I Don’t Usual Talk About This Topic…

But two things happened this week, my brother was talking about a book he is reading by a physicist who tries to prove that there is life after death and the other thing was watching Bill Moyers talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe.

The first didn’t interest me because I have my own beliefs about life after death. But deGrasse Tyson interview interested me and prompted this post.

The first part of the show is an excellent discussion of dark matter and multiple universes,

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:   …And if we have another universe adjacent to ours, it could be that these sites [Dark Matter] where we see extra gravity is ordinary gravity in a parallel universe. And here we are, looking at it mysteriously like, "What is this?" It's like the blind man touching the elephant. "I don't know what this whole thing is, but here I can describe this part of it. And it's kind of textured, and it's, no, no, no, no, no, this got, it's smooth and hard." And, you know, you can't see the whole elephant. Maybe the elephant is ordinary gravity in another universe and we're feeling it and we're making stuff up just to account for it.

BILL MOYERS: You think there could be another universe?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don't see why not. Because back when we thought Earth was alone in the universe, we knew that there were other planets, that the Earth is just a planet, one of many. "Well, the sun is surely special." No, the sun is one of a hundred billion other suns. So, the galaxy, the Milky Way. No, the galaxy is one of hundred billion galaxies. How about the universe?

We have philosophical precedent to suggest that why should nature make anything in ones? Okay?
Everything else we ever thought was unique or special, well, we found more of them. So philosophically, it's not unsettling to imagine more than one universe.

We also have good theoretical grounds for suggesting the existence of a multiverse. Where our universe is just one of some countless number of other universes coming in and out of existence, with slightly different laws of physics within them. That makes it a little dangerous. Because we are held together, involved in a universe where we work. Where we work physically. If you want to visit another universe, I would, like, you know, send something else ahead of you.

It is like deGrasse Tyson said, we are a blind man trying to make sense of something that we can’t see. We can possible see the effects of the other universes but we cannot see them. He goes on to talk about how we describe things to other people,

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, so there you're stuck with the analogy of the biggest explosion you know, using that to describe something that's even bigger. Which is hard to do, right? I mean, not to get morbid on you, but I was four blocks from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I live downtown. And I was trying to describe to others the sound of the collapse of 107-story building. And it is not like anything else. So I can say, "Well, imagine two trains colliding." But how many of us even have heard or seen that? Whatever that is, it's more than that. So you're stuck. If the biggest explosion we've made on Earth is the hydrogen bomb, and then you say it's a cosmic hydrogen bomb, it is, I think saying it's a cosmic hydrogen bomb cheapens the event. Yeah, it's way bigger than--

Then deGrasse Tyson begins to talk about the Bible…

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don't, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them. So, for example, if you knew nothing about science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account of nature, that's what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right, because that's what happens during the Revelation.

You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don't know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, "Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it." Then you'd say things like, "Oh, well they didn't really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively."

So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It's the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we're good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.

And that is how I look at the Bible, like trying to explain an elephant to a blind man. How do you explain a billion years to someone who may only count to a hundred? When your world is maybe to the next village over, a flood that encompasses your valley looks like your whole world. Not to eat pork or shellfish made sense because they had no idea that these little things like plankton or bacteria or viruses or parasites even existed. They couldn’t fit their minds around such an idea, they were the blind man.

I have a problem with people of who take a literally view of the Bible and other documents from the past. Our knowledge and science has greatly changed. Do you even think that when they wrote the Second Amendment to our Constitution that they could even dream of a gun that fired several hundred rounds a minute? To them a gun fired maybe one round a minute if the person was really fast loading the musket.
In two thousand years, we know how to prevent and treat trichinosis, we can treat leprosy, we know that slavery is wrong and we know that our sexual orientation and gender identity is not a choice but a part of our being. We understand the diversity of nature.

And for the record, yes I do believe in God, I just don’t believe in any one religion. I believe it is more important how you live your life and how you treat others.