Best of Neil deGrasse Tyson Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 4

like I said I don't care what you believe it doesn't matter to me provided it doesn't harm another person however if what you believe is demonstrably false and you want to pass it off as true in a science classroom I have an issue with that if you want to say it in the religion class fine in the belief system class fine in the history of human thought class fine and I don't I don't know how many of you I've managed to get it like a little letter to the editor in the New York Times a month ago you remember that case in New Jersey where there was the the middle school student who were tape recorded the history teacher saying that the students will burn in hell if they don't believe in Jesus Christ you remember that and it became a whole hullabaloo in the district and it would say separation of church and state this is a violation of the the first american of whichever amendment okay but first amendment separation of church and state and everybody happened an LLC the American Civil Liberties you jump on arms about separating church and state and I'm saying by the among the statements made by this teacher were that the Big Bang and evolution were not scientific theories and that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs now so at some point I said I can't keep listening to this and I wrote a really short letter short letters of the best I think and all I said was after two other letters rambling on about keeping religion out of the school because of the amendment in the Constitution I said this is not an issue of the separation of church and state no you got that wrong this is an issue of the separation of ignorant scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of school teachers if he's about to be executed uh how about you are about to be executable 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 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 error the Inquisition and this sort of thing and so so to say that 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 religions still have any grip at all not to why does it still have a big rip because it's not a big rip when you look in the developed world so in fact most of Europe were just there eight you know your whole countries where religion is 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 so so so that's one fact and we pull away from that a little there's plenty of what goes on in religious tax that has tremendous value to how to think about life and how to treat one another in fact Jefferson created what was essentially what you can think of as the Jeffrey 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 should have value to any modern person going forward with 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 inner 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 that 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 think it's that point where you get to the concept of the God of the gaps the the you go we do not understand this you know science takes us so far but we don't understand anything view on that therefore that's God the stuff that we don't get that's good and the trouble with that is the moment that you actually go no we do understand that now is people going to God just go away there and it goes back you know nice simple things like the rainbow the point where you go whoa the rainbow actually 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 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 of a different rainbow than I see it's a remarkable fun fact about rainbows my favorite fun fact about rainbows is the fact that they were originally believed to have six color bands but that you can added at an indigo and violet Newton like he likely like this effort in number 7 he had a mystical feeling for the number 7 throws in indigo that no one else sees nobody ends up here who actually goes indigo violet there's the indigo yeah just go purple yeah exactly okay purple but Oh something 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 because that would mean your perspective on it would change that's what makes it a good place to hide the gold in case you didn't know alright are you Alton yourself here as an unbeliever electrical I have been burned it stinks and 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 univer I don't know must have been something that God so they got a stick in God where we're not there yet then I just say I got we got top people working on that that's it's a current frontier we're not there yet and given the history of the moving frontier where people had previously said well God must be operating with long past that we those explanations have come and so 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 twenty-first century so it is not without consequence to have conduct of that way after the war ends if there's any way you going to go into space you better study that rocket that's why every rocket in science fiction stories in the 1950s look like the v2 it had fins it was bullet shaped did you just take a picture of me like this okay so so the influence was huge people's visions of space the spaceship had fins and you know what else had fins our cars had fins if you go to the designers they're not going to say oh I did this because Rockets have fins it was in the air exploration of space became part of our culture the first time we ever left Earth was Apollo 8 doesn't get the attention it deserves relative to Apollo 11 these three astronauts were men of the Year 1968 Anders Borman and Lovell they orbited the moon Apollo 8 they took this picture I'm almost done here so I know you got a vote or something we'll go somewhere is that if you have a healthy science program in your country you guarantee your economic future you're innovating then