While informing his friendly Berkeley audience that the world must not have been designed because of all its evil and dysteleology (there are earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and lightning strikes, and for every beautiful waterfall there is a deadly newt hiding under a rock), the Director of the Hayden Planetarium also reminds his fellow evolutionists that they are the “truth-seekers.” [7:10 in thisvideo] Tyson is an entertaining speaker but this was not meant to be funny. The lesson here is that evolutionists are so confident and convincing not because they are good liars, but because they actually believe their lies. Read more
11 Replies to “Neil deGrasse Tyson: We are the “truth-seekers””
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Arguments from evil and dysteleology against ID strike me as myopic and unimaginative. Materialists always say that this is a universe with no purpose, no meaning, no destiny; red in tooth and claw. Yet on the other hand they dream of a utopia where there is no pain, no suffering, no poverty.
Newsflash for Neil deGrasse Tyson, “We’re all going to die!” Most of us in fairly unpleasant ways. That’s the human condition. For the theist, death is the result of sin and according to Chesterton, orginal sin is the only self-evident dogma.
Strong cases for teleology could easily be made for most of the disasters Tyson lists: earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis are the result of tectonic activity which is necessary for the recycling of the essential surface elements of life. Then there is lightning, without which there would be no nitrates and therefore no protein. To borrow the language from origin of life liturature, one can image how floods, tornadoes and hurricanes could also contribute in a positive way to the biosphere. Yes, bad things accompany these events but the benefits far outweigh the evil.
One more favorite “dysteleological” entity of Tyson is our own eye vs the perfect eye of the giant squid. I don’t know what Dr. Tyson’s idea of feminine beauty is but I’m damn glad my wife has the eyes she does.
Tyson is clearly clueless in this area and it is unfortunate that he keeps spouting such nonsense.
Stick to Astronomy, Neil, for everyone’s sake. It will also help you avoid embarrassment.
It’s disheartening that this fallacious argument against design – by pointing to the existence of evil – is even used by the people that are supposed or considered to be of high caliber.
It seems, by such reasoning, they would be consistent to argue that the guillotine or nuclear weapons were not designed because they are instruments of death.
A minor correction: Lightning is responsible for fixing only a very small portion of the nitrogen in our soil. Most of the heavy lifting on that score is done by microbes.
But in claiming that earthquakes, disease, war, etc., represent a failure of the Designer to accomplish the goal of His design, atheists always posit some goal that no God I read of in Scripture ever set forth. So their argument is a straw man right out of the starting gate.
Pity Elvis deGrasse Tyson. His entourage and fans will never let him know he’s too intellectually bloated and lazy and uninformed on the matter. Why should they? He entertains them in the way they like even if he’s packing extra pounds and his gut hangs out from under that shirt. They paid to see a show and they darn well better hear his old worn hits and not cuts from any new, better albums. Life is good if not entirely predictable in Darwin’s Vegas.
It seems like Tyson is now doubling down off his usual bad design argument and now resorting to the evil argument. It seems like the more he talks the worse his side looks lol, so keep talking Tyson , keep talking 🙂
EvilSnack, thank you for the correction. So surely lightning played an almost exclusive roll with regard to nitrates in the origin of life.
When Neil deGrasse Tyson states,,,
,,,Tyson is running headlong into a claim that Christ made about Himself as to being ‘The Truth’:
So is Tyson saying that he is seeking Christ in his seeking of truth? Apparently not! So what does Tyson actually mean when he says that he and, I’m presuming, ‘scientists in general’ are ‘truth seekers’? And what does ‘the truth’ even look like to an atheist who holds a self-defeating naturalistic worldview where every claim for truth is subordinated to the claim that truth itself is relative?
Which again begs the question, ‘If ‘Truth’ cannot be grounded in a naturalistic worldview, since every possibility and its countervailing antecedent can be true, what does it mean to ‘seek truth’ in the naturalistic philosophy?’. Well, contrary to what Tyson thinks, Tyson, as Dr. Hunter has pointed out, is not really seeking truth so much since he already, deep down, believes he knows ‘the Truth’ beforehand. And that ‘truth’ to Tyson, and to other Naturalists down through the ages, (such as Darwin himself in ‘Origin of Species’), is as such:
Yet evil requires good to exist in order for evil to exist in the first place. So how can the existence of evil in the world possibly negate the existence of good in the world rather than affirm its existence?
Thus, Tyson’s claim that the existence of evil negates Theism from being true requires that Theism itself be true in the first place! i.e. it is another, in a long line, of self-defeating naturalistic propositions.
