Religion Vs Science: Can The Two Coexist? | Neil deGrasse Tyson

so normally I don't go here normally I don't go here normal cuz I just like talking about astrophysics but I get given this conference and given how many of you out there are rabid atheists I gotta give you a bone here I got toss you a bone okay so I'm going to toss you a few bones okay just because you're rabid alright so let's look at some data here you probably know all these data actually the Dana I'm about to show is for the United States I don't know what it is I'm sure the data exists but when I compiled it I'm gonna make yet a separate point so wouldn't have mattered what country was represented here in America ninety percent of the nation would claim to be religious and you define this in a way that's unambiguous you don't say well do you go to church every Sunday you don't ask that question plenty of people go to church who are not religious they go to get a date or so they go for the cupcakes or something they don't go to be spiritually enlightened so you ask a different question you say is there a God that listens to your prayers if you answer yes to that you're religious by anybody's definition because your understanding of a deity is that that deity is monitoring your daily affairs so that's unambiguous about not if this number is dropped in the last couple of years what it's about 90% turns out if you go to college and get an advanced degree a masters or doctorate where these are degrees where you actually question the state of existing knowledge the undergraduate degree doesn't really do that you're learning from textbooks they're written by somebody else your doctrines are already there the higher degrees imply that you're questioning the very fabric of the knowledge you had previously learned among that community it's 60% it has dropped well that's interesting let's keep going how about scientists of all stripes so biologists chemists sorry let's include engineers as well people who have formal scientific training mathematicians as well okay what happens next drops to 40% now if you look at this number it looks like Wow so scientists the public is 90% scientists to 40% no the drop is not that significant because every scientist has an advanced degree so in fact the drop is not from 90 to 40 the drop is from 60 to 40 so becoming a scientist is not as big an effect on whether you're religious as you might otherwise think most of the drop comes because you're educated educated beyond the level of college so that's 40% so now you go to elite scientists members of the National Academy highly accomplished subset among scientists the number drops to 7% there was a headline in nature the British journal Nature which said after the study was released 93% of elite scientists reject God that was supposed to be a shocking headline and I'd look at that I said that's not even interesting that was the trend line anyway what's more interesting which was not to have line is that 7% of elite scientists pray to a god is it isn't that a more interesting fact to you isn't that kind of interesting the most accomplished scientist in the world in that community 7% of them still pray to a personal God I think that is deserving of more study than the 93 percent who don't because something's going on there we don't know what and I have confronted people on this I would say to the most sort of vociferous in the Atheist community I would say you're beaten the public over the head saying telling them why you do it and I'm thinking before you beat the public why don't you beat them over the head hey I'm just saying if you're gonna rank if you just cuz that you understand that first because if you can't convert that 7% you've got no hope in the general public that's all I'm saying this this this is among the ranks of the scientifically educated now philosophers basically invented atheism and if you do this if you check this statistic for Philosopher's it's down it's below 1% there are no religious the only religious philosophers there are there like theologian philosophers all right if you subtract the theologic philosophers this numbers is essentially zero all right so they're basically birthed atheism the philosophers and this is talk I don't know here in Australia what does the Bible in the public school class or not know is it by law or is it just by tradition these are by law okay so in America there's this understanding that this state and the church are separate and by and large that's been honored for by and large for most of the history of the country by and large and the what's interesting about America a point that was a little bit alluded to earlier today is that it was founded on the principle that the state has no religion the state is indifferent to what religion you might have so that means there's no authority over you that's going to tell you who wouldn't want to worship and that's a state that we all take for granted but so many places in the world that is not true well there's a case in New Jersey where a middle school kid was lectured to by the history teacher in a public school and the history teacher said if you don't accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior you are going to hell there's a little Muslim girl there said you were already damned to hell first point second that Noah had dinosaurs on his ark third point he made is that Big Bang and evolution are just theories and you can take him or leave him so I I don't like I said I don't get into these I just don't we got people who do this we've got the four horsemen we got we got our boy here who's coming up after we got people who fight this stuff I'm not one of those really I I'm doing this because like I know y'all this is the bone I'm throwing you but I really I don't do this so but then I thought about it and I said you know I have a not bad I can I mean a a letter to the editor on this that I can write and I left out the part about Jesus I left that out because if that's how he feels he what he wants you to be Christian that's okay fine I left that out I went to the rest of what he said and this was my letter as it appeared in the new york times people cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey as a separation of church and state essentially New Jersey school teacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's Ark carried dinosaurs the case is not about the need to separate church and state it's about the need to separate ignorant scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers that's the problem if he wants to believe Jesus is a savior that's not synonymous with being scientifically illiterate because 40% of American scientists pray to a personal God what is identical with being scientifically literate is that if Noah was a human being he did not have dinosaurs on his ark because humans and dinosaurs did not coexist all right every one of those scientists knows that even the 40% who pray to God so this is this is how I've sort of split the kingdom there then then you get the the Billboard Wars okay this was fun Big Bang Theory you got to be kidding God all right so this goes on this is what we put up with all right so then we got a then there was like let's come back praise Darwin evolve beyond belief Freedom From Religion founded so the billboard wars are in progress here there's some people who are like okay with God and okay with sort of how things evolved so they ride the fence so here's a bumper sticker the Big Bang Theory God smoke and bang it happened you know so they're excited about both God and the Big Bang but then we had this idiot back in May Judgment Day did this did this Judgment Day stuff reach below the equator okay yeah it was it was now the good thing this what unlike other predictions like Jesus will come one day this had a date okay you could test it this was like easy to test you just sort of wait around for it alright so now it turns out that May 21st was only the day Jesus was supposed to show up the actual end of the world is October 21st so the end of the world is still to come this year this is directly from the website so I had to tweet so this was May 21st so on May 21st or May 20th I tweeted this if Jesus actually arrives May 21st it'll be easy to convince skeptics if he doesn't show up do the faithful become atheists that was my question now in a Twitter stream it's a it's a it's a live conversation with complete strangers everybody depositing their 140 characters worth of thought so here this is there was a huge reaction to that tweet now you would expect that most of my followers or at least a big fraction of them would be sort of atheistic so you'd expect people say this guy is an idiot why we even spending any time on them well one such person did make such a reply but not in the way you might think no anyone who's read the Bible know this camping was full of from the start okay so what do you do with that so so this is somebody complaining about the prediction of Jesus coming because he says this other guy doesn't know jack about the Bible but this guy does and went on there are other places where people quoted that one can't know when Jesus comes so the fact that this guy saying he knows means he doesn't read the Bible so this so so this is what's out there people who are ready to vociferously argue about who knows the Bible the least

Channel: This Is 42

Views: 202,268

Rating: 4.7674518 out of 5

Keywords: religion, science, neil degrasse tyson, atheism, atheist

Id: Xxz0W4OgG9k

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020