Transcription
I've been brought into some of that conversation just to help people understand what science is and what science is not. And so I think what's unfortunate about how that's turned is religion is becoming sort of the enemy of science, or science the enemy of religion. And that's only because religious forces are trying to put religious writings in the science classroom. Now, there's no tradition of the science professor knocking down the door of the Sunday school, telling the preacher to put science in what goes on in the Sunday school class. There's no tradition of that. There's no scientist picketing outside of churches saying, "You know, equal time for Darwin." It doesn't happen. It's not how this country was founded.
So, it's this, it's this needless debate going on out there. When people need to know, if your belief system derives from what's called inspired truths that do not come out of empirical investigation of the physical world, it has no place in the science classroom. That doesn't mean it has no place anywhere else. Put it in the religious philosophy class. Put it in the history of human thought class. But it just has no place in the science classroom.
And so, what concerns me now is, even if you're as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops. It just stops. You're kind of no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come, come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain and who says, "That's a really cool problem. I want to solve it." They come in and solve it. But look at the time delay. This was a hundred-year time delay. And the math that's in perturbation theory is like crumbs for Newton. He could have come up with that. The guy invented calculus just on a dare, practically, when someone asked him, "What, what, you know, Ike, how come planets orbit in ellipses and not some other shape?" And he couldn't answer that. He goes home for two months, comes back out, comes in differential calculus because he needed that to answer that, to answer that question. And so, so this is, this is the kind of mind we were dealing with with Newton. He could have gone there, but he didn't. He didn't. His religiosity stopped him.
And so, we're left with the real, the, the realization, of course, that intelligent design, while real in the history of science, while real in the presence of sort of philosophical drivers, is nonetheless a philosophy of ignorance. And so, regardless of what our political agendas, all you have to say is, "Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance." That's all. I don't need to see, I don't need to have you discovered anything lately. If not, get out of the science classroom. But I'm not going to say don't teach this because it's, it's real. It happened. So I don't want people to sweep it under the rug, because if you do, you're neglecting something fundamental that's going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand. Understand? And it happens to the greatest of the minds, as it happens to everyone else.
Many, if not most, other people in the public. Don't you sometimes feel sad about breaking all these myths apart? No, no. Because I, I, I think it's, um, some myths are deserve to be broken apart out of respect for the human intellect. That, um, no, when you're writhing on the ground and froth is coming out of your, you're having an epileptic seizure, you have not been invaded by the devil. We got this one figured out, okay? I mean, discovery moves on. So I, I don't mind the power of myth and magic and, but take it to the next frontier and apply it there. Don't apply it in places where we've long passed what we already know what's going on.
Do you give people who make this case that that was the beginning and that there had to be something that provoked the beginning? Do you give them an A, at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason? Um, I don't think they're reconcilable. What do you mean? Well, well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don't, I, I don't, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there would be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them.
So, for example, if you, if you knew nothing about science and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis is an account of nature, that's that's what that is. And I said to you, "Give me your description of the natural world based only on this." You would say, "The world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light, much lesser than the sun, and in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right?" Because that's what happens during, during the, um, Revelation, one of the signs that the second coming is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don't know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.
So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is, is unerring, what you would do is you would say, "Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it." Then you say things like, "Oh, they didn't really mean that literally, they meant that figuratively." So this whole sort of reinterpretation of the fig, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are, came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It's the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally literal truth of God, that, and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science.
But do you have any sympathy for people who seem to feel only feel safe in the vastness of the universe you describe in your show if they can infer a personal God who makes it more hospitable to them, who cares for them? In this, what we tell ourselves is a free country, which means you should have freedom of thought. I don't care what you think. Go ahead, think that there's one God, two Gods, 10 Gods, or no Gods. That is what it means to live in a free country. The problem arises is if you have a religious philosophy that is not based in objective realities, that you then want to put in the science classroom. Then I'm going to stand there and say, "No, I'm not going to allow you in the science classroom." I'm not telling you what to think. I'm just telling you, in the science class, you're not doing science. This is not science. Keep it out. That's where I, that's when I stand up. Otherwise, go ahead. I, I, I'm not telling you how to think.
I think you must realize that some people are going to go to your show at the planetarium and they're going to say, "Aha! Those scientists have discovered God, because God, dark matter is what holds this universe together." So was that a question? It's a statement. You know, you know, they're going to say, so the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier, and there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary into the unknown lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot. Newton, even said it. He had his laws of gravity and motion, and he was explaining the moon and the pl, he was there. He doesn't mention God for any of that. And then he gets to the limits of what his equations can calculate. So I don't, can't quite figure this out. Maybe God steps in and makes it right every now and then. That's, that's where he invoked God.
