Transcription
There was a philosopher commenting on miracles, and I'm going to mangle the quote, but he said something like: Miracles are so unlikely, bordering on impossible, that if you do encounter something that you cannot explain, not only from your own base of knowledge, but is unexplainable given any base of knowledge yet acquired on Earth, it's more likely that you simply discovered a new law of physics than that there is a divine miracle that was performed in front of you, right?
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, if your 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 up 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 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.
A thousand years ago, uh, the intellectual center of the world was Baghdad. Baghdad. Europe was busy disbarring heretics at the time. Baghdad was open to all thought at the time. Between AD 800 and 1100, around there. If you look at the advances that unfolded in that period, in that location, it includes, uh, the, the, the invention of algebra. Algebra is an Arabic word. Algorithm is an Arabic word. Two-thirds of the stars in the night sky that have names have Arabic names. How does that happen? Just, what, where did the naming rights come from? It came from the fact that at that time, huge advances in the Middle East, in Baghdad in particular, um, was, uh, unfolded in engineering, mathematics, especially mathematics, astronomy, navigation, um, uh, physiology.
And you say, well, why is that? If you look at what was going on, they were open to all lines of thought. Muslims, Christians, there were doubters back then, today we would call them atheists. They would all come around a table and share ideas. If you have some philosophy that's got holes in it, someone's going to find it, and they're going to challenge you on those ideas. And what happens is the conversation ratchets up. You discard what doesn't work, and you keep what does. And when you do that, you make discoveries, and you make discoveries rapidly.
And at the time, that period drew to a close. If you read history books, it'll typically describe sort of the, the sacking of Baghdad. It was a bad time for the city, and they say it all came to an end. However, the Islamic culture rose at other times later, and in those other times, science and engineering discoveries were not a part of it. So he asked, what, why not? You got the cultural heritage, why doesn't it show up again? Again? And then you got to dig a little deeper. From the sacking of Baghdad, and you find out there was a Muslim cleric, Al-Ghazali was his name, who was to Islam what St. Augustine was to Christianity. St. Augustine kind of laid out the rules for how to be a good Christian at the time. A lot of people were practicing it in their own way. He codified it. He was a religious scholar, figured it out according to his own read, told everybody how to behave. There's the book, you follow this, you're a good Christian. Al-Ghazali said, you follow this, you're a good Muslim. In that text included the assertion, which gained influence socially, but then politically, so then it had power of influence in there, was the assertion that mathematics and the manipulation of numbers was the work of the devil. The entire enterprise collapsed and never recovered. It has not recovered since.
If you look at the number of Muslims who have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences, it's one. Number of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize? One-quarter of all Nobel Prizes in science have been won by Jews. How many Muslims in the world? 1.3 billion. How many Jews in the world? 15 million, tops. So you look at what effect the culture of discovery and learning can have on what you discover about the natural world. It's extraordinary.
So just because you're making discoveries doesn't mean it's forever. And I look at the 20th century in America as a period of great discovery, and then I see forces now operating against it. Then I look at the history of the consequences of this, and I see America just simply fading into insignificance. No, it's not off of a cliff, it's just a slope. And every next day you're a little bit further down on the slope. You barely notice it, right? Until one day you can't see over the hill that you just came from, and you try to make do with what you have down here. And then you find out it's the rest of the world making the inventions and not you. You're trailing, no longer leading. You're not even abreast with what's going on. You're running behind, trying to catch up.
We, we've talked about science and religion like our whole lives, my friend and I. And we, I would describe to him, I would go to a mountaintop to observe the universe. And back in the day, it was an ordeal. I mean, you would take trains, planes, automobiles. You would, you would invert to live nocturnally. You would, uh, set up the telescope. Your sunset was the beginning of your day, when it was near the end of everyone else's day. And then it's you, the telescope, and the cosmos in the eerie silence of the night. But there's the den of the electronics driving the telescope juxtaposed with it. And I would look up and I would feel very deeply connected to the cosmos. He was quick to say, that's like a religious experience. And so I said, okay, except I wasn't thinking God. I was thinking, this is a magnificent, glorious universe. Yes, but you, I have the privilege of studying you. You beheld that scene with awe. You were in awe of the universe. And often that, and I started using all the same words, the awe and the majesty, and I was humbled in its presence. I was, uh, I wasn't prostrate in its presence, but I was humbled.
