Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the Natural History Museum’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He is also the host of Fox Networks’ new science series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Last Sunday, Tyson appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources program and spoke with Brian Stelter. During the program, Tyson talked about “the hypocrisy of people dismissing scientific theory while simultaneously embracing the fruits of scientific discovery ‘that we so take for granted today.’”
Tyson said that our civilization “is built on the innovation of scientists and technologists and engineers who have shaped everything that we so take for granted today. So some of the science deniers or science haters, these are people who are telling that to you while they are on their mobile phone. They are saying, ‘I don’t like science. Oh, GPS just told us to go left. So it’s time for people to sit back and reassess what role science has actually played in our lives. And learn how to embrace that going forward, because without it, we will just regress back into the caves.”
Stelter asked Tyson if he felt that the news media should feel a responsibility to portray science correctly—especially with regard to controversial issues such as climate change. Tyson said he thought the news media was wrong to give equal time to the “flat-earthers.” He thinks the media “should stop trying to ‘balance’ the debate on scientific issues by hosting people who deny science.”
Tyson said, “The media has to sort of come out of this ethos that I think was in principle a good one, but it doesn’t really apply in science. The principle was, whatever story you give, you have to give the opposing view. And then you can be viewed as balanced.” He continued, “You don’t talk about the spherical Earth with NASA, and then say let’s give equal time to the flat Earthers. Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick.”
Tyson added, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. Alright? I guess you can decide whether or not to believe in it, but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.”
The great American science divide (CNN)
Recently, Tyson spoke about the new version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Tyson said that science and religion should not be painted as being “diametrically opposed to each other.” He said there were many scientists who believe in God. He added, “The issue there is not religion versus non-religion or religion versus science, the issue there is ideas that are different versus dogma.”
Tyson explained, “If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems, and there is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet because this gave me insight.’” He continued, “Enlightened religious people know this, and don’t try to use the Bible as a textbook.”
Chris Mooney of Mother Jones said that Tyson has emphasized that the stance of the science series Cosmos is anti-dogma—not anti-religion. Tyson was quoted as saying, “Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you’ve got doctrine, you’ve got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it.”
Katie Valentine of ThinkProgress noted that Tyson had spoken previously “about the need for the public to accept scientific facts rather than the talking points of politicians.” According to Valentine, the astrophysicist said in 2011 that climate change deniers should “be mature enough to recognize something can be true even if you don’t like the consequences of it. That’s what it means to be a mature adult.” Valentine also reported that while appearing on CNN in February, Tyson said that “he hopes America doesn’t wait until climate change has drastically changed the Earth’s landscape to realize that our policies haven’t done enough to prepare us.”
Tyson said that he doesn’t know what to say “when politicians start analyzing the science. “Are we going to wait until the coastlines get redrawn as the glaciers melt off of Antarctica and Greenland?”
Good question, Mr. Tyson, good question.
SOURCES
Neil deGrasse Tyson tells CNN: Stop giving ‘equal time to the flat Earthers’ (Raw Story)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson To Science Deniers: ‘Science Is Not There For You To Cherry Pick’ (ThinkProgress)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: ‘Enlightened Religious People Don’t Use The Bible As A Textbook’ (Huffington Post)
Nobody’s censoring any creationist fantasies; all credible studies receive consideration – even the thoroughly ridiculous reports are considered if only to point out how silly they are.
It’s hilarious how you’re so eager to get this creationist nonsense into the schools. That would be like teaching pisrogues. Of course, that would make it easier to control future generations through fear, which I suspect is your ultimate goal.
RTC wrote: “Nobody’s censoring any creationist fantasies…”
Are you unaware of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover?
RTC wrote: “It’s hilarious how you’re so eager to get this creationist nonsense into the schools.”
It is not about getting it in. I object to courts forcing school boards not to teach problems with evolutionary models and how creation models better explain the empirical data. That is government indoctrination, not education. Let the educators decide the curriculum rather than the courts.
