Neil deGrasse Tyson's view on Religious Beliefs

[Music] i love you quick question i have a question about the fossil record when people uh non-believers try to attack the dating system they use for the for the for fossils and whatnot carbon dating and whatnot is there any validity to that so these are non when you say non-believers people who like to reject science yes in favor of their religious philosophies so these are people who are apparently require data to support their faith i find that odd right because then it's not faith right i mean if if you have religious faith then whatever anyone says about the world wouldn't matter to you if it does matter to you then you're that's a different kind of contract that you're taking out on information and that contract is there could be data out there that would conflict with your religious philosophy and then you'd have to go along with it that's not what actually happens they there's a pretense that data matters and then they filter it reinterpret it ignore parts of it slice and dice it so that it all fits in to the religious philosophy so it requires blinders in order to make that happen so um with the uh the radio radioactive dating which we use are many different elements carbon is good carbon 14 we've all heard about that is good for periods of time that go back thousands tens of thousands of years basically into the ice age we can carbon date you know frozen cavemen fo and mastodons coming out of glaciers then we have we have other other elements used that are radioactive and they decay lead is used to date the age of the earth that has a half-life of billions you forgot the exact billion plus years whereas car uh carbon-14 is in the thousands of years so you so you pick the one that suits the time interval you're interested in and then you can date those that's how we date meteorites for example yeah the people who are in denial of this uh simply it exhibits a failure in their educational system that's what the validity to it of course not thank you so much yeah okay um and another thing just you mentioned the god of the gaps in in a free society a free pluralistic society where the freedom of the expression of religion is constitutionally protected which is a fundamental part of why america was so attractive to immigrants from around the world whose religious differences were not being supported in their hometown i will never be one to tell you what you should believe or what you should not believe what i will say is that if you want to say that where we don't understand things that's where god rests that's where god operates the god of the gaps argument because i get asked that all the time what was around before the universe i don't know must have been something god so they gotta stick in god where we're not there yet and i just say i got we got top people working on that that's it'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 we're long past that we those explanations have come and so i i don't there's no compelling reason to say god did it and then sort of give up and go on to the next problem my issue with the god of the gaps is that if you feel that way you should not be writing the science curriculum of a classroom okay that's all okay because if you do you are undermining the very process of what science is all about because the god of the gaps principle is like a it's a philosophy of ignorance whereas science is a philosophy of discovery and that's an important distinction between the two and if you remove that foundation for what builds science you are undermining the capacity of your culture of your nation to compete technologically in this the 21st century so it is not without consequence to have conducted that way where are we at beyond belief 2006 uh lecture you said that were you there or did you watch the youtube watch the youtube okay um you said that what stopped middle eastern scientific progress was a theological takeover yes uh do you think that's that's a shorthand for what i said but yeah i did you i built the case a little more elegantly than that it was much nicer do you think that's happened here in light of what's happening with like scientific textbooks in texas and things like that yeah i just read recently about the plight of textbook of textbooks in texas i spent some time in texas six years actually and of course texas has johnson space center these are the folks who track everything we put in orbit with humans on it after it passes the launch um uh the launch tower in in cape canaveral all command goes over to houston so texas is a fundamental part of our space enterprise culturally and historically so that for them to now have textbooks where the science content is altered to be different from what is going on in mainstream science worries me greatly what you're referring to in the the talk that i gave at that lecture is in san diego 2006 uh it referenced what was going on a thousand years ago a thousand years ago the intellectual center of the world was baghdad baghdad europe was busy disemboweling heretics at the time baghdad was open to all thought at the time between ad 800 and 1100 around there if you look at the advances that unfolded in that period in that location it includes the the the invention of algebra algebra is an arabic word algorithm is an arabic word two-thirds of the stars in the night sky that have names have arabic names how does that happen just what where did the naming rights come from it came from the fact that at that time huge advances in the middle east in baghdad in particular was unfolded in engineering mathematics especially mathematics astronomy navigation physiology and you say well why is that so if you look at what was going on they were open to all lines of thought jews muslims christians there were doubters back then today we would call them atheists they would all come around a table and share ideas if you have some philosophy that's got holes in it someone's going to find it and they're going to challenge you on those ideas and what happens is the conversation ratchets up you discard what doesn't work and you keep what does and when you do that you make discoveries and you make discoveries rapidly and at the time that period drew to a close if you read history books they'll typically describe sort of the the sacking of baghdad it was a bad time for the city and they said it all came to an end however the islamic culture rose at other times later and in those other times science and engineering discoveries were not a part of it so he asked what why not you got the cultural heritage why didn't it show up again and then you got to dig a little deeper from the sacking of baghdad and you find out there was a muslim cleric al-ghazali was his name who was to islam what saint augustine was to christianity st augustine kind of laid out the rules for how to be a good christian at the time a lot of people were practicing it in their own way he codified it he was a religious scholar figured it out according to his own read told everybody how to behave there's the book you follow this you're a good christian al ghazali said you follow this you're a good muslim in that text included the assertion which gained influence socially but then politically so then it had power of influence in there was the assertion that mathematics and the manipulation of numbers was the work of the devil the entire enterprise collapsed and never recovered it has not recovered since if you look at the number of muslims who have won the nobel prize in the sciences it's one number of jews who have won the nobel prize one-fourth of all nobel prizes in science have been won by jews how many muslims in the world 1.3 billion how many jews in the world 15 million tops so you look at what effect the culture of discovery and learning can have on what you discover about the natural world it's extraordinary so just because you're making discoveries doesn't mean it's forever and i look at the 20th century in america as a period of great discovery and then i see forces now operating against it and then i look at the history of the consequences of this and i see america just simply fading into insignificance no it's not off of a cliff it's just a slope and every next day or a little bit further down on the slope you barely notice it right until one day you can't see over the hill that you just came from and you try to make do with what you have down here and then you find out it's the rest of the world making the inventions and not you you're trailing no longer leading you're not even abreast with what's going on you're running behind trying to catch up have a nice day yes it's okay we've got a question right here another question yes [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Wonderful Truth