Now, here's what I found: people with religious experiences typically, there's something they experience that they cannot explain, right? That's normally the case. That's normally the case. Correct. Of, of any kind, okay? An apparition or this or that and the other. So I have seen things that if I did not know astrophysics, physics, uh, geology, atmospheric sciences, and just basically the laws of physics, I probably would rapidly call the police department to try to get somebody to investigate what I was looking at, or I would be on my knees, uh, in awe, wondering what, what mysterious mythical forces were operating. So, so I don't know whether my knowledge of what is possible in this universe has precluded me from having some religious experiences that others might have.
Okay. All right. This is in response to the people out there who say, "Oh, Earth is just perfect for life. Oh, what a haven in all the universe. Just right." It's not just right. So this is every opportunity it gets, it tries to kill us. Add it up: the tsunamis, the hurricanes, the tornadoes, the asteroids, the, the three-quarters of the Earth. If I drop you butt naked, you're dead 10 minutes later because something eats you, okay? So this is the anti-haven. Anti-haven. Yeah, it's bad for life. And, and evidence of that is, look at the fossil record. 99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct. That is not the signature of a planet that is in love with life.
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, they're just, they, you know, they're whole countries where religion has essentially disappeared entirely, and the countries 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 texts that has tremendous value to how to think about life and how to treat one another. Uh, in fact, Jefferson created what was essentially, what you 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, 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 texts 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 their access point to understanding the natural world. And persistent efforts of the past to make that happen have just simply failed. That, the, the Bible does not work as a science textbook. In fact, Galileo knew this, and he himself was a religious man. He's famously quoted as saying, "The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
So on that scale, the, the conflict comes about when that subset of the religious community feels threatened by scientific discoveries that are different from how they interpret what should the natural world should be in the Bible. I, I think it's that point where you get to the concept of the God of the Gaps. The, you go, "We do not understand this. You know, science takes us so far, but we don't understand anything beyond that. Therefore, that's God." The stuff that we don't get, that's God. And the trouble with that is, the moment that you actually go, "No, we do understand that now," is people are going, "Well, did God just go away then?" And, and it goes back, you know, nice simple things like the rainbow. The point where you go, "Well, the rainbow actually, it's, it's an optical effect. It's not something magic that gets put up in the sky to memorialize the flood." Plus, did you know that everyone sees a unique rainbow? No, that's right. Um, the rainbow is an optical effect for the person who sees it. So if you stand 10 feet to my left, you see an actual, a different rainbow than I see. It's a remarkable, uh, fun fact about rainbows. My, my, my favorite fun fact about rainbows is the fact that they were originally believed to have six color bands, but that Newton added, added indigo and violet like he liked the number seven. He had the mystical feeling for the number seven. Throws in indigo that no one else sees. Nobody. I mean, hands up here, who actually goes indigo, violet? There's the indigo. You don't. You just go purple. Yeah, exactly. Blue, purple. But so another thing about the rainbow, because each rainbow is unique to the viewer, it can only be a rainbow that is exactly face-on to you. You've never seen a rainbow that was like at an oblique angle. Think about it. They're exactly hemispherical in front of you. That's why you can never get to the base of the rainbow, 'cause that would mean your perspective on it would change. That's what makes it a good place to hide the gold, okay? In case you didn't know.
All right. Are you, are you, are you outing yourself here as an unbeliever? In people have been burned at stakes, indeed. Am. Um, and another thing, just you mentioned the God of the Gaps. In a free society, a free pluralistic society, where the freedom of the expression of religion is constitutionally protected, which was a fundamental part of why America was so attractive to immigrants from around the world whose religious differences were not being supported in their hometown. I will never be one to tell you what you should believe or what you should not believe. What I will say is that if you want to say that where we don't understand things, that's where God rests, that's where God operates, the God of the Gaps argument, because I get asked that all the time. "What was around before the universe?" "I don't know." "Must have been something. God." So they got to stick in God where we're not there yet. And I just say, "I got, we got top people working on that. That's it. It's a current front. We're not there yet." And given the history of the moving frontier where people had previously said, "Well, God must be operating," we're long past that. We, those explanations have come. And so I, I don't, there's no compelling reason to say God did it and then sort of give up and go on to the next problem. My issue with the God of the Gaps is that if you feel that way, you should not be writing the science curriculum of a classroom, okay? That's all. Okay? Because if you do, you are undermining the very process of what science is all about. Because the God of the Gaps principle is like a, it's a philosophy of ignorance, whereas science is a philosophy of discovery. And that's an important distinction between the two. And if you remove that foundation for what builds science, you are undermining the capacity of your culture, of your nation, to compete technologically in this, the 21st century. So it is not without consequence to have conduct of that way.
