"When Knowledge Conquered Fear" - Ep 3 of Cosmos: A SpaceTme Odyssey premiers tonight 9pm on @FoxTV. Be there or be a sphere
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 23, 2014
My only question is, how many religious people will THIS episode piss off?As usual I will DVR the show, and watch it after my Sunday night visit to the zombie apocalypse is complete.
Feel free to leave a comment about your impressions. And I will add mine after TWD.
I just do NOT understand why creationists have a problem with science. God is majestic and created all of it in six days. Wouldn't they want to know the intricacies and wonder of it all? I'm sorry but the two CAN peacefully co-exist!
ReplyDeleteUmm... no individual created the universe. There has never been any proof besides a book assembled by 40 authors 4000 years ago of a belief. If the universe is 14 billion years old would it go to show it took that long for things to evolve to the point when things on earth came to life as science is unearthing day by day.
DeleteMy point is, why does someone always have to be right? Believe what you want, live and let live.
Delete@6:37 Tyson, himself, has explained the difference between belief and science. You can believe what ever you want. The laws of science have been proved and can be independently confirmed. Experiments have to be verifiable and repeated.
DeleteYou can't just say, "Well I don't believe that a caterpillar could turn into a butterfly. You see, it's just a worm and the butterfly is..." It's easy. Collect some caterpillars and the leaves that they eat, watch them spin their cocoon and see what comes out. Do it over and over, Repeat the experiment next year, and the year after that. That's scientific, and it is not consistent with what you believe. Oh, you can keep believing it, and be sure to teach that to your kids when you home school them, but with that kind of misinformation, they won't pass the SAT test and they won't get into college. But, they will believe that a worm can't turn into a butterfly-- while caterpillars continue to spin their cocoons and turn into butterflies.
Why does someone always have to be right? If we get into a subject that is more important than butterflies, and I tell you that is poisonous and you don't believe me. Go ahead and drink it. Pay no attention to the skull and cross bones marking the bottle as poison. Someone already did the experiments and they have labelled it to protect you. But, you are free to believe that you can drink it. Live and let live? The reason someone is right is because that's the truth of it. You can't argue with the truth. But please continue to believe what ever you want to believe. But, you are not entitled to your own facts.
When I taught biology, I was warned that the overzealous archbishop in our area did not allow the teaching of evolution, not even in public schools and the state's university system. I never had a problem with him. I explained to my class that I was going to teach evolution the way that Darwin and all of the other scientists figured it out. If they need to understand it in terms of their religion, they were free to believe that it was directed by the Hand of God. In any case, the story of evolution (and I was teaching plants and animals, not the entire universe) is such a wonderful story, filled with so much rich detail that everyone should just marvel at what happened. And, the answer, "Hand of God," would not be accepted on the test. But the facts of evolution were going to be on the test. How they justified accepting that information was their own business. As I said, while my fellow teachers got regular visits from the Church, I never did.
DeleteScience is thin gruel for the weak-minded and feminized. Real warriors sustain themselves with the word of God.
ReplyDeleteHorseshit!
DeleteHA! HA! HA! HA! That's really funny! Satire can be so funny, can't it?
DeleteI know, 6:02 Especially good Satire like 5:44's comment.
DeleteIn other words:
Delete1. to not believe in "god" is a clue that maybe you instead believe there is a "goddess"?
2. Or, that no matter what you believe, you DON'T believe in a patriarchal society?
3. Or, that you reject the violence and homo-erotic world of ancient warrior culture (see greeks and romans for starters). No that is not a slam on our gay/lesbian friends - read up on it.
4. Or, you believe the universe is a mystical place that is as yet unexplainable?
5. All of the above.
You my "friend" are a fool. Try reading your own good book for a change and "repent" if you truly believe the word of God made flesh, in Jesus Christ.
(hypocrite)
Well, I see the Baptists showed up........
Delete@5:44. Get your head around science for a change
DeleteConsider the science that was done to determine the theory, write the code, built the firmware, and engineer the computer you posted your inane and ignorant comment with.
Not to mention the literally hundreds of switches, routers, servers, proxies and software entities that were necessary to allow your ascii characters to show up on a server and post to the correct blog.