But, since truth cannot be grounded in Naturalism, save by the hidden presupposition of Theistic claims in Naturalism in the first place, what does it REALLY mean to ‘seek truth’? Well, a lot of atheists would claim, such as Hawking, that ‘seeking truth’ would involve seeking the hypothetical mathematical ‘Theory of Everything’. But, as Godel proved, and as Hawking himself admitted and subsequently forgot, truth cannot be grounded within a mathematical ‘Theory Of Everything’ since any mathematics that is specific enough to have counting numbers within it cannot contain ‘the Truth’ within itself but is dependent on a outside cause in order to derive its truthfulness:
Thus Naturalists/Atheists cannot appeal to a platonic realm of abstract mathematical ideas in their ‘seeking of truth’ since ‘truth’ cannot be grounded in any mathematics that is specific enough to account for the universe. This would seem to be rather obvious point to make:
Indeed, assuming naturalism as the source for the truthfulness inherent within mathematics leads to the frightful proposition, because of the ‘randomness’ postulate at the base of naturalism, that at any moment our mathematical models may fail to give us an accurate account of reality. i.e. ‘Random’ Naturalism simply does not guarantee us that our mathematical models will remain consistent tomorrow with the reality they purport to describe to us today:
And yet Naturalists/Atheists, apparently completely oblivious to the chaos in science that would ensue if random variance were actually found to be in the fundamental constants of the universe, continue to be surprised every time they find that the constants have not ‘randomly’ varied as they presuppose they should according to their base naturalistic (i.e. random) worldview:
Indeed Einstein and Wigner both expressed wonder that mathematics should describe reality so accurately when, according to naturalism, this should not be a-priorily expected:
Yet, to go back to square one in Tyson running headlong into a claim that Christ made about Himself as to being ‘The Truth’,,,
,,, Can what we have reviewed so far support such a radical claim that Christ made about Himself? Yes! I believe Christ’s claim is substantiated by the following. If we allow that ‘God can play the role of a person’, (for who could deny Him that possibility “IF” He exists), as even the author of the incompleteness theorem himself allowed that God could do,,
,, ‘if’ we allow that possibility that ‘God can play the role of a person’, (and how could a person who believes in the infinite multiverse deny at least that possibility?) ‘if’ we allow that possibility then we find a very credible reconciliation between the finite world of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity and the infinite world of ‘timelessness’ of Quantum Mechanics. A very credible reconciliation that does not wind up in the ‘anything goes’ epistemological pit of logical absurdities as string theory, m-theory and the multiverse does,,,
,,,in fact, unlike all these outlandish multiverse scenarios which have no empirical support (and which undermine our ability to rationally practice science in the first place), we find a reconciliation between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that has a surprising amount of empirical support. For instance, it is now shown that the process in which the image was formed on the Shroud of Turin had to be a ‘quantum process’, not a classical process:
I suggest, if scientists want to find the source for the supernatural, ‘Quantum’, light which made the “3D – photographic negative” image on the Shroud, then they should look to the thousands of documented Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) in Judeo-Christian cultures. It is in their testimonies that you will find mention of an indescribably bright ‘Light’ or ‘Being of Light’ who is always described as being of a much brighter intensity of light than the people had ever seen before.
Of note;
Even though the atheistic researchers in this following study found evidence directly contradicting what they had expected to find for Near Death Experiences, they were/are so wedded to the materialistic/naturalistic view of reality, the view of “I’ am my body”, that it seems sadly impossible for them to even conceive of the fact that they may be wrong in their naturalistic presuppositions, and to even admit to the possibility of the reality/truth of the soul, i.e. to the “I’ am a soul distinct from my body” view of reality.
Verse and Music;
Corrected reference to bottom of post #8
Thus Naturalists/Atheists cannot appeal to a platonic realm of abstract mathematical ideas in their ‘seeking of truth’ since ‘truth’ cannot be grounded in any mathematics that is specific enough to account for the universe. This would seem to be rather obvious enough point to make:
GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – Oct. 2010
Excerpt: This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world,,,
Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency – a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them. This is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Anything else invokes random miracles as an explanatory principle and spells the end of scientific rationality.,,,
Universes do not “spontaneously create” on the basis of abstract mathematical descriptions, nor does the fantasy of a limitless multiverse trump the explanatory power of transcendent intelligent design. What Mr. Hawking’s contrary assertions show is that mathematical savants can sometimes be metaphysical simpletons. Caveat emptor.
http://www.washingtontimes.com.....arguments/
Mathematics and Physics – A Happy Coincidence? – William Lane Craig – video
http://www.metacafe.com/w/9826382
1. If God did not exist the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence.
2. The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence.
3. Therefore, God exists.
Indeed, assuming naturalism as the source for the truthfulness inherent within mathematics leads to the frightful proposition, because of the ‘randomness’ postulate at the base of naturalism, that at any moment our mathematical models may fail to give us an accurate account of reality.,,,