you don't have to have arguments about tariffs regulations on products you don't have to worry about jobs going overseas because they don't know how to do it yet because you just invented it I can't stand it when I hear these discussions about our job force I have to close my ears yeah you can put up some tariffs yes you can complain about the paying their workers less sure okay but you as long as you understand why you're in that situation it's because you've stopped innovating everybody else is caught up with you and it's if you have a global a global economy it's the job of the corporation to make it for as cheap as possible so they're going to make it overseas that's what they're going to do doing it's incumbent upon them to do so but if you keep innovating this stuff stays here the jobs stay here you don't even need to have eris because there's nothing to tariff you assure the economic stability of your future so when I hear people say oh we can't afford NASA can't afford it we can maybe we can't it's like you can't afford not to you go around the world and you find times in places where nations have excelled in one subject or another there's a birth of that period of where they excel and then there is a peak and sometimes it drops off and sometimes they hang on and so you can ask the culture of that what was going on in that nation to support those discoveries and then what happened when they ended and so I call that sort of naming rights if you were there first and you did it best you name things particle physics in this country in the United States was like going gangbusters after the Second World War and in the discovery of atomic elements look at the periodic table is Berkeley in California you know we got half the United States up there in the upper heavier elements of the periodic table am i right there sir okay that's that's not because the world liked California or Berkeley it's because the work was done here it's because there was a there was a an effort to excel in just those subjects and it shows up in other ways I'll give you just briefly you know part of the naming rights is that you don't have to name it so for example well we didn't invent the internet we certainly exploited it here in America we did that sort of first and best and so your email address does not end in dot u.s. everybody else's in the world they got to say what country they came from we don't okay it's as simple but it's the consequence of being there first and doing it better than anyone had done it before do you know that the British postage stamp is the only poster Center in the world that does not identify the country of origin because they invented postage stamps so why should they have to say what country it is it's their invention okay check them out it's just the facts of this the constellations of the night sky we is the Greek enrollment and that's lasted to this time because they did a really good job thinking that stuff up all the mythologies of the heavens that really stuck with us alright so I'm gonna make a larger point not to get ritualists on you here but September 11 2001 as we all know this was going on in New York City this is the view outside of my window I live four blocks from ground zero excuse me this is the corner of the building in which I live I went outside to get this view I was at the time judging whether I should go collect my daughter who was in elementary school two blocks north of the North Tower north is to the right in this picture so I want to get a closer view with it highly magnified zoom lens to see what while that was happening the plane flew into the South Tower and so no one was thinking terrorism until the second one was hit the first one was just sort of a bad tragedy and so these are just three frames for my camcorder this is at T equals zero this is one second with like actually a fraction of a second plane was moving probably 500 miles an hour and just to understand the black building that black sort of monolithic building that is 50 stories tall this is New York City people so tall buildings are kind of they're just all over the place and that's just a hotel a 50-story hotel and it's the towers of foreshorten because they're the angle at which this is shown I put these up because a few days after this President Bush I don't remember where he said this on the steps of the White House in the Rose Garden or at the Capitol in an attempt to distinguish whe from they the terrorists who flew these planes into the buildings and into the that went down in Pennsylvania and it at in Washington to distinguish we from they he loosely caught quotes a phrase out of the Bible by saying our God is the God who named the Stars now this is before I was on his rolodex okay because I could have helped them out there now first of all it's the same God okay God of Islam and God of the old tent it's the same Allah is the same as the god of the it's the same so hold that aside for the moment hold that aside what he did not know is that of all stars that have names two-thirds of them have Arabic surnames okay now I don't think that's the point he wanted to make I think he he he didn't quite get that and so he you know here they go I mean it just goes on and on and on and on not all stars have names but two-thirds of those that do have names have Arabic names there we go okay there they go and you might say well how did this come to pass what where did that come from what was going on because if you think of the Middle East now and it's not where you're not saying hey these are folks naming stars you go back a thousand years Islam 800 to 1100 in that period which generally called the Golden Age of Islam of Islamic science golden a true go there was no greater Golden Age in the history of the world before or after when you look at the some of advances that came out of that