That was then routed via http over IP to someone's ISP, down the wire, into their home router, into their PC, interpreted through the OSI layers, grokked by the video driver, sent as digital signals, and finally made visible by the tiny pixels being fired up by electrons intricately flowing to exactly the right place on my 50 inch plasma TV.
You use science stuff every day, and your mocking and arrogant bullshit convinces no one of anything, and only proves
you are as addle pated as your hero Palin
Unless of course that post was pure /sarc because it was almost too asinine to be otherwise.
No: The sound-minded concern themselves with facts and evidence visible to all, regardless of faith. To that end, it is SCIENCE that maintains the edge in terms of plausibility and reality.
Delete@ 5:44
DeleteOkay. Let me get this straight. YOU say that science is feminized and that true warriors find strength in god.
That's awfully sexist of you, don't you think? It sounds to me as though you are saying only men can be warriors. I'll tell you a little secret "my friend". It is so clearly obvious you haven't a clue about the fighting spirit of a woman should she feel the need to fight. Without a doubt at all, I can say that I would rather face ten men than one woman who has decided to fight. YOU may not believe it, but every female military person I met while in the Navy - and in the Army because my brother went Army - was superior to the majority of men because they felt the need.
I'll bet you believe they don't make good soldiers because they don't have the strength men do, don't you? A clue: Fight SMART. It usually wins. Did it never occur to you that your own book of myths has David defeating Goliath because David was SMARTER? DUH! I'll bet you even go to a knife fight with a knife!
There are many things better about the female than the male, too. They are better combat pilots because they can withstand more "g's" than a male without blacking out. Their reaction times are better. Etc. Etc.
Of course, like everything else, this is not ALWAYS the case, but generalities can be made.
And the final insult to your ignorant statement? Have you ever seen a mother fight to save her kids? Trust me on this, you do NOT want to get between a mother and her kids!
Crawl back into your place of worship and leave the rest of us to discuss things intelligently. Your ignorance is distasteful. Come back IF you ever come up with a repeatably provable argument, not some stuff written in a text by ignorant fools who didn't even know the earth goes around the sun.
Or do you believe otherwise?
I just got caught up on last week's episode about natural and artificial selection - a million more times amazing than any silly story in a 2000 year old book. Loved it!
ReplyDeleteI'm taping it as well. Of COURSE there'll be a lot of clucking going on with the creationists- that's why they lay square eggs!
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad this show's on again, a whole new generation will be amazed and learn about the universe.
We had a healthy curiosity because of the space program, The average kid's smart phone has more power and innovation in a much smaller size than the original computer.
I really wish they'd do an update of James Burke's Connections. I loved that show.
ReplyDeleteI loved it too!
DeleteBig fan too. He was a fabulous host and I'd love to see the entire series again. Last time I looked around for it, no luck.
DeleteThat was a cool show.
DeleteI have to agree completely! I was lucky enough to be in the audience when he came to visit my home town to speak. An absolutely amazing individual even face to face!
DeleteMy favorite episode was when he followed the path from the planting stick to the 747!
Wow, I love that animated gif graphic you have in your post, Gryphen! Really cool!
ReplyDelete"Be there or be a sphere." :-)
ReplyDeleteBased on the description I'm sure we'll be hearing from the non-heliocentric crowd demanding equal time to express their belief that the sun rotates around the earth
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that creationists are demanding equal time on Tyson's shows. They can go on any Bible show, any church show, Christian Broadcasting, make their own show. They must feel especially threatened by the wonderful way that Tyson explains things.
ReplyDeleteThey have more than equal time, I see tons of religious shows on the tube! Pat Robertson, Casey Treat, etc.
DeleteLet them spew away on their own shows!
You've GOT TO STOP demonizing everyone who's religious. Most of us don't deny science. You're incredible nasty Gryphen, and closedmindedly judgmental.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with you, that some of us aren't juvenile enough to require belief that God donned a tophat and a cape, to astound an audience of nobody, creating the universe in a union fought for 6 day week--
DeleteI also noticed that Gryphen correctly predicted an onslaught of angry posters, demanding that everyone agree with their childish viewpoints.
It cannot possibly have escaped everyone's notice, that people who show anger when others don't mirror their beliefs, reveal an obvious fear that they will be talked out of that delusion, by facts, and peer pressure to grow the hell UP.
