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)
davidm@9:13p.m.
That’s your opinion based upon reading biased sources that censor information. A substantial minority disagree with you.
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a substantial minority also believes the zombie apocalypse is possible
http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/a-real-zombie-apocalypse-is-possible/
Address the issues and not the individuals in our debate. Be passionate but don’t let it get personal.” -Jonathan Turley
If pointing out facts and behaviors is “uncivil” then this must be Alice in Wonderland.
Someone said: “Elaine LOVES to wait a few days and then try and sneak a new link in, always looking for the last word. Glad to see you guys are on your toes. Great comments.”
“Please help us keep this an island of civility and mature discourse on the Internet. Address the issues and not the individuals in our debate. Be passionate but don’t let it get personal.” -Jonathan Turley
“Religion must stick to both faith and facts.”
And it is faith that causes someone to want the evidence to say whatever it is they want to hear.
RTC wrote: “And it is faith that causes someone to want the evidence to say whatever it is they want to hear.”
I grant you that many religious people who are weak in faith suffer from confirmation bias. However, confirmation bias happens on both sides. A positivist has a bias toward making the evidence prove evolutionary development absent a creator.
A true man of faith knows to be objective with what the physical evidence shows. He knows that there is nothing to fear in the truth of empirical data, and objectivity leads to interesting knowledge and understanding that was previously unknown. In contrast, a positivist scientist cannot accept any evidence for a creator, because it would lead to falsifying his definition of how knowledge is acquired.
Paul: Are the Abrahamic religions now called mythologies?? No, but give it a few thousand years and they will be.
RTC wrote: “No, but give it a few thousand years and they will be.”
I don’t think it will take that long for Darwinism to be labeled a mythology of positivist scientists.
“The point is that they were men who believed in a creator, men of faith, creationists who also practiced science and made great contributions to science.”
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The point is that they didn’t prove a creation theory.
I don’t care if you’re a man of faith; show me how to tie a better knot, or build a better mouse-trap, or evidence that throws the world into a new light, I’ll buy in all day long. The point is that creationists haven’t provided much credible evidenc,e and what little there is has been disproved or discredited.
RTC wrote: “The point is that creationists haven’t provided much credible evidenc,e and what little there is has been disproved or discredited.”
That’s your opinion based upon reading biased sources that censor information. A substantial minority disagree with you.
You might consider that Ptolemy’s model of cosmology was held onto by scientists for 1200 years. In contrast, Darwinism is only 150 years old. The Epicurean models of the past held interest for what, 400 – 500 years? So now they have a resurgence, but it hasn’t been for very long.
RTC – the day you can get past the ‘Uncaused Cause’ let me know.
david and RTC – I would like to posit that the only way the Theory of Darwinian Evolution works is to overlay it with Chaos Theory.
Paul Schulte wrote: “I would like to posit that the only way the Theory of Darwinian Evolution works is to overlay it with Chaos Theory.”
You mean like Professor Bennett’s idea?
The chaos theory of evolution
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827821.000-the-chaos-theory-of-evolution.html?full=true#.U0XtwKi2h8E
david – although I came to my hypothesis individually, it is nice to see I am not alone in my added chaos layer. 🙂
Elaine LOVES to wait a few days and then try and sneak a new link in, always looking for the last word. Glad to see you guys are on your toes. Great comments.
Paul sez: ” What we now call mythology was the devoutly believed religion of a people. It was never literature.”
Paul: You’re making a convincing case that the Abrahamic religions are mythologies.
RTC – are the Abrahamic religions now called mythologies?? Is there anything in my original statement that was incorrect?
“Creation scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Isaac Newton are examples of how this works.”
None of these guys proved a creationist origin theory. They examined evidence of different phenomena and made conclusions that profoundly changed the way people viewed the universe. Their ideas insofar as creationism/Intelligent Design are concerned have not, shall we say, passed “peer review”.
As far as gradualism is concerned, how would the fossil record look if the human race became extinct for some reason.
Gradualism fails to account for cataclysmic events like meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, and climate change.
RTC wrote: “They examined evidence of different phenomena and made conclusions that profoundly changed the way people viewed the universe.”
The point is that they were men who believed in a creator, men of faith, creationists who also practiced science and made great contributions to science.
The positivist scientists of today are the ones who want to exclude faith and to censor the religious from practicing science. You claimed that science must stick to facts and religion stick to faith. That is a false construct of the modern positivist scientists, not of the men of religion who also practice science and stick to facts as well as faith.