“Because everyone knows Jesus is smarter than the speed of light is constant.” – 1 Cor. 17:3
Gene – assuming, for the sake of argument, that Jesus is God and therefore all -knowing, that would be a true statement. I do not know the New Testament well enough to know if the citation is correct. 😉
Neil deGrasse Tyson trolls creationists on ‘Cosmos’ with puny size of biblical universe
By Travis Gettys
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-trolls-creationists-on-cosmos-with-puny-size-of-biblical-universe/
Excerpt:
Neil deGrasse Tyson toyed with creationist beliefs Sunday night on the latest episode of Cosmos.
The astrophysicist explained during the episode, “Sky Full of Ghosts,” that the Crab Nebula disproved the Bible-based belief about the age of the universe.
“The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light years from Earth,” Tyson said. “According to some beliefs, that’s the age of the whole universe, but if the universe were only 6,500 years old, how could we see light from anything more distant than the Crab Nebula? We couldn’t.”
Light travels about 6 trillion miles per year, and Tyson said there simply wouldn’t be enough time for light to reach Earth from celestial bodies beyond the Crab Nebula.
“To believe in a universe as young as 6,000 or 7,000 years old is to extinguish the light from most of the galaxy, not to mention the light from all the other hundred billion other galaxies in the observable universe,” Tyson said.
Isn’t it funny how Tyson pretends that creationists are too dumb to even ask this question. They not only have asked the question, they have attempted to answer it. This is the problem with censorship of knowledge. The censors are the ones who get to act like they are the smartest ones on the block. There is nobody to object, thanks to the heavy hand of censorship. In the meantime, the quality of our education suffers thanks to courts that have made it illegal to present rational answers to these questions in the classroom.
William Herschel from “A Sky Full Of Ghosts” | COSMOS | FOX BROADCASTING
The Energizer Bunny.
Last night’s “Cosmos:” Neil deGrasse Tyson debunks creationists, Sir Patrick Stewart makes a cameo
“To believe in a universe as young as 6- or 7,000 years old, is to extinguish the light of most of the galaxy”
By Sarah Gray
3/31/14
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/31/last_nights_cosmos_neil_degrasse_tyson_debunks_creationists_sir_patrick_stewart_makes_a_cameo/
Cosmic terror: Why Neil deGrasse Tyson has religious fundamentalists so freaked
Religious belief systems prefer a universe with mankind firmly at its center. No wonder “Cosmos” is so threatening
Adam Lee, AlterNet
3/27/14
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/27/cosmic_terror_why_neil_degrasse_tyson_has_religious_fundamentalists_so_freaked_partner/
Excerpt:
The new Cosmos TV series airing on Fox is a worthy reboot of Carl Sagan’s original. Following in Sagan’s footsteps, host Neil deGrasse Tyson takes viewers on a voyage through the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond, showing how our sun is just one star out of a hundred billion in the majestic spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, and even the Milky Way itself is a speck in the observable universe. As in the original series, he compresses the history of the universe into a single year, showing that on that scale, the human species emerges only in the last few seconds before midnight on December 31.
Sagan’s Cosmos was due for an update, and not just because our computer graphics are better. Since the original series aired, we’ve sent robotic rovers to Mars, sampling its rocks and exploring its history. We’ve detected hundreds of alien planets outside the solar system, finding them by the slight gravitational wobble they cause in their home stars, or by the brief dips in light as they pass across the star’s face as seen from Earth. We’ve found the Higgs boson, the elusive and long-theorized particle that endows everything else with mass. We’ve discovered that the expansion of the Universe which began with the Big Bang is accelerating, driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. All these scientific advances deserve to be recognized and celebrated.
