Science, on the other hand, is a system of knowing and discovery that is decoupled from your nationality or birthplace or ancestry or politics or who you worship. It’s a system of knowing the natural world that is immune to opinion, but not to experiment.
When you invoke the methods and tools of science, you come up with the origins story as conveyed by scientists. You don’t come up with any faith-based description of the natural world. Had that been the case, then scientists would have been mining religious writings since antiquity for insights into how the physical world works.
Again, thank you for your interest, and continued best wishes for your HAMming it up on the airwaves.
Sincerely,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Bible Tells Me So
Brandon Fibbs, a former devout Christian turned atheist, engaged a former professor from when he had attended bible college. Certain the Bible is correct on all matters, and that anything disagreeing with the Bible amounts to a liberal conspiracy, the professor actively denies global warming, evolution, the Big Bang, and other findings from the frontier of science. Fibbs, a formidable writer and commentator, shared his 1,500-word reply with me to solicit my reaction. What follows is my response to his full-scale attack on his former professor.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Brandon,
Your polemic is tight, unforgiving, and well-informed. Would probably be a waste on someone other than a former professor. My bet is that you are older now than he was when he was your professor. Is that correct?
Personally, I try to spend twice as much time to make things half as long. You don’t want to be guilty of a Shakespearean, “Methinks the Gentlemen doth protest too much.” Another point I take to heart is the adage, “When an argument last longer than five minutes then both sides are wrong.”
About global warming and heavy snowfalls, I continue to find it odd that people equate snow accumulations with cold. The heaviest snowfalls tend to occur between 22 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit. At these “warmer” temperatures, water crystals grow larger, are stickier, and accumulate much faster on the ground. So huge snowfalls are indications of warm snowstorms not cold ones.
Also, try to avoid the word proof. It’s commonly ascribed to what scientists do. But it somewhat misrepresents what goes on in the process of discovery and confirmation. And it leaves you susceptible to people saying that “Scientists once proved that A is true, but now they say B is true.” This highlights the modern distinction between the words hypothesis and theory.
Scientists never “prove” anything. This word has a specific application in mathematics, but in science what we do is demonstrate, with sufficient experiments, that a consensus exists and further evidence in support of an idea would be a waste of effort or funding since other pressing questions remain unanswered. When such an experimental consensus emerges the results will never one day be shown to be wrong. In the modern era of science (the past 400 years) all that happens is that a bigger truth emerges that enclosed the previous ideas and experiments in a deeper understanding.
For ideas in progress, we are now using the word “hypothesis” rather than Theory, reserving the word theory for big ideas that provide broad and deep understandings of the operations of nature. Quantum Theory, Relativity Theory, Evolution Theory. Some theories of the 19th century still retain the word “Law,” back when that word was common: Laws of Gravity, Laws of Thermodynamics, etc. Today they would be called theories.
Neil
p.s. Your writing is potent, but you never want to win an argument for being a better writer, or because you have a bigger vocabulary than your opponent. In this way, the strength of the argument rests on the strength of the argument rather than the strength of your literacy.
A Piece of Pi
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Dear Neil,
You mention pi in a recent article of yours. For many years nearly all the books on the history of mathematics stated that in the Old Testament of the Bible, the value of pi is given as 3, a rather poor approximation. Yet recent “detective work” shows otherwise.
One always relishes the notion that a hidden code can reveal long lost secrets. There are two places in the Bible where the same sentence appears, identical in every way except for one word, which is spelled differently in the two citations.
Reverting to the original Hebrew, in I Kings 7:23 it was written as whereas in 2 Chronicles 4:2 it was written as Elijah applied the ancient biblical analysis technique (still used by Talmudic scholars today) called gematria, where the Hebrew letters are given their appropriate numerical values according to their sequence in the Hebrew alphabet, to the two spellings of the word for “line measure” and found the following: the letter values are: = 100, = 6 and = 5. Therefore, the spelling for “line measure” in 1 Kings 7:23 is = 5 + 6 + 100 = 111, while in 2 Chronicles 4:2 the spelling = 6 + 100 = 106. Using gematria in an accepted way, he then took the ratio of these two values: (to four decimal places), which he considered the necessary “correction factor.” By multiplying the Bible’s apparent value (3) of pi by this factor, one gets 3.1416, which is pi correct to four decimal places!
“Wow!” is a common reaction. Such accuracy is quite astonishing for ancient times. Moreover, remember how just getting pi = 3.14 using string measurements was quite a feat. Now imagine getting pi accurate to four decimal places. We would contend that this would be nearly impossible with typical string measurements. Try it if you need convincing.