RTC wrote: “Gradualism fails to account for cataclysmic events like meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, and climate change.”
Yup, this is exactly the criticism that creationists have made to evolutionists for years.
Fox will not put evolution, creationism up for debate on ‘Cosmos’
Sharon Kennedy Wynne, Times Staff Writer
Tampa Bay Times
Saturday, April 5, 2014
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/media/fox-will-not-put-evolution-creationism-up-for-debate-on-cosmos/2173525
Excerpt:
Maybe the best outcome of Cosmos will be that people of faith who see no conflict with science will speak up more. It doesn’t get much press but Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, most seminaries, Judaism and Muslims see no conflict between their faith and science. It’s only the fundamentalists of all those sects who have a problem with it. And they are usually the loudest.
But that may be changing, thanks to the Fox show.
Rabbi Michael Knopf recently wrote an essay on Cosmos saying the show and Neil deGrasse Tyson have actually strengthened his faith. “As a person of faith, I appreciate Cosmos because, while it describes the sometimes-tense historical relationship between religion and science, it refuses to argue that this clash is inevitable… This relationship of integration also allows science and religion to be at their best. For example, Cosmos reminds us that the universe and all it contains originated in the Big Bang. To me, this teaching affirms the Jewish belief that if God is one, there is no other God and thus if God created the cosmos, all existence is ultimately one.”
And Christian author Edward T. Bowser writes that Cosmos “isn’t an affront to religion, it’s divine confirmation of faith.”
The current theory of abiotic evolution based on abiotic selection (On the Origin of the Genes of Viruses – 5, On the Origin of the Genes of Viruses – 6).
davidm2575
Natural Selection predicts gradualism in the fossil record. No matter how fossils are arranged, they do not support Natural Selection as the major mechanism at work for the origin of species. The actual speciation events, if they happened, could not have happened by Natural Selection. There simply isn’t enough time. This does not mean that species did not originate through an evolutionary process, but the idea that science has settled the question of evolution with the publication of Darwin’s theory is completely false from my perspective. The question deserves more study and is far from settled.
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I quote scientists often who understand that.
And they are athiests.
Science must stick to the facts.
Religion must stick to the faith.
Dredd wrote: “Science must stick to the facts. Religion must stick to the faith.”
Correction. You are misrepresenting religion as a discipline that does not care about facts.
Religion must stick to both faith and facts. Science must stick solely to empirical facts.
Creation scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Isaac Newton are examples of how this works.
Dredd – if I am reading you correctly, you are saying that you can only be a ‘proper scientist’ is you are an atheist?
Paul,
The Bible/Bible stories and mythology are taught as literature in my state (Massachusetts).
Here’s a link to the MASSACHUSETTS CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK FOR
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS AND LITERACY:
http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ela/0311.pdf
In what curriculum subject do they teach about the Bible and mythology in your state?
In Arizona, we have a specific Bible as Literature class in high school. However, mythology, classical or world, and world religions is taught as a humanities. All Arizona students are required to have humanities hours. Because so much classical literature refers to either the Bible or mythology teachers find themselves having to do a certain amount of explanation in literature classes.
In college I personally have taken the Illiad in a literature class, a history class and an ancient warfare class. Because of the description of Troy and the battles, I think who ever originally wrote it was present at the siege. It is clear that it was written as an oral piece designed for the oral story telling tradition. The Irish are one of the few people left who follow the oral tradition of story telling. When writing finally came to Greece, it was finally written down.
I did not wade through the Mass. standards to find where they have mythology, but I can tell you when I was working on a project on state standards several years back, MA history standards were weak. I do hope they have tightened them up. 🙂 If it makes you feel any better, at the time NY were untestable.
Mythology is traditional literature. It’s not science. It should not be taught as science. I read creation myths from different cultures to my elementary students–and taught about them in my literature course at BU.
When my daughter was young, I read her stories from William F. Russell’s book “Classic Myths to Read Aloud.”
Where they teach it at BU has no connection with reality. What we now call mythology was the devoutly believed religion of a people. It was never literature. You might have taught about them in your literature course but that does not make them literature.
Elaine M wrote: “Mythology is traditional literature. It’s not science.”
If this is true, then modern creationist theories of origins based upon empirical data should not be categorized as mythology.
