Hey Science, It's Me Religion. Sorry? Impressions Rebuttals and Comments on "God of the Gaps" by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
I read a great post by @andrarchy yesterday shown here Now, let me say that I think a great post is about more than the content, it's about the discussions it generates in the comments. I don't know as it went the direction he thought it would. As a topic, religion and science tend to bring pretty strong views on one side or the other, and rarely the middle. Why?
God of the Gaps
This lecture by Neil Degrasse Tyson was posted yesterday in the comments yesterday. It's an academic lecture regarding the school system wanting to introduce creationism into the school system, I quote "you have school systems wanting to put intelligent design into the classrooms, but you also have the most the most brilliant people walking the face of this earth wanting to do the same thing!". I like the man, I admire his academic works, I also don't agree with him here. I scribbled notes down throughout the video, some rebuttals to his statements, and random thoughts it elicited that I want to share.
Why Can't BOTH be right?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson starts with a fairly simple breakdown of belief in North America. 90%+ of people believe in a God that answers their prayers. In science that breaks down to 40%, in what he calls the elite science community (National Academy of Science) 85% reject a personal God. He gets a bit peeved when asking why that number isn't 0.
From there it's a systematic breakdown of how science has historically referred to God when it comes to areas they don't have the answers, Isaac Newton's statement used as an example 'this most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the council of an intelligent and powerful being.". Tyson uses that and several other similar examples to make the statement that "Science is the philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is the philosophy of Ignorance."
My thought written down immediately, is about the way he presents that statement, it's the way a child makes fun of another child. How does making my beliefs sound small and stupid validate your beliefs?
As we explore the cosmos and laws of the universe there are answers found and amazing discoveries made. The argument I see being made I will break down like this:
- Church said God made Earth the center of the universe.
- Science discovered the sun was the center
- We disproved God and every other argument that can be made for God we will disprove also.
So, you get to disprove creation and God by saying that I don't know? About things that you may possibly NEVER know? It needs to be accepted as debunked by the community, and a timeframe of eternity granted to prove it?
Creationists, You're No Better!
A brief history of my experience. I have had what I would call a salvation experience. I have read the bible front to back. It was intentionally done that way vs a "read the bible in a year/month" plan.. why? Information delivered out of sequence is not the same information.
Okay, I only care about the first four books of the New Testament which deal with four viewpoints of the same sequence of events, the life of Jesus. What I read was him asking questions, lots and lots of questions, even answering questions with questions! I had conducted a google search regarding it "questions Jesus asked" and interesting results came up. I am only borrowing the title of the search result and not it's contents, but I was caught by How Many Questions Did Jesus Answer? as a title of a top search result. I propose none. Everything I recall was answering questions with questions and inviting a search for the answer. How is it that almost immediately upon his departure from Earth (okay, yeah we killed him) is it a God so fragile that he cannot be questioned?
Soooooooo, What Now?
I agree strongly with a statement made by Neil. "Revelation replaced investigation". I have two questions to ask.
Science... How scientific is it to rule out a set of answers before you begin?
Religion... If God can't stand up to being questioned... What the hell are you doing?
I honestly believe the two are not opposite of each other. Science and Religion.... each fills the gaps of the other to me. What about you?
@clevecross Good topic, you should also check the back and forth between @casandrarose and myself for a completely different viewpoint
https://steemit.com/religion/@casandrarose/why-belive-in-god
Absolutely will and thanks. It is a very narrow wedge I agree. I have a lot to say on the matter. I had a ton more I kept wanting to say and just wanted to focus on this one aspect, an attempt to keep it limited to this. I will definitely read anything you and her have to say and do plan to go into this further over time. Honestly, I am stoked my first comment wasn't a bot!!! Thanks so much!
Nice post. I've been having conversations on this topic all over Steem for two weeks, so there's a lot out there already to contribute to your topic.
Not sure why you say God can't stand up to being questioned. That's been going on for 6000 years. :o)
God put all his answers in the Bible and assigned his disciples the job of internalizing that information, making more disciples and answering such questions until He comes back to check up on us.
I had just meant more the attempt to stop scientific progress that some do. As if their God can't hold up to it. One doesn't exclude the other and it needs to stop. More saying they don't need to be rivals. Thank you for your comment. I appreciate it
"God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller over time"
Science follows the trail of evidence, and while it does seem scientists want the total energy of the universe to equal 0 (due to gravity having negative potential energy) which would satisfy conservation of energy and prove the universe could be created without the need of a god, they will promote any sufficiently evidenced theory objectively. And as is, science points towards that answer being correct. Religion on the other hand is often stubborn and unchanging when new evidence is discovered. all throughout history, when science made wrong predictions, they were studied and viewpoints evolved as the theories were changed and corrected. In science it is ok to say " I dont know", or to change opinions when new information is discovered
Heh. I won't comment on "religion" because it means everything under the sun.
What you say is not true about Biblical Christianity. It has the scoop directly revealed from God.
Don't confuse this with Popery or other church teachings that are not Bible based. They are all over the place and often wrong.
Science will never come close to understanding God because it denies anything that can't be directly observed and repeated. It's a very limited tool when it comes to all there is to know.
And don't give me that about Science being objective. The history of science is the mainstream suppressing the young upstarts generation after generation. Try to get funding for research that is outside the mainstream. Try to get published in a "peer reviewed" journal.