And Ptolemy, he, he, he, he bet on the wrong horse. But he was a brilliant guy. He formulated the geocentric universe with Earth in the middle. This is where we got epicycles and all these, all this, the machinations of the heavens. There was still a mystery to him. He, he looked up and uttered the following words. "I, when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies," these are the planets going through retrograde and back, "the mysteries of the, when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of Ambrosia." What he did was invoke, he didn't invoke Zeus to account for the rock that he's standing on or the air he's breathing. It was this point of mystery. And in gets invoked God. This over time has been described by philosophers as the god of the gaps. If, if that's how you, if that's where you're going to put your God in this world, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance. If that's how you're going to invoke God, if God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we're, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious, at the end of the conversation, God has to be more to you than just where science has yet to tread. So to the person who says, "Maybe dark matter is God," if the only reason why you're saying it's because it's a mystery, then get ready to have that undone.
Now, when you talk about these things, somebody in the audience must come up, I assume, and say, "Well, oh, we only understand 4% of the stuff." Yeah, that's great. I love it. How, how is that different from Bill O'Reilly saying, "Well, in that case, the rest of it, God, and we, you guys are just, you're just expounding beliefs here. You've got no evidence." Difference for the 96%? The difference is, we do understand the tides. The tides are part of the 4%. We understand. So Bill O'Reilly is giving a list of things that are fully understood. If he had given a list of things that are not understood, okay, that would be a different reaction, and it would be less susceptible to comedic mockery than saying, "Tides come in and out. You can't explain that." It's like, yes, we can. We've known that one for the last couple hundred years. Give me a better example. So if he said, "There's dark matter, and there's dark energy forcing an expansion of the universe so fast that it's accelerating." You can't explain that, right? We can't explain it. Okay. I don't think he knows enough physics to be able to tell us what it is. We don't understand yet. That would have been a more interesting exchange with the atheist guy, I, I forgot his name, forgive me, but the guy who, he was interviewing. Now, if he wants to use that as evidence for God, then we just have to come back and say, "Well, doesn't mean if you don't understand that something, and the community of physicists don't understand it, understand it, that means God did it? Is that, is that how you want to play this game?" Because if it is, here's a list of the things in the past that the physicist at the time didn't understand. And a talk show, you might have conducted 200 years ago, would have said, "The planets do retrograde. Can't understand that. Must be a God." And we'd say, "You're right." And then 10 years later, we understand it. So what do you do? So you're, if that's how, if that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on. So just be ready for that to happen if that's how you want to come at the problem. So that's just simply the god of the gaps argument. It's been around forever.
So, in fact, people who want to make arguments, wait, wait. And I don't, I don't even mind. I don't even care if someone wants to say, "You don't understand that God did it." That doesn't even bother me. What would bother me is if you were so content in that answer that you no longer had curiosity to learn how it happened. If the day you stop looking because you're content, "God did it," I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world. And if the world had been, if I'm glad whoever those folks are, there aren't that many of them, because if they dominated the world, we'd still be in the cave. We would have never left the cave because there are mysterious things out there. And "God is doing that," and "You don't need to know that," and "Don't even think about it." Where would we be if their understanding of the world ruled the world? So I don't mind it. But just don't prevent others from, uh, conducting that investigation themselves.
Do you believe in God? Me, Creator? Yeah. So I'm the, the more I look at the universe, um, just the less convinced I am that there is something benevolent going on. So if you, if you're concept of a Creator is someone who's all-powerful and all-good, that's not an uncommon pairing of powers that you might describe to a Creator. All-powerful and all-good. And I look at disasters that afflict Earth and life on Earth: volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, um, congenital birth defects. You look at this list of ways that life is made miserable on Earth by natural causes, and I just ask, "How do you deal with that?" So philosophers rose up and said, "If there is a God, God is either not all-powerful or not all-good." I have no problems if, as we probe the origins of things, we bump into the bearded man. If that shows up, we're good to go, okay? Not a problem. There's just no evidence of it. And this is why religions are called faiths collectively, because you believe something in the absence of evidence. That's what it is. That's why it's called faith. Otherwise, we would call all religions evidence. But we don't, for exactly that reason. So, so, so I, I'm, I'm, given what everyone describes to be the properties that would be expressed by an all-powerful being in the gods that they worship, I look for that in the universe, and I don't find it.
So is there a God? Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'll be about to have breaking news. Is there a God? Okay, so I will tell you, is that with there are a lot of unknowns in the universe, but just because they're unknowns does not mean there's a deity in the unknown. If you're going to assign a deity to that, which that doesn't mean there isn't. That's correct. So you're more of an open mind about this, right? I, everyone should. If the, the unknown is the unknown. But the, the, the track record of people saying, "God is behind this," and then you add a little science to it, and you find out, "No, we can completely explain it and control it." Then that, the history of that exercise is so rich with science discovering the unknowns that were previously ascribed to deity, like lightning bolts and weather systems. There was Poseidon, there was Zeus. Just look at the history of this. I'm, I'm not given reason to say we're going to find something God is going to be at the center of that, and there'll be no science to apply. I'm going to look for the science first, because that's how the history of this exercise has unfolded.