Elaine M wrote: “Mythology is traditional literature. It’s not science.”
Tyson basically adopts the traditional literature of Epicureanism. Why doesn’t Amanda Marcotte label Tyson’s model of origins as mythology?
Neil deGrasse Tyson Under Attack from Christians Who Want More Biblical Creationism on His Show
Why not other creationism stories, like the Norse or Egyptian myths?\By Amanda Marcotte
http://www.alternet.org/belief/neil-degrasse-tyson-under-attack-christians-who-want-more-biblical-creationism-his-show
Excerpt:
April 2, 2014 |
Conservative Christians are really mad about the reboot of the legendary science series Cosmos, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. The complaint? That an ancient myth about creation invented by Hebrews thousands of years ago is not being included in a show that is there to teach science. Christian conservatives have been taking to the airwaves complaining about the non-inclusion of ancient myths in a science program, with Danny Faulkner of Answers in Genesis whining, “Creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them,” and Elizabeth Mitchell of the same organization decrying the show for having “blind faith in evolution.” (She’s just straight up lying here. Evolution is well-established by evidence, something Cosmos covers in its second episode.)
While it’s tempting to laugh off the idea that a creation myth should be injected into what is supposed to be a science program, maybe it’s not as zany as it initially seems. After all, anthropology is a science, and a creation myth segment could be a great way to introduce the way scientists study ancient cultures. But there’s no reason it has to be the one in the Bible, which everyone knows already. There’s been thousands of creation stories throughout time, so in the interest of fair-and-balanced, why not given one of these others a chance? Here are some potential creation stories, and the pros and cons for telling each one.
1. The ancient Greeks. Chaos, a goddess who also happens to be the entire universe, gave birth to Gaia, the Earth, and Uranus, the sky. Brother and sister married and gave birth to a bunch of Titans. One of those Titans, named Cronus, had a bad habit of eating his children, but Gaia was able to hide one of those babies, named Zeus, away from him. Zeus’ wife managed to get Cronus to barf up all his eaten children, and those children ended up, alongside Zeus, defeating their father in battle to become the Greek gods we all know and love. The invention of people is something of an afterthought in this legend, but a big deal is made out of how one gentle Titan, Prometheus, gave the people fire. This irritated Zeus, because he just really didn’t like people for some reason, and so he chained Prometheus to a mountain and made a bird steal his liver on the daily. He then punished people for fire-stealing by giving them a woman named Pandora who opened a box that released sin into the world.
Pros: The image of the sky copulating with the earth is pretty cool. The animations you could come up with for Cronus vomiting up his children would also be entertaining.
Cons: Just as with the story of Eve and the apple, this is a misogynist creation myth that blames all the misery and sin in the world on women.
2. Ancient Japanese creation myth. The gods, kicking around in the formlessness of space, decided to stir Earth into being so they had something to occupy their time. Two of them, a man and woman, do this little stirring dance-like routine, but the lady steps on the man’s lines, speaking before he does. This causes their babies to be rejects they have to throw out. So the couple redoes their little stirring routine and she acts more submissive this time around. Female submission, being magic, means that this time around, she is way better at producing usable children. Those children end up being a bunch of islands, because Japan, as you know, is a bunch of islands.
Pros: Many creation myths show the gods copulating the world into being, but few really spend much time on their pre-child dating life. This story has the appeal of a rom-com, complete with a dance scene.
Cons: Misogyny, just like in the Bible and the Greek creation myth. For some reason, men the world over were fond of making up creation stories that concluded with a lesson about how women are always screwing things up and therefore should not be allowed to have power.
Elaine – as someone who has taught World Mythology, both on the college and high school level, I am all for teaching all of the creation stories, some of them sound a great deal like the The Big Bang Theory. Who the heck is to say what is true. Just this week we learned the universe is flatter than thought.
The Greeks have a wonderful and complex, and often conflicting, set of stories about their origin. Pandora was the first woman (created by female gods), the “all-giving” and she opened a jar, not a box and she released evil (plagues, illnesses, deformities, etc.) not sin. She did it because she was curious not malicious. Sadly, when she realized what she had done she tried to put the top back on the jar and trapped ‘Hope’ which was the only thing left in the jar.
The Greeks were a deeply religious people, just as the Romans and believed in their gods. Socrates was executed because he denied the gods.