Do you believe in evolution? How old do you believe the universe, our solar system, and earth are?
Is there room for both? I'll use it again lol. I read an interesting thing once. Jesus turned water into wine, it was good wine. Good wine is aged wine. The point they were making was if that's the power we are dealing with..... Well, what's wrong with a 6 billion year old universe that's 6,000 years old?
There is room for God and science, but the universe is unquestionably not 6000 years old. And biblical Christianity rigidly holds onto a belief based on no evidence and refuses to change which proves my point
Exactly. Let's do a thought experiment.
Suppose the best explanation for the universe is that it is a simulation as scientists have proposed to explain quantum entanglement and two-slit experiment results.
Now, compare two universes. One that has been evolving from a singularity for 13.8B years and another that was initialized at precisely the same state as the first universe merely 6000 years ago. Could science tell the difference?
You are conflating economics and politics with science. Scientific beliefs have a rigorous process before educated guesses become theories or laws. The politics and economics of what gets funded is a matter of opportunity cost.
I agree here also. I wanted to find and quote this piece I found from his interview with Bill Moyer
He does not, however, dismiss the existence of God or suggest that there’s anything wrong with religious beliefs, he just argues that God has to be more to you than where science has yet to travel, because science continues to travel further and further, solving more and more of the mysteries of the universe that religious people often attribute to God.
Let's start with the Big Bang. It has two major triumphs: explaining the uniform microwave background and explaining nucleosynthesis and why the Hydrogen to Helium to heavier element ratio is what it is in the universe today. However, the Big Bang has remaining mysteries: why is there matter rather than anti-matter and what came before, what caused it, and similar origin questions. While I personally believe the universe started from nothing and do not believe in a god, believing in a deist God that set the universe in motion and defined the physical laws of nature is a completely compatible belief with science. There is room for science and religion, but some beliefs have no basis in reality.
What makes a deist god more compatible with science than an active, interventionist God?
The only evidence that exists to differentiate between the two is eyewitness accounts that He is actively involved in history.
...unless you want to suppress those eyewitness accounts. There is zero information of any kind pointing in the diest direction, yet you "scientifically" select deism over activism. Why? :o)
Isn't it convenient that all these miracles and eyewitness accounts happen before recording equipment is invented? There is not only no evidence to suggest many things in the bible happened, there is evidence to the contrary. Things simply did not happen the way the bible says. I absolutely wish to suppress these accounts because just like every other religion, they are written by men who make shit up.
What makes Christian accounts more likely than non-Christian ones? And what makes either of those more likely than fossil records and observation of the universe?
Richard Dawkins — 'We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.'
edit: going to reply to your thought experiment here because for some reason I can't in the other spot. It is absolutely possible we live in a simulation. But if that is the case, all bets are off, and we would know nothing about the base reality since all observations done have been in a simulation. The base reality could be anything at all, from the same universe (with the simulation modeled after the original), being created by a flying spaghetti monster with evidence to support that, or a simulation within another simulation within another simulation until finally reaching base reality which again be anything.
tangent: why was steemit programmed to not allow comments further than depth 4?
Yeah that Dawkins quote is very clever.
There is only one God so of course we are nonbeliever's about the rest.
Things happened exactly as the Bible says. There. We are even.
Would you believe an "eyewitness" account coming from today's media about anything?
32 AD was the perfect time to introduce this information because Pax Romana provided the stability and interconnectedness to allow this information to spread like wildfire. There is no other historical document of any kind more thoroughly documented than the Bible. What could possibly be added that would make a skeptic like you change his mind? That's right. Nothing. DNA samples? Video clips? Celebrity endorsements? Approval of councils of all the respected religious leaders of the entire Mediterranean basin? Sixty Minutes exposes? It wouldn't matter. You don't want to see the truth, so you of course won't.
Fact is, you have the single most pampered historical document collection in all of history. Nothing else comes close by an order of magnitude in terms of corroborating evidence and 5600 manuscripts dating to the same generation as the authors. Not to mention that the Dead Sea scrolls dated to 200 BC and discovered 2200 years later in 1947 prove that the bulk of the Bible has not changed at all in that long time.
The biggest thing that distinguishes the 66 documents from 44 authors collected in the Bible is that those authors did not use their writings to gain glory, wealth, and power. Most lived in poverty and died for their beliefs rather than recant their eyewitness accounts. Most were found credible by their contemporaries who preserved their accounts to the extreme levels of efforts - because they were viewed as holy.
There is simply no justification for most of the statements you have made here.
We do agree on one thing: Steemit needs a better way to allow a back-and-forth conversation! :o)
#payitforward @clevecross its a very interesting article you have written here, I myself am a devout Christian so it was a bit of a hard swallow lol but i read through nontheless as my commitment to #payitforward on my post, regarding questioning God this is something I dont do he is God after all however he always does reveal the answers to the questions that I have without me asking, for me science and religion are both mans system God through Jesus Christ brought the faith system to us :) be blessed my friend.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I tried to go middle of the road with it. There was more I felt myself wanting to say, but ultimately tried to keep it somewhat neutral. Thank you.
True. Science and Religion take turns being wrong throughout History.
But God's revelation in the Bible has never been proven wrong.