The story of Cosmos is also the story of human beings. For the vast majority of our history as a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands. Civilization is a recent innovation, arising within the last few thousand years, and science is more recent still, appearing only in the last few hundred. But in just those few short centuries, we’ve made dramatic strides, from wooden sailing ships to space shuttles, bloodletting to bionic limbs, quill pens to the Internet. We’ve drawn back the curtain on ancient mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity of time and space. Compared to that vastness, we’re unimaginably small and insignificant; yet we possess an intelligence and a power of understanding that, as far as we still know, is unique among all the countless worlds. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
However, not everyone accepts this as a positive development. There have always been those who prefer a small, comprehensible cosmos, with human beings placed firmly at the center. The religious belief systems that posit such a universe were our first, fumbling attempts to explain the origin of the world, and they rarely share power gladly. Those who clash against conventional wisdom, who dare to suggest that the cosmos holds wonders undreamed of in conventional mythology, have always found themselves in grave peril from the gatekeepers of dogma who presume to dictate the thoughts human beings should be permitted to think.
The first episode of the new Cosmos graphically illustrates this with the story of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century monk who argued that the sun was a star like all the rest, and that every star had its own planets and its own living beings. Bruno wasn’t a scientist, as the show makes clear: his cosmological views flowed from his mystical, pantheist theology, not from evidence. But that made no difference to the Inquisition, which imprisoned and tortured Bruno, and when he refused to recant, burned him at the stake. His statue still stands in the Campo dei Fiori where he was executed, facing the Vatican as if accusing those who murdered him.
There’s also Bruno’s contemporary, Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who discovered the moons of Jupiter and argued for the heliocentric solar system. As a reward for his revolutionary scientific work, he was judged suspect of heresy by the Inquisition and forced to abjure his own work under threat of torture; his books were banned and he was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. The story of Galileo’s persecution is so well-known that I’d hesitate to retell it yet again, if it weren’t for the fact that church apologists like Jay Wesley Richards are still defending and soft-pedaling it.
In fact, even Bruno’s torture and execution still have their defenders, like the creationist site Evolution News and Views, or professional outrage-monger William Donohue of the Catholic League, who ludicrously claimed that the Spanish Inquisition was a good thing. A Catholic cardinal, Angelo Sodano, likewise said in 2000 that the inquisitors who condemned Bruno “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.”
And from Carl Sagan’s original series, one more cautionary tale: the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who lived in fourth-century Egypt in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Christianity was on the rise and bent on stamping out pagan ideas, and Hypatia was despised by the local bishop, Cyril of Alexandria, who hated her for her friendship with the governor and the different worldview she represented. Despite the personal danger she was in, she continued to study and to teach until, one day, she was assaulted in the street by a mob of Christian fanatics who dragged her from her chariot and hacked her to death with tiles. Her works were destroyed, her books lost. Cyril was made a saint. (Hypatia’s life and death were dramatized in the 2009 film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz.)
But this kind of persecution isn’t just a relic of ancient history. While we’re thankfully past the days when scientists could be stoned in the streets or imprisoned by church tribunals, the anti-science spirit is alive and virulent in the world today, waving away facts that disagree with its ideology and seeking to silence or intimidate those who speak inconvenient truths.
We can see this most clearly with one of the most urgent issues confronting the human species, the danger of global climate change. While it’s a matter of uncontroversial fact among scientists that the burning of fossil fuels is changing the Earth’s climate in perilous ways, climate science is far less accepted among the public, driven by fierce resistance from those who have an ideological reason for disbelieving it.
The renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, whose work forms the basis for United Nations climate reports and the famous “hockey stick” graph that illustrates global temperature rises, has been the subject of continual harassment by conservative legislators, including frivolous subpoenas by Ken Cuccinelli, the former right-wing attorney general of Virginia, accusing him of scientific fraud. In other localities, the right-wing response to climate change has reached epic levels of head-in-the-sand denial, such as when the North Carolina legislature passed a lawforbidding science to be used in forecasting future sea-level rise.
Religious groups have joined the banner of climate-change denial as well, calling the environmental movement a pagan religion and arguing that global warming is a nonissue becausethe Bible says God won’t allow the Earth to change too much. When moderate evangelical Richard Cizik argued that Christians should devote more time to environmental issues, he waspressured and eventually forced to resign his vice-presidential position in the National Association of Evangelicals by religious-right groups who said that talking about global warming would “shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Heresy trial of Giodano Bruno from Wikipedia
Any one of the charges on the list would be enough for condemnation and burning at the stake. Remember, the civil authorities did all the burning, not the Church.