Views: 2,342,083

Keywords: Richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, sam harris, ricky gervais, atheism, religion, god, god delusion, debate, non believer, Richard Dawkins, Science, Knowledge, Debate, Religion vs. Science, Atheist, Atheism, Theist, Evolution, Bible, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, Islam, Buddhism, Neil deGrasse Tyson, The God Delusion, Darwin, Ricky Gerwais, facts, fact, Lawrence Krauss, Daniel dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Multiverse, dan barker, Peter singer, Plato, Aristoteles, victor stenger, Stephen Fry

Id: 7danfOYkFG0

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cn3m_]

Muhammad Hijab have responded to Neil deGrasse Tyson:

• https://youtu.be/nfRnYNig9jU

I encourage you u/HopDavid to check that video.

[u/HopDavid]

Tyson's claims regarding Ghazali have been debunked many times:
By Ibrahim Arsalan in 2010.
By physicist Basil Altaie in 2016.
By Joseph Lumbard in 2017.
By Mohammed Hijab in 2021.

And I have my own Ghazali section in my list of Tyson's questionable claims.

And yet as recently as July 23, 2021 we have someone who ironically calls himself "The wonderful truth" spreading Tyson's misinformation.

Mohammed Hijab says: "and you're getting caught out and no longer is the muslim community or even any religious community i'm going to say idly by watching individuals like you talk rubbish and make mistakes and blunders and and just leave you to do what you want to do. And maybe some of our youth will listen to what you have to say and be convinced. No we're going to hold you to account to academic account not just on a peer-reviewed journal that only a a few elites can look at. No, this is now going to be in the public sphere for people to ridicule you."

I sure hope Hijab is correct. But Hijab is not the first person who has called out Neil's falsehoods. And yet Neil's clueless following continues to spread Tyson's fictions.

Tyson needs to be called out loudly and publicly. Not just by Muslims. But by Christians as well. Or by any atheist who values truth. By anyone who hates falsehoods.

[u/Tenfoldshield]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it Al-Ghazali who warned against taking the words of experts in one field when they're talking about something entirely unrelated to their profession?

If it is, the irony is palpable.

[u/Moonie-iLLy]

The comment section is unbelievably ironic.

[u/bonelatch]

I always knew he was trash. No one pretending to be all nice and innocent really is.