In fact, the people who say they are dying in their hospital bed and they lift up and they see themselves, they look back on themselves. That's a very common experience. Very common. So you got the experiment for that, okay? You got the experiment. You set up a ledge above the bed, okay? Mhm. Okay. These are people who were had near-death experiences, right? They saw themselves and then they went back. So you set a ledge up above the bed, and then you write something, a simple saying like, "Roses are red," or "The sky is blue," okay? You put that on top. Don't tell the person who was dying. When they say they went up and saw themselves, they would see this thing that you wrote and get them to tell you what it says. Oh, that's rough. That would be evidence. That's what I'm saying. That would be evidence that they actually came up, they came looking down physically on their own body. Yes. Yes, exactly. On their own body in the bed. That's right. So there, there are experiments you can do. And by the way, there's a history of this. Did you know that, uh, late 1890s, was it? 19, at the turn of the century, Wilhelm Röntgen? You, you realize he discovered X-rays. We call them X-rays. In Germany, he's German. They call them Röntgen rays, okay? As you'd expect, okay? They see through your body. What people were doing back then was, "Oh my gosh, if it can see through the body, maybe if I X-ray you the moment of your death, I will see the soul rise up out of your corporal existence." So they did these experiments. I mean, why not? Yeah, the person's already dying. They don't have to worry about the radiation, that's for sure.
You, I know you're an avowed atheist. How can you be so certain that there is no supernatural, God-like entity out there, given that we know so little? Well, first, I, I don't count myself among the ranks of avowed atheists. And I give a fast example why. A friend of mine went up to fix the Hubble telescope, okay, on the space shuttle. And on my, on my, on my Facebook feed, I said, "Godspeed to the space shuttle astronauts." And then in the comments, read it, said, "I thought you were an atheist. How could you possibly say that?" And so the fact that I gleefully said that and atheists complained about it, clearly I'm not an atheist, okay? My favorite, my favorite Broadway musical of all time is Jesus Christ Superstar, which I saw in real time in New York City. And I don't know that atheists can. So I don't. So is there a God then? Neil deGrasse Tyson: I'll be about to have breaking news. Is there a God? Okay. So I will tell you this: 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 to that, which that doesn't mean there isn't. That's correct. So you're more of an open mind about this, right? Everyone should. If, 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, 'cause that's how the history of this exercise has unfolded.
If you go to, if you go to, you go online, and in a, in a Google search, you type "Gods worshiped by humans," there's a tally of all the gods ever worshiped by humans in the history of civilization, and it just goes screen after screen after screen after screen. So when you say, "Do you believe in God?" Is there, is it which God is it? Zeus? Is it Poseidon? Is it the, the God? Is it the Christian God? Because the God from the Old Testament is filled with wrath, okay? All right. And, and smiting and smiting and whatever the past tense verb is. And so in the New Testament, that God is kinder, right? Little nicer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So you look at all of this and say, "Is that the God you want me to comment on?" Or is there some other God? Typically, it's the Judeo-Christian blend there. In that context, I would say, in my studies of the universe, I, I value evidence, and I don't see evidence for any kind of, um, active intelligence or power over anything. Yeah. But if you had it, every show it to me, I'm all in. I mean.
And then there are certain things that are just a violation of the laws of physics, like Jesus walking on water. There's no way around that either. He walked on water, and that's a miracle, or there's something else going on. Whether it's the testimony is incorrect, behind, he, he was behind water skis, right? That that could have been it. Skiing on his feet. That'd be so funny. Bare water. No, there are no. There are people who are trying, like for example, there's a Jesus spider. There's a spider, or Jesus lizard. Jesus lizard that can walk on water. Yes, I've seen that. It runs. They call it the Jesus Lizard. But the Jesus Lizard is walking on water because of surface tension, plus it's propelling itself. So that part of the effort gets it back out of the little bit of water that it sunk into. Plus, he doesn't weigh very much. So I would say that's an insult to Jesus because the lizard is using laws of physics to do it, right? Whereas Jesus had to violate the laws of physics, correct, in order for that to be the, to be the miracle described, right? Yeah, correct, correct. Either that, or he had really cool sandals. Just awesome sandal, styrofoam. Sr.
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, 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 it. 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 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 that, in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right?" Because that's what happens during, during the, uh, 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'd 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, uh, enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. They're saying, "Science is cool. We're good with that." And use the Bible for to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.