Which is why does religion have such a persistent hold on human thought despite all that we know of science? Uh, yeah, I think there are several ways one can address that question. Let me address it in, in a, consider not long ago when so much of the Western world was the state was the religion. And we have actually moved quite a distance from that compared with 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 400 years ago, the era of the Inquisition and this sort of thing. And so, so to say that it has such a grip, it has a fraction of the grip that it once did on the operations of human conduct and of society. So the real question is, if implicit in that is, given what we know of science, why would religion still have any grip at all? Not do, why does it still have a big grip? Because it's not a big grip. When you look, um, in the, in the developed world, so in fact, most of Europe are just, they, you know, their whole countries where religion has essentially disappeared entirely. And the country are not, the countries are not full of violence. And, you know, it's just the assumption that you have to be religious to be moral is a false one. It's empirically false, because you just look around in places where that's the case. So, um, so, so, so that's one fact. And pull away from that a little. There's plenty of what goes on in religious text that has tremendous value to how to think about life and how to treat one another. Uh, in fact, uh, Jefferson created what was essentially what we can think of as the Jeff, Thomas Jefferson, the Jefferson Bible. I don't know if you ever heard of this. He went through the Bible, and I think both the Old and the New Testament, and he crossed off everything that was sort of mythical, magical, uh, things that clearly violated known laws of nature, and kept the rest and said, "Here is the, the stuff of the Bible that will, should have value to any modern person going forward." If you look at people who are religious today who are not in conflict with science, they have viewed their religious text as a spiritual, something that gives them spiritual support, not as a science textbook. The, the conflict in society is when you have those who are still religious who want to use the religious text as, as their access point to understanding the natural world. And persistent efforts of the past to make that happen have just simply failed. The, the Bible does not work as a science textbook. In fact, Galileo knew this, and he himself was a religious man.
I read a book, "Consolation of Philosophy." The main guy, Boethius, is condemned to death. He has everything taken from him. All he has is his reason and his sense of self, not even. And that. But he attempts to console himself to this execution by reasoning that the world has order, that there is something that keeps things together. And he uses his reason to try and get to the root of why he should be at peace at death. The problem is, his source of origin is a belief in God. What would you do? Well, I, I don't know if I fully understand the question. I do know that, uh, if he's about to be executed, how about you are about to be executed? Oh, I'm about to be executed. You have nothing except your knowledge and your, your knowledge of science, your experience. I would request that my body, in death, be buried, not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the Earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.
[Applause]
At the 1 to 2 minute mark, Neil talks about how even some of the smartest individuals in history like Newton had to bask in the majesty of God at some point, after which their discoveries basically stopped. And that isn't the only example of just how dangerous dogma can be to scientific advancements. Nicholas Copernicus, a genius astronomer who proposed the heliocentric system of the universe, had to wait more than 30 years until he was near his death to publish his work because he knew his ideas would be controversial and more than certainly church officials would punish him for heresy. And he was right to worry because after he published his work, which he titled "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres," the church added it to its index of forbidden works for centuries. Man, even once when another genius arose shortly thereafter, Galileo Galilei, and supported Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system, the church not only forced him to recant his support under the threat of torture, but they also put him under house arrest for the rest of his remaining life. Just imagine, man, all these guys and many others like them who are lost to history. Just imagine if they existed in a more science-friendly environment, what things will they have uncovered? As Neil points out, and this actually reminds me of another point. When you're debating Christians and you point out the harms that religion has had in society since the beginning of time, one of the points they usually throw back at you is that, well, good things in history have also been done by people who believed in God, such as those that led the abolition movement. But as we've seen, man, most people in history just happen to be Christians, not because the word of God was so seductive and nurturing, but because being anything but a believer and a Christian back then was a king's tomb and a life sentence of misery. If not to us, it's undeniable today that if the likes of Galileo and Copernicus existed today, they'd be the farthest thing from the Bible. Tempers running a-mo in America today. And also what remains a fact at the end of the day is that holy scriptures like the Bible were used to justify some of the worst crimes against humanity. And I personally find it weird that by some people hailed as a rich and perfect tapestry of love, kindness, and holiness can be used for such evils. Now, you could argue that since both good and evil people in the past used the Bible to justify their motivations, doesn't that show that the common denominator is humans, and they are the problematic piece of the puzzle? I actually agree with that one, 100%, 100%. My only point is that Christians who were part of the abolitionist movement were on the losing end of a theological argument. The pro-enslavement Christians were able to point to multiple passages in the Bible where their dark desires once supported and encouraged, but not a single verse in the supposedly huge holy book, by the practice explicitly. Man, don't you find that weird? Thanks a lot, guys, for joining me today. I really hope you've enjoyed the show. Video. Please tune in tomorrow.