Physicist Limited

Neil deGrasse Tyson & the Conflation of Physics & Pretentious Philosophy

Background:

A star-gazer by age nine, Neil deGrasse Tyson graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, then went on to earn a B.A. in physics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia University. He has since received twenty honorary doctorates and more commendations than a one-page article can list, including People magazine's "Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive."

He's hosted PBS's NOVA ScienceNOW, the science-comedy hybrid StarTalk, and the 2014 remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, to name a few, and has so far written eleven books. Since 1995, he has served as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Reason for Surveillance:

Tyson is an excellent communicator, blending astrophysics and science history with cool graphics and folksy lingo. When he sticks to science, he's delightfully informative and really good at making the complex understandable. The problems come in when he laces science with bad philosophy and spins out righteous indignation over those "others"—meaning the unenlightened who hold other viewpoints, scientific, philosophical, or political.

Tyson rightly encourages intellectual humility. Here are a few things he admits that he and science are ignorant on:

• We don't know how the universe came into existence.

• We have no idea what happened before the beginning.

• We don't know what happened just after the beginning.

• We don't know how life got started.

• Most of the universe is made of stuff about which we are clueless (e.g., dark matter and dark energy).

• After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

"Ignorance," he writesin his most recent book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, "is the natural state of mind for a research scientist." This is all well and good and consistent with epistemic humility.

But at the same time, he's waging a war on "ignorance," by which he basically means non-materialism in science. At a 2006 symposium called "Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival," Tyson waxed apoplectic over data showing that 15 percent of America's elite scientists profess belief in a personal God. This is a deep challenge, he stresses to his colleagues. The question they should be asking is, "How come this number isn't zero? . . . They should be the subject of everybody's investigation. [This matter of scientists believing in God] is something that we can't just sweep under the rug."

Most Egregious Dishonesty:

Tyson has also constructed an inaccurate and dishonest case against ID. He rightly notes that some of the greatest minds in science believed in God. But he wrongly claims that their religion closed the doors to scientific discovery. (His 2014 Cosmos series—watched by millions of viewers—was roundly criticized for rewriting history in order to promote the warfare myth—the idea that religion has opposed science.) By this route he imperiously asserts, "Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent Design is a philosophy of ignorance."

Even granting that Tyson is using the word "ignorant" in two different contexts, it is clear that he aims to label ID as science-stopping ignorance. I see two possible routes he could have taken to draw his conclusion: Either (1) he has not familiarized himself with ID by seeking to understand the scientific arguments its theorists present, or (2) he understands ID and knowingly misrepresents it. The former is delinquent scientifically; the latter is delinquent morally. Neither reflects well on Tyson or bodes well for his followers.

I don't necessarily agree that after physics, everything else is opinion. But either way, Tyson would do well to study some good philosophy. And to learn the difference between physics, facts, and his own pretentious opinions.