I have known serious religious people, not fundamentalists, who were scared when Carl Sagan opened his series with the words, "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." That scared them because they interpret that to mean, "Then if this is it, there's nothing else, no God, and no life after." For religious people, many people say, "Well, God is within you," or "God, there are ways that people have shaped this," rather than God as an old, gray-bearded man in the clouds. So if God is within you, what I'm sure Carl would say, in you, in your mind. And we can measure their neurosynaptic firings when you have a religious experience. We can tell you where that's happening, when it's happening, what you're feeling like at the time. So your mind, of course, is still within the cosmos.
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. I just don't go think whatever you want. 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.
Don't you sometimes feel sad about breaking all these myths apart? Ter: No, no, because I, I think it's, some myths are deserve to be broken apart out of respect for the human intellect. That, no, when you're rising on the ground and froth is coming out of your mouth, 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.
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 dark matter is what holds this universe together." 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 planets. 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, and, uh, Tycho Brahe. 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.
Anybody, anybody know that there's a heaven that they're gone somewhere? That there's an after? How could anyone know that? Boggles my mind. They can believe they know. No, but belief is. I could believe that it's raining. Well, this is the difference between believing something and using the methods and tools of science to establish what is objectively true. And what is objectively true is something that is true outside of your belief system. That's what science is. Facts and belief. I know the religious people believe. The scientist says, "Prove." What do you believe? What do you think happens when we die?
Well, so, I, I can make some able statements about what happens when, when you die. So you spend your life eating food. Food has a calorie content, and calorie is a source of energy. Calorie is a unit of energy. You bring it in, and then the energy is available for you to maintain your body temperature at nearly 100 degrees. It's 98.6. How do you keep something at 100 degrees when nothing else around you is? You're burning energy to sustain that, because biologically we need to be at that temperature to function, okay? You also need energy to walk and to move. That's why you eat food. The moment you die, what happens? You don't maintain the energy. Your temperature drops. How far does it drop? To room temperature. At a funeral, in the casket, if you touch the hand of the person in the casket, your first thought is, "The body's cold." No, it's not. It's room temperature, but it's cold compared to 100 degrees. They're no longer burning this energy, okay? So now, every one of your molecules has energy within it. If you get cremated, that energy gets released in the form of heat, and you heat the air, and that air radiates to space. You get buried, which is how I want my body to be disposed. Bury me. Bury me, because you know why? I don't want the energy content of my body to just get radiated out into space of no use to anybody. Put me in the ground, let the worms, microbes come in and out of my body, and the energy content of my body that I had assembled over my lifetime consuming the flora and fauna of this Earth, my body then returns to them, and thus is the cycle of life. I know that's going to happen because you can measure where the energy goes, and that's how I want to go out.
But you're not conscious, and that's for eternity? Uh, yeah. That, there's no evidence that I have any consciousness of anything. And by the way, is that so weird? Did you have consciousness before you were born? Were you saying, "How come I'm not on Earth? My gosh, I need to be on Earth." Or how, where am I? No, you, there's just the state of non-existence. So I'm not given any reason. But now I am born, and I can't stand the thought of non-existence. See, I already have existence. I don't. I accept. Okay. It is true, we fear death because we are born knowing only life, right? I get that. However, I, I take another view. 'Cause I've been asked, "If you could live forever, would you?" Yes. Okay. We're done. Inter: Yes. No. Okay. Sure. That's an attractive idea. But the way I look at it is, it is the knowledge that I'm going to die that creates the focus that I bring to being alive, the urgency of accomplishment, the need to express love now, not later. If we live forever, why ever even get out of bed in the morning? Because you always have tomorrow. That's not the kind of life I want to lead.
But why don't you fear not being around? I fear living a life where I could have accomplished something and didn't. That's what I fear. I, I don't fear death. You don't fear the unknown? I love the unknown. I, I, I, I love, you know what I want on my tombstone? My sister has this in her notes, 'cause in case I can't tell anyone after I die. On my tombstone: a quote from Horace Mann, great educator: "Be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity." That's what I want on my tombstone.
But you don't fear or or think about not being around? My great regret for not being around would be, it would be kind of cool to see my kids continue. Don't you want to know that? Yeah, that'd be. I would. That'd be fun. I want to see what inventions would make life easier, what clever discoveries or innovations would arise out of the collective brainwork of my species. Do think.
