Neil DeGrasse Tyson
[Doctor Tyson is an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.]It will only ever be about how compelling is the evidence to you.
Hard work dissipates ignorance.
If you have religious faith then whatever anyone says about the world wouldn't matter to you. If it does matter to you then that's a different kind of contract that you're taking out on information. And that contract is that there could be data out there that would conflict with your religious philosophy. Then you'd have to go along with it. But that's not what actually happens. 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 into the religious philosophy. So it requires blinders in order to make that happen.
I see myself as a responsible educator. And in that role, if you want to put your creation philosophies into a science classroom, I'm going to stand at the gate and prevent that. Science is about taking the unknown and figuring it out. Intelligent design (as presented in the Dover trial and as is widely discussed) takes what is unknown and then doesn't try to figure it out. It says we can't figure it out and ascribes it to a higher intelligence. End of story. It's not science. Therefore it does not belong in the science classroom. If you want to put it somewhere, it's fine. Put it in philosophy class or history class or religion class -- it's not science.
In my studies of the Universe I value evidence, and I don't see evidence for any kind of active intelligence or power over anything. The more I look at the Universe the less convinced I am that there is something benevolent going on. So if your concept of a Creator is someone who's all powerful and all good (that's not an uncommon pairing of powers that you might ascribe to a Creator: all powerful and all good), and I look at the disasters that afflict Earth and life on Earth: volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, congenital birth defects... You look at this list of ways that life is made miserable on Earth by natural causes, and I just ask how do you deal with that. So philosophers rose up and said if there is a God, God is either not all powerful or not all good...
“I have no problems if as we probe the origins of things we bump up into the bearded man. If that shows up we're good to go okay. Not a problem. There's just no evidence of it. And this is why religions are called faiths, collectively, because you believe something in the absence of evidence. That's what it is. That's why it's called Faith otherwise we would call all religions evidence but we don't for exactly that reason. So I'm given what everyone describes to be the properties that would be expressed by an all powerful being in the gods that they worship -- I look for that in the universe and I don't find it! So I remain unconvinced. But if you got some good evidence, bring it. Bring it. Okay... What I believe should be irrelevant to anyone. It's not about me. It's about the real world.
If you come from a belief system, then what you believe doesn't have the evidence that science would normally require to establish what is objectively true. That's why they're called belief systems because you believe that something is true. Belief systems are such that it may be true for you, but it's not really true for other people unless you convince them of it. And since it's based on belief, rational arguments tend to not work. So you need methods of coercion or force, ultimately threat of violence, perhaps even threat of death.
We look at the reasons why people have fought wars over the years. A common one is access to limited resources. I want what you have. I need what you have. Oh, you're not going to share it. You're not going to give it to me. Therefore, I'm going to take it. Well, you can only do that. You can only threaten to do that if you have the resources, the financial resources, the scientific resources, the engineering resources.
Other reasons why people fight with limited access to resources. Yes. Religion, again, I come to it as a scientist. If there's a batch of scientists over there who say E doesn't equal MC squared E = MC cubed, are we going to go to war over that? No. I would say. Now let me show you why that is not true. And I would demonstrate it with experiments and examples. That doesn't work as well when you have belief systems. If you come from a belief system, then what you believe doesn't have the evidence that science would normally require to establish what is objectively true. That's why they're called belief systems because you believe that something is true. Now, you may believe it so strongly that you ‘know’ it's true, but that's an internal emotion that you carry. Belief systems are such that it may be true for you, but it's not really true for other people unless you convince them of it. And since it's based on belief, rational arguments tend to not work, you need methods of coercion or force, ultimately threat of violence, perhaps even threat of death. And so some of the most violent encounters civilization has ever had with itself is when one waring faction has a belief system that differs from that of their adversary.
It's interesting to ask of ourselves in society. Is there anything you would die for? You get one chance in life. What I have found is that the less tangible the thing is you're fighting for, the more abstract it is, the less evidence there is in support of it, the more willing people are to die for it. And so war always seems to be this glorious thing at the beginning and then the body bags start coming back and not only military casualties but civilian casualties just trying to live their lives who are now susceptible to decisions made by people in power who generally are not themselves the same people who go do the fighting. I find that dismaying just being human in civilization as a scientist, but it's real and it happens. And that's how the world is put together with or without the League of Nations coming out of the First World War, with or without the United Nations after the Second World War, with charters that are signed, Geneva Conventions. At the end of the day, you can ask the question, can we just all get along?
Why do you have the power to define who and what God is but not have the power to define what good is? So therefore if you're going to say God actually is good, and a quarter million people dying from an earthquake and a tsunami and and other natural disasters (and God presumably has control over that), and God is good; then we have to say God works in mysterious ways. But people only say that when their understanding of God fails them. When they can't understand it they say well God works in mysterious ways. But somehow in these other ways you did understand them. How are you saying well this is the handiwork of God or you're doing God's work, God wants you to do this? Somehow you know God's motives every other way but when a quarter million people get wiped out then God works in mysterious ways. Why do you even claim to have access to God's mind in some context and not others. Just admit you have no clue and get on with life. That's how I look at it.
As a scientist, if your religious and you say something that is patently objectively false, I will tell you. I'm not going to respect your views if they're objectively false. I owe that to your intellect, to explain to you what is objectively true in the face of what you think is true, want to be true, or wish for what is true. I respect your freedom to think whatever you want. But if you're going to make a decision based on something that's objectively false that emanates from your belief system, no matter what it is, I'm obliged as an educator to say that's not going to work, or here's why it's not going to work. You're advising someone else who doesn't know better, and that's not in their best interest. I'm going to say that.
It's not that religious people mess up society. That's the wrong way to look at this. The issue is dogma. dogma in any form messes up society. You can have political dogma which has no less guilt messing up society than religious dogma. The issue here is dogma. You fight dogma and if it happens to be under the guise of religion, fine; but as an educated scientist-atheist if you're going to go out there and fight religious people you're really fighting dogma -- where people want you to believe something in the absence of evidence and make that policy, make that educational curricula, and make legislation based on that. That's where you have problems. And that's where you get Nazism! That's where you get the the Lysenkoism. That's where you get all of these isms that have risen up. Some of them even had some patina of being academically derived, but when you actually part the curtains there is dogmatic invocation of rules established by some committee of people who decide how they want you to think about all the various topics.
There's very little in life that's worth achieving that isn't hard. Those things that are hard are hard because most people can't do it. That's why we say they're hard. If you work at it and achieve it and you continue that throughout your life, you are distinguishing yourself among others around you by what you have achieved. And those who rise the highest are those who keep solving hard things. This leads me to the famous quote from John Kennedy: We choose to go to the Moon... ‘We choose these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’
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C-Span Appearances
Excerpt from The Sky Is Not the Limit
Star Talk Radio Show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson
PBS NOVA ScienceNOW with Neil deGrasse Tyson
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