Excerpt:
Imprisonment, trial and execution, 1593–1600[edit]
In Rome, Bruno’s trial lasted seven years during which time he was imprisoned, lastly in the Tower of Nona. Some important documents about the trial are lost, but others have been preserved, among them a summary of the proceedings that was rediscovered in 1940.[23] The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. Luigi Firpo lists these charges made against Bruno by the Roman Inquisition:[24]
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass;
claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity;
believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes;
dealing in magics and divination.
The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition. Bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari, Campo de’ Fiori, Rome.
Bruno continued his Venetian defensive strategy, which consisted in bowing to the Church’s dogmatic teachings, while trying to preserve the basis of his philosophy. In particular Bruno held firm to his belief in the plurality of worlds, although he was admonished to abandon it. His trial was overseen by the Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. On January 20, 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death. According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, he is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied:
“Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam (Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it).”[25] He was turned over to the secular authorities and, on February 17, 1600 in the Campo de’ Fiori, a central Roman market square, “his tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words” he was burned at the stake.[26] His ashes were dumped into the Tiber river. All of Bruno’s works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. Inquisition cardinals who judged Giordano Bruno were: Cardinal Bellarmino (Bellarmine), Cardinal Madruzzo (Madruzzi), Cardinal Camillo Borghese (later Pope Paul V), Domenico Cardinal Pinelli, Pompeio Cardinal Arrigoni, Cardinal Sfondrati, Pedro Cardinal De Deza Manuel, Cardinal Santorio (Archbishop of Santa Severina, Cardinal-Bishop of Palestrina)
Wonder what kind of psychological profile was required for one to become a Judge? Did they all go to the same College? University of Bologna. lol
From Wiki: The University arose around mutual aid societies of foreign students called “nations” (as they were grouped by nationality) for protection against city laws which imposed collective punishment on foreigners for the crimes and debts of their countrymen. These students then hired scholars from the city to teach them. In time the various “nations” decided to form a larger association, or universitas—thus, the university. The university grew to have a strong position of collective bargaining with the city, since by then it derived significant revenue through visiting foreign students, who would depart if they were not well treated. The foreign students in Bologna received greater rights, and collective punishment was ended. There was also collective bargaining with the scholars who served as professors at the university. By the initiation or threat of a student strike, the students could enforce their demands as to the content of courses and the pay professors would receive. University professors were hired, fired, and had their pay determined by an elected council of two representatives from every student “nation” which governed the institution, with the most important decisions requiring a majority vote from all the students to ratify. The professors could also be fined if they failed to finish classes on time, or complete course material by the end of the semester. A student committee, the “Denouncers of Professors”, kept tabs on them and reported any misbehavior. Professors themselves were not powerless, however, and formed a College of Teachers, and secured the rights to set examination fees and degree requirements. Eventually, the city ended this arrangement, paying professors from tax revenues, and making it a chartered public university.[5]
The university is historically notable for its teaching of canon and civil law; indeed, it was set up in large part with the aim of studying the Digest,[6] a central text in Roman law, which had been rediscovered in Italy in 1070, and the university was central in the development of medieval Roman law.[7] Until modern times, the only degree granted at that university was the doctorate.
I think back then I’d already have been burned at the stake.
RTC:
good link, I signed up for the newsletter.
Thank you.
Paul Schulte, I know but when he starts that crap, I just can’t help myself. His last post was civil and I responded in a similar manner.
Creationists to Neil deGrasse Tyson: Evolution isn’t scientific, but the Book of Genesis is
By Juan Cole | Mar. 25, 2014
http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/creationists-evolution-scientific.html
Excerpt:
Creationist Ray Comfort complained that Neil deGrasse Tyson had misrepresented the Bible.