period in Baghdad algebra was invented in that period algebra is itself an Arabic word algorithm is an Arabic word our numerals are Arabic numerals you ever wonder why even stop and think why they call Arabic numerals in that period mathematics took great leaps and bounds agriculture engineering medicine navigation navigation navigation star maps were made to assist navigation astrolabes were crafted then it all stopped it ended it ended if your historian typically you are you are you focus on history as marked by changes of kings and leaders and Wars that's the lens through which many historians look at the past and so if you ask people to sell the Mongols sacked Baghdad and so that's why it all ended if that were the only force operating then later when the Islamic culture rose you would still see this tradition of scientific innovation but it has not recovered it has not come back at all compared to what was going on in that 300 years and what you do is you read the writings of al-ghazali who is a Muslim cleric and he he was to Islam what st. Augustine was to Christianity what he did was he taught you how to be a good Muslim he taught you how to read the Quran and how to obey the commands that because back then people were just interpreting it for themselves he came along he was a an academic scholar he interpreted the Quran he said this is how you must do it first had social influence and then political and cultural influence and basically his interpretation took over and in that interpretation it included the perspective that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the devil this cuts the kneecaps out of any mathematical advances that would unfold math is the language of the universe if you take that out of your personal equation you no longer contribute to the advance of human understanding of that universe and that absence of Muslim presence in the frontier of science persists to this day take a look at the Nobel Prize from 1900 to 2010 I can do this do this for the Jews for example how many Jews in the world is like 15 million tops tops 15 million out of 7 billion people these are the numbers of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences 25 percent of the Nobel Prizes we have a Jewish person in the audience congratulations okay fine okay this is rightly something to be extraordinarily proud of the traditions of Jews in the 20th century is one of education and scholarship in earlier centuries it was one of very strict sort of study of the Torah did not involve the natural world this was a later emergence of the Jewish culture to exhibit this let's look at the numbers for Islam so these are Jews they're 15 million Jews 25% of the Nobel Prizes there is 1.3 billion Muslims in the world these are the numbers two and a half okay I'll give you three if you really want to include economics as a full number there okay if you got to give it a full number okay okay now for me but you can analyze this in any number of ways there 50 times the number of Nobel Prizes 180th the population there's four thousand times the impact I lose sleep at night with the question how many secrets of the universe lay undiscovered because 1.3 billion people who in an ancestral time would have participated in this enterprise and are now not that's what I think of as a scientist whole populations by the way there other populations that never contributed I'm not going to them and blame and now I'm talking about a population that already did contribute it's in it's in the cultural heritage already all we're asking is to resurrect it it is it has not happened so why am I even going here because I'm trying to explain to you that the you fast forward the dangerous here is that what you fast forward to 21st century America and ask what influences do we are we feeling now because that period that naming period in Islam stopped and it never recovered because the the the the way of thinking about the natural world revelation replaced investigation ok so I fast forward to twenty twenty first century and what do you find you get things like this okay this is in America all right so now what I find interesting is it's a level of passion that it requires to actually do you got to like pay for this okay and it means a lot of people pissed off at the big bang they pissed off at the big bang at our Museum in New York the American Museum of Natural History they come to the Big Bang exhibit and sometimes I don't feel like having that conversation I say why don't you go to our Hall of human biology first and then come to us and this we have sort of monkeys holding hands with people in skeleton forms and then they never make it back to the big back they're gone forever okay so however egregious the Big Bang is monkeys and people is a blood or worse the Green is a worse transgression apparently

Channel: Agatan Foundation

Views: 370,413

Rating: 4.8778687 out of 5

Keywords: Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Organization Leader), Astrophysics (Field Of Study), Moments, best, arguments, and, comebacks, part, Best, of, clever, Amazing, Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Religion, Debate, Philosophy, Science, great, nice, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, church, morality, god, humanism, free will, theism, Christianity (Religion), Argument, Islam (Religion), Space, NASA, blackhole, earth, Darwin, three, Astronomy (Field Of Study), agatan, fnd

Id: 7ifxv7WfiFs

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Timothy_Riches]

This is a particularly good collection of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I really liked the editing of multiple appearances on the same topic. Overall it had a nice flow, particularly on the topic of Islam, which Tyson has struck a nice balance of attitude toward. More of a stern talking-to than a beratement.