Natural Selection predicts gradualism in the fossil record. No matter how fossils are arranged, they do not support Natural Selection as the major mechanism at work for the origin of species. The actual speciation events, if they happened, could not have happened by Natural Selection. There simply isn’t enough time. This does not mean that species did not originate through an evolutionary process, but the idea that science has settled the question of evolution with the publication of Darwin’s theory is completely false from my perspective. The question deserves more study and is far from settled.
Paul: Pisrogues, pronounced pishrogues is a Gaelic word to describe a set of quasi-religious superstitious beliefs that often prescribe ways to cure illness and bad luck, for instance beating someone with an oak branch to cure pneumonia by driving out the evil spirit.
David: In what way does a creation model provide a better explanation for the “empirical” data. I think everytihng you’ve raised, like polonium halos, has been “asked and answered”, as rugby announcers like to say.
Seems to me that in the type of schools you want, the indoctrination would be religious.
RTC wrote: “I think everytihng you’ve raised, like polonium halos, has been “asked and answered”, as rugby announcers like to say.”
In regards to polonium halos, no scientist has yet falsified Gentry’s hypothesis. They’ve tried but failed. All they have done is suggested alternative hypotheses which all have been falsified by empirical tests. So the jury is still out concerning the proper interpretation of these halos. Remember that science deals with facts and what actually is. Speculating on other possible answers is not how science operates, so the rhetorical exercise of “asked and answered” is insufficient.
RTC wrote: “In what way does a creation model provide a better explanation for the “empirical” data.”
The answer requires a volume larger in size than Darwin’s Origin of the Species to answer adequately because there is a lot of data that must be put into a different framework of understanding. Let me share my experience at my first fossil dig as an example of how a framework of understanding affects how we interpret empirical evidence.
When I was a graduate student, Frank Garcia discovered a significant fossil bed at Leisey Shell Pit near Ruskin, Florida. My major professor and I helped dig these fossils out when the Florida Museum of Natural History became involved. All published information on the site presented a framework of understanding that terrestrial vertebrates settled in a bend of an ancient river and accumulated during the early Pleistocene epoch. As I dug and observed the evidence before me, I was struck by how different the fossil bed was from what I had expected based upon the evolutionary model that I had been taught all my life. I was expecting to find humus and twigs compacted down around the bones, because as someone who has explored river bottoms using SCUBA, I know them to be littered with water soaked branches and twigs. Instead, the bones were all jumbled together with many scratches upon them. What we were digging in was not soil or even sand, but marine shells. Furthermore, there were clear distinct layers of different types of shells. The bones were not uniformly distributed, but layered, abruptly starting and abruptly ending within the stratification. What grabbed my attention was that these were marine shells compacted around the bones. I could not make sense of it, as much as I tried, and in frustration I looked up at my professor digging beside me and said, “Henry, this does not look like a river bed. Where is the humus and debris common in a river bed? These are marine shells. This looks like a catastrophic event.” He looked at me with a blank stare, shrugged his shoulders, and then returned to digging. The next day, I read the newspaper account of the work we were doing. It gave the standard evolutionary explanation of these fossils being a million years old that slowly precipitated in the bend of an ancient river over a long period of time. Little attention was given to the marine shells which were more abundant than the terrestrial vertebrate bones. I felt like the newspaper was 50% fabrication and did not accurately portray the fossil bed.
I could not help but think that a creationist model which envisions a ravishing catastrophic flood destroying terrestrial animals would be a far better model of understanding for this evidence. The evolutionary paradigm from my perspective caused biased and misrepresentations of the actual dig. If I had not been to the dig myself, I would have believed the fossil find to look much different based upon the published accounts. It was at that point that I began to doubt the publications of scientists portraying information without confirming the empirical evidence for myself. I began to be more open to hearing from other scientists who claimed to find fossil evidence that was not in the evolutionary order being taught, such as finding fossil evidence of humans in Jurassic era deposits. I also became suspicious of the reported dates of fossil digs, perceiving the difference between when sites were dated based upon index fossils of the theory itself and when radiometric dating actually was used.
RTC wrote: “Seems to me that in the type of schools you want, the indoctrination would be religious.”
Absolutely not. I think science teachers should teach whatever makes sense to them and not censor either questions or answers. I do not believe that any questions or answers should be censored because it also can be categorized as “religious” simply because of agreement with a religious teaching. In my mind, that represents religious bigotry and becomes a possible source of error in rational thought.
RTC – what is a pisrouges?