The astrophysicist and host of Fox’s “Cosmos” said recently that using the Bible as a scientific source was problematic, because no one had ever scientifically proven a theory based on scripture.
Comfort said last week on his online “Comfort Zone” program that Tyson wasn’t qualified to make that determination because he’s not a theologian.
“You know, the word ‘science,’ it’s kind of a magical word,” Comfort said. “‘I believe in science.’ It just means knowledge, that’s all it means. There’s different areas of science, different areas of knowledge. When you say the Bible is not a science book, you’re saying it’s not a knowledge book? It tells us how God created the Earth!”
Knowledge, of course, is not quite all that defines science, which is characterized by systematic methods of observation in pursuit of new understanding.
But Comfort insisted the Bible was a science book because it described the origins of the universe.
“It gives us the basis for all creation, and it passes the scientific method,” he said. “It’s observable – Genesis – and testable. Evolution is not. You can’t observe something 60 million years old, but you can observe what Genesis says.”
Darren – thanks for the effort. Appreciate that you tried. When WordPress does an update we can ask for that feature. 🙂
———-
Elaine M. – Darren was trying to find a way to find all of my posts in this particular blog, which is impossible without swimming upstream. Thank for your effort.
Darren,
You can put the name of the weekend contributor whose posts you want to check out in the “search” box:
http://jonathanturley.org/?s=darren+smith
Paul:
Yes, I tried to find a way to search for individual comments made by a commentator but I have not been able to find a way to do this. I read the various wordpress help files and as of yet it has proven unhelpful.
I even looked into the blog in editor mode and could not find a way to do that either. It could be a symptom of an architecture issue with the wordpress service in that the names used for posts are not indexed or placed into some table like a database would. I can see that being a resonable method considering there are tremendous numbers of users and that table would grow massively, rending searches of it and overhead to process it being expensive, processor wise. So, I think a flat format is used where the user info is only contained within the post itself. Searching for your name under these conditions would be the same as searching for “foobar” in that it would return only the article for which it was contain in, even if foobar was in your or another’s post.
I guess it is what it is.
Do I understand it that some here think Neil degrasse Tyson is not a valid source on scientific issues? Or am I misunderstanding something?
RTC,
We are supposed to get a little snow here in McHenry County tonight so don’t break out the garden tools quite yet!
rafflaw – depending on the subject matter, I do not consider Tyson a reliable source. He is, what is called in literature, an unreliable narrator. Sometimes reliable, sometimes not. For goodness sakes, rafflaw, there have got to be at least 300 post here by this point and you finally realized this? 😉
Skip: Are you calling Paul Schulte stupid? I’m not going to argue with you about it; I’m just surprised.
Elaine,
There’s rumor that Spring might be breaking out here in Northern Illinois some time within the next couple of months, so I’m looking forward to getting out into the yard, myself. 🙂
RTC,
Thanks for that link. I’m going to send it along to my husband and my daughter.
Byron: Here’s a website you might find interesting when you start working on your yard. If you follow the native plant finder link, you can find information for your specific region.
http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/
dagda – That is only if Porkchop can steal the ProCam from his skydiving daughter.
P.S.: “putting wheels on a Lay-z-Boy and riding it down a steep hill.”
OK, that’s pretty cool.
Recording it with a ProCam is the really cool part. 🙂
RTC wrote: P.S.: “putting wheels on a Lay-z-Boy and riding it down a steep hill.”
OK, that’s pretty cool.
I think that what you are referring to is what is called a redneck soap box derby contest with someone eventually getting hurt. You see stupid people doing stuff on videos like that all the time.
hskiprob – I am offended that you would call Porkchop stupid or a redneck. I think he really has this worked out. Since I do not have a death wish, I am not riding the Lay-Z-Boy down the hill, but I am supportive of his effort. Personally, I want to do the Gravity Ride in Mt. Tamalpias that reopened. 8 1/2 miles of controlled drop in a coaster sled. 🙂