If someone discovers a giant pile of money in a cave, and when telling someone about it, meets with their disbelief, does he get all worked up and scream his disdain? NO! He walks off smirking, thinking, "Boy, what a dummy...I won't waste time on HIM anymore."
@anonymous at 8:13.
DeleteYou believe what you want, and you have that right because we have freedom of religion in the USA
The problem we face as a diverse country is that millions of your fellow hard core religious Christians are doing everything they can to deny science is real, force their views on others, perpetuate mythology in culture and in schools, and create laws based on religion.
When churches pay their taxes, support the 1st amendment, and stay out of politics, stop pretending that America is a Christian nation, the some of us athiests will feel a lot more empathetic to you religious folks.
Gryphen can post any damn thing he wants on his blog and if you don't like it, you don't need to come here.
DeleteScience and the technology, knowledge, and discoveries it produces is a very big threat to many religious people.
ReplyDeleteThis is especially true for those who advocate creating laws based on religion, or those who support Christian Dominionism, or even full blown theocracy.
When the telephone was first being put into wide use back in the early 1900's, many preachers railed against it as an instrument of the devil.
Human society and culture is so sadly blighted by the militant fundamentalists (Christians and Muslims) and their bronze age mythology.
To take your point about fundamentalists one step further, many Western evangelicals seem to (conveniently) forget that were it not for the Muslims preserving the works of Aristotle, Christianity would not exist at all. Throw THAT at them and they will shrivel up and away like a Styrofoam cup in a fire.
Deleteit reminds me of a little kid with fingers in his ears screaming, "I can't heeeear you!"
DeleteAs one of the great theologians of his day, Isaac Newton seems to exemplify the ability to find unproblematic the coexistence of God and science.
ReplyDeleteFrom The General Scholium to Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica (1713):
"It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God; a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a Living, Intelligent, and Powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from Eternity to Eternity; his presence from Infinity to Infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done."
There's a whole lot more. In fact, Newton wrote upwards of two and a half million words on theology, So religious people should be interested in this episode - at least in theory.
For more this this extraordinary thinker - http://isaac-newton.org
And who is to say that there isn't something spiritually (not necessarily a God per se) about us that science has yet to discover? There is so much more to the human psyche that we have yet to uncover. Grand mysteries still hidden and unsolved.
DeleteMaybe someday we will take for granted the fact that we have far more power and potential mentally than we could ever imagine today. I'm sure the idea of a small worm changing it's form so completely into a butterfly would have been miraculous to the unscientific, uneducated mind a thousand years ago.
There might be a whole dimension to our brains and souls we have yet to make sense of. But to just relinquish all responsibility of innovation to a higher power? I don't know. We won't until we have all the answers- and we should never stop searching just because someone says "It's God's plan, we just have to have faith." I bet that if there were a benevolent God, he/she/it would agree.
I was not raised in any religion. I was influenced to accept that knowledge for knowledge's sake is important.
DeleteNewton, for example was a theist, like many of our Founding Fathers, who also rejected religious dogma. "How" he came to know, think and decide - and he did write a lot about it - is as valuable and the "what."
I recently reread Thomas Paine's Common Sense and The Age of Reason. He sings the praises of Deism. At the same time, his arguments against organized religion, particularly Christianity, are brilliant, imo.
It's all grist for the mill. But, to mix my metaphors, holding open the heavy weight of the doors of our minds is a constant effort and, while we will fail from time to time, for me it's a more fulfilling way to go through life than plonking myself down on one side of any argument and refusing to budge.
Fascinating what different things comets meant to different people in the world.
ReplyDeleteAnd all of it bad.
Sir Isaac Newton was a genius,
ReplyDeleteWho believed in alchemy.
Oh well, nobody's perfect.
But on the plus side, he rejected Christian orthodoxy and held views that would have had him labelled as a heretic: A plus for any scientist in my book.
DeleteI was called a heretic a few weeks ago for my beliefs. I took it as a compliment.
DeleteWonderful show last night!!!!
ReplyDeleteI love this show! Our universe explained to us by someone who understands. What could be better? (I took biology and then chemistry, my brother took physics. Still jealous.)
ReplyDelete