What do you think when you see religious people? When you see Popes or rabbis or people who fervently believe, the Billy Grahams of the world, who are sincere and wonderful people? Yeah, of course. Who actually, maybe delusional that they're gone somewhere? No, they're, they are embedded in belief systems. And what I look at is, I see all the belief systems. And when you line them up, they're not really compatible with one another. So whatever they're believing, it can't be a truth that applies to everybody, because other people believe what they do with no less fervor. And so I sit back as a person who's interested in in objective truths, and I say, "Well, it doesn't look like that's a path towards objective truth." So let people continue to think and say what they want. But as a citizen of a country that is not founded on a, on a, on a, on a religion, it's founded with, sort of a secular construct in a way that protects whatever religion you want to express. This is protected in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't actually mention God, right? Rather controversial in its day, and that it doesn't mention God, 'cause they don't want legislation to tell you what God to worship. They knew this. They knew how governments can persecute people who had belief systems that didn't agree with the state. They knew this. So they created those freedoms. And so we have these freedoms. Go ahead. But if you're going to create legislation that has to apply to everybody, and you're now going to put your belief system into legislation, that is not a free and open democracy.
Do you see any intention or anything in like the ordering of this of the cosmos? Yeah. So, if, intent is an interesting question. When imposed on the universe, for the longest while, philosophically, people imagined that the universe was some perfect place. Earth was a haven for life, especially human life, and everything is just right for us. And that would leave you thinking that there's some intent to the universe, that the universe is serving our needs. And of course, this is, as you would suspect, very strong in religious philosophies, where the adherents of that particular religion are sure that they are more special than any other religion, or more correct in so doing. When you look at the large-scale universe and you see these structures, what you have to ask yourself is, suppose all the galaxies were exactly equally spaced rather than in these filaments and structures. Perhaps you'd be asking the same thing, "Oh, look at, is there some intent here? Look how beautifully ordered it is." Ask yourself, is there some configuration of the universe where you wouldn't ask that? Because if there isn't, then the question doesn't actually aim towards a unique answer. If anything you see out there looks like it's ordered to you, then the question, you can't ask the question. You have to be able to ask the question such that if it were this other way, you would reject it. Now, the people who say, "Earth is a haven," and all this, the fossil record argues differently. 97.8% of all life that ever existed is now extinct. That's the sign not of a planet that loves its life. That's a sign of a planet that wants it to get the life the hell off, right? That's the anti-haven, right, right. We are alive not because, but in spite of it. From tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, every year they kill thousands of people, thousands. You're kind of bumming me out, I have to say. I'm not done. Not to mention asteroid impacts took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Earth is in a shooting gallery. You want to say there is intent? Yeah, the intent is to kill us, okay? There's your intent. So, so the more you look at the universe, the less clear any purposeful intent there is.
On that upbeat note, we're going to need to wait. Wait, you want to upbeat us when the, when the, when the asteroid comes? Yes, okay. Uh, if we have people who, who reject the science world, and the asteroid is headed towards us, they will be doing a number of things: praying, certainly. They'll be running away from the impact point. They'll be buying toilet paper and bottled water. Whereas if you had scientists in your midst and engineers, when the asteroid comes, you say, "How can I deflect that?" Two completely different outlooks on your fate. So I'm, if I'm bumming you out by saying there's disaster that will kill us, I'd like to lift you up again by saying it may be that innovations in science and technology may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves.
You de-bummed me. That's perfect. I think, I think rational investigation could kill pretty much any religious experience. It, uh, rational questioning of what's going on in the moment. What, what kind of in the moment would kind of squelch the experience itself? With methods, with, with methods and tools to investigate, right? Right. You know, tools to make the measurement. So, so here's one, here's one, uh, uh, Seth MacFarlane. Okay. Okay. Potty mouth Seth MacFarlane. That's right. Who's actually highly scientifically literate, okay? And there's a lot of evidence for that. If you've seen Family Guy, there's a lot of science references in it, right? He's also a fan of Star Trek, and he's had the Star Trek crew as cast members in the cartoon. Also, he was co-executive producer of Cosmos, okay? Yeah. It's because of him that we brought it to Fox, that got the distribution far greater than anything it would have gotten on PBS, anyhow. Okay. He's out late one night. He lives in Boston at the time. He's out late one night, and he wakes up in the morning, and he might be hung over, I don't know, or did whatever, and he missed his airplane. Mhm. That was the airplane from Boston that flew into the, the towers. Wow. Yes. Damn. That morning, he missed his airplane. Everybody asked him, "So, did you feel closer to God? Did God, you feel like you were protected?" And he says, "No, because many a morning I have been hung over and missed." I was gonna say. "In that case, my new God would be Jack Daniels." That's my new God. Who do you worship? I, Johnny Walker. Johnny Walker Black. I don't know. Saved my life. He saved my life. I'm telling you right now. Uh, and anyhow, what does that say for everyone else who died? Well, God didn't save them. I mean, you're stuck with the moral conundrum of the people who did die versus those who didn't.