Dr. Alfred S. Posamentier, Dean, School of Education
The City College of New York
Dear Alfred,
No need for you to be rapt by Talmudic Kabbalist numerology. To know, in advance, the answer you are looking for, and then to manipulate a set of preexisting numbers in search of the connection, is an old, attractive, but discredited means of knowing the world. The real measure of numerology’s value (if it had any) would be to do all this in advance, and then predict the value for pi (or anything else). But this has never happened. That’s because there is an almost-infinite number of ways you can combine numbers to get other numbers. And if you do not know in advance what you are after, you will most surely be doing calculations that have nothing to do with anything.
The “power” of numerology is seductive indeed. As just one example of many, the attacks on September 11, 2001, spawned endless numerological excursions, all pointing to some deep meaning for the time, date, number of hijackers, number of letters in their names, and so forth.
Problem is, this information did not exist before the attacks, thereby missing an opportunity to predict them. That’s because after-the-fact numerological deductions can be made for any event of any date of any year (you would just combine the numbers in another, equally sensible way), yet the results appear to the eye and the mind as a magical, even mystical connection.
Other hot-beds for numerology include the Kennedy assassination, the shape and proportions of the Egyptian pyramids, the end of the world, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and D-Day.
So have fun, but do so knowing that numerology is granting access to entertainment rather than access to reality.
Neil
Buddhist
Friday, August 28, 2009
Hello Dr. Tyson,
I want to say that I enjoy your videos very much. And yes I consider myself a religious person. How come you guys don’t pick on the Buddhists? It’s only the Christians, Jews and Muslims. If you haven’t guessed I am of Buddhist beliefs. Not important, but it makes the joke more funny.
I want my children exposed to other ideas and let them make a decision for themselves as to what they want to believe. I only want to teach them compassion, and if they follow that through science or religion, good for them.
Keep up your great work sir.
Todd Baxter
Dear Mr. Baxter,
In my writings (from which the videos are derived) I reference only those who want to bring religious philosophy into the
science classroom. This behavior is common for Protestant fundamentalists and largely unheard of in America among Buddhists, Jews, or Muslims, for that matter.
Note also that not all belief systems are equal. Most are demonstrably false. The notion that all belief systems are equal is evidence for rampant scientific illiteracy in the nation.
And you care about compassion—as we all should. But to be devout in one religion almost always requires that you reject all other religions. Compassion is the last thing you find during Holy Wars. And, of course, the most prominent stories of the Old Testament show anything but compassion.
Thank you,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Open Mind
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Dear Dr. Tyson,
I respect you very much. I also love my church. I am very confused. I want to ask one question—as a man of science, you are supposed to have an open mind—is there ANY chance at all that the Earth is only five or six thousand years old?
I would just say that if there is no God I would/will feel awfully alone and insignificant.
Kevin Carrol
Dear Kevin,
Zero chance that Earth is five or six thousand years old.
As I say often, if you use religious texts to predict future knowledge of the physical universe, you will get the wrong answer. But it’s not for want of trying. More accurately stated: every previous attempt at this exercise has failed.
Consider instead Galileo’s dictum§:
“In my mind God wrote two books. The first book is the Bible, where humans can find the answers to their questions on values and morals. The second book of God is the book of nature, which allows humans to use observation and experiment to answer our own questions about the universe.”
Galileo was a religious man, but was nonetheless compelled to say:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.”
Just to be clear, the existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Most (> 80%, is my guess) of western religious people recognize this. Those who link Earth’s age with whether or not God exists are a small minority of the religious community. They just happen to be louder than most others, giving the (false) impression that they are mainstream and represent the majority. There are extensive religious organizations that have published statements in support of Evolution, which requires accepting a very old Earth.
Good luck in your explorations.
Sincerely,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Proof
Monday, September 19, 2005 thru
Monday, May 8, 2006
Hello,
I know you are a busy man and I hope you would reply to my humble email. Seeing you on TV presents me with mixed emotions.
First, I’m happy to see a fellow black man talking about science on such a wonderful and popular TV program such as PBS Nova (one of my favorite programs). We certainly need to see more blacks in the scientific field, and Nova is a great place for it. I’m an electronics engineer myself (started two engineering companies) and I love science very much.
On the other hand, I feel sorry that you don’t seem to believe in God, and think that everything came into existence by random chance. As an electronics engineer, I design complex products all the time for a living, and I know how hard it is to design something and make it work. Every last detail must be thought out completely ahead of time or else all you get is fire and smoke, or get sued. I can see no way that something as complex as a human being, DNA, the universe with all its robustness could have made itself from random chance or from a Big Bang.
I was wondering why you don’t believe that the universe was created by God? How could anybody believe that such a complex universe could be created by random chance? From personal research, I have found so many reasons why, scientifically, God must exist.
