when people subscribed to ever-evolving faiths as the world around them changed, not sticking to stale doctrines laid out in books written by so-called religious leaders who didn't even understand the basics of jump theory, man. Anyway, also, before you leave guys, I'd like to remind you guys that I'd really like your help with supplying basic school materials to some of the most impoverished kids across Kenya. Even a single dollar, man, could go towards changing a kid's life. And isn't that just amazing? One, so I'll highly appreciate whatever it is that you can spare. And you can make, make the donations through the PayPal link in the description in the channel. It's the first link immediately after you open the description section. Otherwise, thanks a lot. I hope you and these politicians would I disagree with our advice that [Music] and these politicians go home to live. [Music]