Cosmos, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

I watched part of the first part of Cosmos, a series about (what else) the cosmos, on Fox TV and also on the National Graphic Channel, on Sunday evenings, with Neil deGrasse Tyson as narrator. This is an upgrade of a previous series, with the same name, with Carl Sagan as narrator, which may have been the most widely watched TV series of all time. It looks like the new one is going to be a great series, with great graphics, and magnificent subject matter, but Tyson unfortunately started it off by quoting Sagan, who said that "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." (Cosmos, p. 4. New York, Random House, 1980.) That's an interesting statement. It may even be true, although I personally don't believe it, because the Bible contradicts it -- the Bible says that there is a God who is superior to the cosmos. And it's not a scientific statement at all. It's a philosophical statement, one that can't be proved or disproved by science. Sagan didn't do any experiments that showed it to be true. Neither did Tyson, or anyone else.

Here's the Wikipedia page on the new series. The Sagan series also has a Wikipedia article -- see the "previous series" link above.

Thanks for reading.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Intelligent Design

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer and author (His recent Death by Black Hole was number 96 in sales on February 25, 2007, according to Amazon.) wrote an essay on the matter of claiming that God made something, when we have no current explanation for it. Here's Tyson's web page, and here's the Wikipedia article on him.

I saw him discussing the essay on C-Span, and he said that he didn't want to enter the debate over Intelligent Design, because others were doing so, but then he felt that he could make a contribution. Hence the essay.

Here's part of his third sentence: "a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding." He cites Ptolemy, who, says Tyson, invoked Zeus to explain the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. He also cites Isaac Newton, who invoked God to explain why the planetary orbits were stable, in spite of the gravitational pull of each planet on the others. Laplace, says Tyson, later found an explanation for the stability, and, when asked why his explanation didn't mention God, famously said that he had no need of that hypothesis.

Tyson's next-to-last sentence: "I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity."

There is a danger in thinking in the way that Tyson describes. But the bigger danger goes back, apparently, at least to Ptolemy. That is the danger of assuming that, because we think we understand something, that God had nothing to do with it. That's like me saying that, because I understand the rules of basketball, that it sprang up spontaneously on ESPN. Basketball has a history. It was invented, and refined.* God is just as much the God of 2 plus 2 as He is the God of infinity, DNA, and black holes.

Tyson hasn't ruled out God. He doesn't claim to have, although I suspect that he doesn't believe in His existence. However intelligent we are, God was there first, and designed the phenomena that make us possible. Can we prove this? I don't think so, but we can't disprove it, either. We can believe it, though, and I do.

*I have made a few modest proposals for changing the rules of basketball, but, so far, they have been ignored.