If I could ask you, if there was one thing you wanted people to remember that you could say about science, what would that be? That the universe is knowable, and what one need not appeal to mystical, magical forces to account for things. Even if a day arises where something unfolds in front of your eyes that you cannot explain, just because you cannot explain it does not mean it is being driven by mystical, magical forces. It just means it's being driven by laws of physics that we know and you have yet to learn, or that we have all yet to discover. But the universe is knowable, and that's an amazing thing. It's knowable by our feeble human brain that rose up out of the, you know, the searing Getti, the plains of Africa, to rise up just to survive, to not get eaten. And we build a civilization where we have sufficient free time so that we can contemplate our place in the universe from anywhere.
Um, 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 that, but 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.
Do you guys believe that a time will ever come when people who believe in religion or the existence of a higher being will get treated the same way we do flats today? Because think about it, man. The only thing giving religion any ounce of credibility today is the fact that science hasn't been able to answer some of the most important questions humans have, or at least hasn't been able to answer these questions in a satisfactory manner. And I'm talking about questions like: What happens to us after death? Why is it that so much life appeared on our planet, on all others in our solar system alone are void of any species at all that you can tell? We have animals, man, surviving in some of the harshest conditions on Earth. So at least some form of living should be found on Mars or any of the other planets in our solar system. Other questions that come to mind, at least for me, are: Where does consciousness come from? What existed before the Big Bang? We can predict and have a way to determine our own destinies, etc., etc. Man, you get the idea. All that said, I'm 100% confident that unless something happens or breaks out that throws humanity back into the ice age or stone age, most, if not all, of these questions will be answered sometime in the future. And when that inevitably happens, will there be really any need for religion? And people who still choose to believe in a God at that point, what purpose will that belief serve in their life? I actually really wish that would happen in our lifetime, man. But you know that's highly unlikely. Yeah, but one can wish. Although, if you were to guess, I think that at that point, the new religion is likely to be a mainstream counterculture, like the hippies in the 1960s. This time, way bigger. Because think about it, guys, a society that has answered all the big questions in the universe is likely to be an almost robotic society, devoid of all things that really make life worth living, like, you know, the fear of the unknown, the fear of death, that pushes us to achieve and live as much as we can with the limited time that has been allocated to us in the universe. So basically, I believe that the new religion will be a push and desire to disconnect from a such extremely controlled society. For here's a food for thought, by the way, guys. Can you imagine if we were finally able to find out what happens to humans after death, and the answers happen to be something positive beyond our comprehension? Like, you know, I'm a, a universe without all the villains, or just a utopia, man, without all the plot twists that you usually find in movies. Can you even begin to imagine the kind of fear that would love on humanity and all human societies? I cannot even begin to imagine, man. Have you guys seen that film called "These Final Hours"? It's about an asteroid that hits, and everyone has a few hours before the world ends in its entirety. In the movie, they have a party scene where people are playing Russian roulette happily and blowing each other's brains out without a care in the world, man. I have a feeling such a world would be something exactly like that. Yeah. Anyway, thanks a lot for watching to the end, man. Oh, and before you leave, man, I need your help with something. My friends and I are setting up an initiative where each month we'll try and supply basic but much-needed school materials to impoverished kids across Kenya. It's one of the poorest counties in my country, and it's actually the country that I'm from. So guys, if you'd like to help us make a difference along this journey, please donate whatever you can using the PayPal link that I've left in the description section. It's the first link. As I always say, even a single dollar could go towards changing a kid's life in some way. So nothing is too small. And also, once we start, we will set up a YouTube channel where we update everything from the amount we've managed to set aside or collect from contributors to everything we supply and the schools that we supply them to. Otherwise, thanks a lot in advance. Once again, the PayPal link is in my description section. Otherwise, once again, thank you for sticking to the end. I'll see you again in the next video. I hope you subscribe, left a comment, liked the video, so maybe it can reach more people. Thanks. Have a nice time.