A lot of scientists panic that if people start believing that God designed everything, then we would stop trying to discover things because we already know who designed it.
But knowing the designer is God would make you want to discover stuff even more. I know a lot of people say that things are badly designed, but I don’t think so. In a physical world there are limits to everything and compromises, no matter what you do (even God), physical things cannot be perfectly designed.
For example, how can anything physical be really perfect? Can it survive every attack, can I throw it into the Sun and it still comes out unscratched? Can I keep it in water for a year and it still can live? Can I keep it in a volcano and it still lives? Can I pour some toxic waste on it and it doesn’t die? Can I hit it with some bird flu combination, AIDS and cancer and it just bounds off? Nothing can withstand all that; even if it could, there is always something else in the universe that can kill it.
I believe God already knows this, so no matter what he did, there would be something in the universe that could kill his physical creation, so why bother making it bullet proof. Anything physical will be mortal no matter what. This is what it means to be physical. Comes with the territory.
Thanks for listening to my ramblings!
Nigel Smith
Dear Nigel,
The modern intelligent design movement, as expressed in the Discovery Institute webpages and by leading ID proponents in the 2005 court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, invokes intelligent design only when the thing being described is unknown (e.g. the origin of life).
If you personally declare that things we do understand (and typically can control or influence) are also the work of an intelligent designer, then you operate with no restrictions on what to discover next.
About good versus bad design—to assert that one must survive a direct hit by a million-ton meteor goes far beyond any example that I give. Anybody with that ability would be “over designed” because such a danger is extremely rare. But choking to death is common in our species. So is drowning. So is childhood leukemia. So are (most) birth defects, etc. And no engineer, in his or her right mind, would ever design a system that ingested liquids, solids, communicated, and respirated through the same orifice. So you ask where to draw the line? Any rational person would put meteor strikes far to one side of that line, and choking to death far on the other side.
I am not in denial of good design. Good design is obvious when it’s there—the opposable thumb. Stereo-vision. Speech. Ball sockets (shoulders and hips). The shape and strength of our skull, to name a few. But you are in denial of bad design, not because it is not there, but because it falls outside of your religious philosophy, and are thus blind to it. By the way, you are not alone. This has been going on for centuries. And there is an entire field of religious philosophy called “apologetics” that carries on with this behavior. Its proponents are called “apologists.”
What they do is construct arguments to counter criticisms of Bible passages by loosely interpreting the literal word, thereby leaving room for the Bible to not sound as though it contradicts empirical findings of the natural world. A clean example of this is the fact that nowhere in the Bible is Earth referenced as a 3D object. And everywhere a reference is made, Earth is simply flat—typically drawn as a circle, with Jerusalem in the center, and the land masses surrounded by water in every direction on the horizon, as is clearly stated in many places and consistent with understandings of the known world of the day. The apologists then cite the Bible passage containing the words “circle of the Earth,” and assert that Circle means Sphere. But, in fact, people of the day knew full well the difference between the two.
So therein lies a non-convergent point of our conversation: You already know where you want to land. And God is there to design it. I have no idea where I am go
ing to land. And if there is a God of unwavering intelligence, this fact is simply not evident in the book of nature to the unbiased observer.
Natural selection never claims perfect design, or even good design, only a design that is more effective than that of a competing species, allowing survival long enough to reproduce. Nothing else matters to the process.
Further, I never said the universe was not designed. I simply said that if it was designed, then there is ample (and widely ignored) evidence to demonstrate the designer’s blunders right alongside all those things that are marvelous.
Sincerely,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Meaning in Life
In December 2007, Mark, an inmate at the Kentucky State Reformatory, asked perhaps the deepest religious question of them all—If there is no God, then how can life have meaning? Who should care if you ever lived? Why would it matter if any one of us were Stalin or Einstein? Hitler or Mother Teresa? I offered Mark an answer, but with no premise that it’s the only answer.
Dear Mark,
Often people, especially religious people, look outside themselves to find the meaning of life—in scripture, in messages from religious leaders, religious relics, and so forth. When you do this, and do it for your entire life, it becomes hard to imagine life without this kind of spiritual structure constructed for you and around you.
But suppose you instead looked within yourself? By doing so, it’s not hard to find meaning in life by doing meaningful things—caring for others less fortunate than you, raising children, accomplishing hard tasks that give you physical, intellectual, or emotional fulfillment. The drive to do this, without any reference to religious texts at all, can be quite fulfilling. My personal goal is to leave the world a little better off for my having lived in it. The prospect of making this come true drives my work habits daily.
Letters from an Astrophysicist Page 12
