you didnt watch the vids did you?
No, at least not entirely, because 1) some of what he was saying didn't make sense and 2) after stopping the video and searching for something he might have written on the topic, I found his website which includes his articles on Newton, Science, Religion, etc. and even has transcripts of his interviews and appearances. That pretty much told me everything I needed to know about the videos and a good deal more. For example, in "
Footprints in the Sands of Science" where he discusses Islam and science and makes two rather fundamental errors. The first problem is a terminological one.
The issue is his use of the word "science" (a confusion I hope is accidental, in that either due to certain ignorance of the history of the philosophy of science, including modern philosophy of science, he didn't realize that what he describes as "science" isn't actually that, or he was simplifying and didn't realize that in doing so he created a false impression).
He states, "Beginning in the 700s and continuing for nearly 400 years—while Europe's Christian zealots were disemboweling heretics—the Abbasid caliphs created a thriving intellectual center of arts, sciences, and medicine for the Islamic world in the city of Bahgdad. Muslim astronomers and mathematicians built observatories, designed advanced timekeeping tools, and developed new methods of mathematical analysis and computation. They preserved the extant works of science from ancient Greece and elsewhere and translated them into Arabic. They collaborated with Christian and Jewish scholars. And Baghdad became a center of enlightenment. Arabic was, for a time, the lingua franca of science."
For around a century, philosophers of science and historians began to write not just about the philosophical bases (or lack thereof) behind various interpretations of science and its methods, or simply document the history of achievements. They did continue to write about these, but also began to write about the history of the philosophy of science itself. In addition, the social sciences also produced research on what exactly is behind cultural worldview differences and how these shape perceptions.
Two results are important here. The first is that "science" is not simply achievements. Throughout history, various motivations (military, economic, etc.) have resulted in great minds developing advanced intellectual approaches, technological innovations, and other things we commonly associate with science. The Greeks, more than any other ancient culture, focused on geometry, the Islamic empire furthered the accomplishments of the Greeks and created algebra. The chinese developed gun powder. The Europeans, in the "dark ages" developed a number of sophisticated achievements of their own, such as crop rotation. The list goes on.
None of this, however, is "science". Science is not intellectual or technological achievement, but a particular framework of understanding of the universe which allows a systematic approach designed to uncover how it works. Most of the developments in various cultures of a mathematical nature were related to record keeping or to engineering. Technological innovations were for applications in combat, for city planning and other civil uses, for agriculture, and other applications. Science certainly has applications, but
it is not defined by applications but by a systematic method for discovery.
In order to have such a method, the first necessity is that it's worth it. This is fundamentally related to the OP, actually, as a good deal of whether or not it is "worth it" stems from how progress is understood. If a given culture believes that the cosmos is pretty much unchanging or is cyclical, then "progress" doesn't have much meaning. Ecclesiastes reflects a common cross-cultural take:
[9] The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
[10] Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
[11] There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
How can a desire for discovery exist when the cultural understanding of life and the cosmos reflects the above?
The second necessity is that it's possible, in that there must be a belief that the universe actually
obeys certain "natural laws" which can be discovered. If Allah or the Gnostic "true god" are supposed to be beyond understanding, then physical laws can't really exist, because as God created them, then being able to understand them entails understanding God (which is supposed to be impossible). Hence, there are no laws. Similar views existed in far Eastern philosophies without a creator god at all.
The Greeks certainly had a sort of "prototype" science, but "natural science" was viewed with enough distaste and suspician that one of the charges Socrates was executed for was "natural science". They also lacked an understanding of an ordered, predictable cosmos, as well as a teleological view of it. So despite all the treatises on things like "atoms" and "elements", they didn't experiment. It was all theoretical; a deductive and inductive approach to developing a "logical" cosmology, rather than a method for discovery how that cosmos functioned.
Which brings us to the second problem. He describes religion as at best not stopping scientific progress, but the norm (according to him) is still that religion either hinders, reverses, or stops scientific progress. But he only gets this by misusing the term "science" and by ignoring what makes it possible for a culture to go beyond individual developments for particular purposes to the creation of modern science.
We don't know what other things might allow for this, because it only happened once (and it need not have). I outined this earlier: the nature and state of intellectual study in the around the 16th century was the product of several important developments which occured at various rates and times, but which provided the necessary impetus and framework for science
. And religion played an intricate, essential role in that development. It provided the understanding of an ordered universe, a reason for investigating and experimenting to understand that order, and even the idea of "progress" thanks to the replacement of the endtimes of early Christianity with a teleological cosmology and model of history.
By equating "science" with individual, disconnected innovations, studies, and technologies, and by ignoring the literature on what made actual "science" possible, Neil deGrasse Tyson gets his "religion is at best irrelevant".
And perhaps today that is true. But his various diatribes about science being held up because, for example, Newton was worried about the religious implications of his work are ridiculous. Apart from anything else (i.e., all the above), we find modern physicists doing the same exact thing he berates Newton for, only instead of religion they abandon both theory and experimental results for other reasons that at least border on the religious:
A number of academic conferences, from one held at Cambridge University in 2001 to another at the same place (different college, same university) in 2005, but in particular one held at Stanford in 2003 resulted in the publication of a volume which shares the name of the 2003 conference: "Universe or Multiverse?"...
In this introduction to the volume, Carr notes the following:
"Despite the growing popularity of the multiverse proposal, it must be admitted that many physicists remain deeply uncomfortable with it. The reason is clear: the idea is highly speculative and, from both a cosmological and a particle physics perspective, the reality of a multiverse is currently untestable. Indeed, it may always remain so, in the sense that astronomers may never be able to observe the other universes with telescopes a and particle physicists may never be able to observe the extra dimensions with their accelerators...
For these reasons, some physicists do not regard these ideas as coming under the purvey of science at all. Since our confidence in them is based on faith and aesthetic considerations (for example mathematical beauty) rather than experimental data, they regard them as having more in common with religion than science. This view has been expressed forcefully by commentators such as Sheldon Glashowm Martin Gardner and George Ellis, with widely differing metaphysical outlooks. Indeed, Paul Davies regards the concept of a multiverse as just as metaphysical as that of a Creator who fine-tuned a single universe for our existence. At the very least the notion of the multiverse requires us to extend our idea of what constitutes legitimate science.
