What happens if you ask an astrophysicist whether the Earth is flat? If that astrophysicist is Neil deGrasse Tyson, he first gives you a brutal side-eye that terrifies you to your core, before explaining the real reason why there are still people who believe the Earth is flat and we are at the center of the universe.
In a recent conversation with The Huffington Post, Tyson likened flat Earthers’ level of logic and understanding of the world to that of children who think people on TV know them.
“When you are a little child, you think they know you because you are the center of your own universe”, said Tyson, speaking with HuffPost’s Impact & Innovation managing editor, David Freeman. “And to mature out of that is very hard — not only when we grow up as humans, but also as we grow up as a civilization”.
Although the Earth seemed flat to people in earlier ages who could only see it from a limited vantage point, today we have several lines of evidence showing that our planet is round, including the Apollo program’s photos of a round Earth, Tyson added.
Most of humanity may have grown out of our ancestors’ immature view of the universe, but some of us seem to be lagging behind. Earlier this year, Tyson got into a Twitter battle with rapper B.o.B, who claimed that the Earth is flat and that he can prove this by using physics and math.
“I don’t mind that people don’t know things”, Tyson said. “But if you don’t know and you have the power of influence over others, that’s dangerous”.
He points the finger at the schools. “I blame the education system that can graduate someone into adulthood who cannot tell the difference between what is and is not true about this world”, Tyson said. (1)
Harmonia Philosophica has for a long time dealt with misconceptions about science, its relation with the philosophical notion of “truth” and the dogmatism hidden under very common “knowledge” like the “Earth is not at the center of the solar system” idea in astronomy. (read “Earth at the center of the Universe?”)
Tyson summarizes the whole philosophy of atheists quite well: They really want to believe they are unimportant (or they really want to deny that they are important) that they tend to overlook facts and simply impose dogmatic opinions as facts in order to satisfy their own psychological problems.
What you are on a planet looking at planets circling around you (yes, this is what you see when observing planets) the most logical thing to say is that these planets… circle around you. And yes, it is logical for a kid to see itself as the center of the universe. It should. We all should.
Modern world is a purely atheistic world. We live in a place where speaking in favor of a religion seems more and more out of… date, with “progressive” people swarming the academic positions and preaching the new religion of “scientism” (NOT science) and the love for the new gods of “randomness”, “purposeless” and “meaningless”.
Scientists and philosophers once relied on their intuition and fantasy to gain insight into important problems of their fields. Now they are just waiting to analyze… data. They forget that data analysis is always performed in the context of a specific theory and, thus, cannot lead to new innovative results.
We are full with astronomers looking with awe at the empty universe.
Without understanding that it is full.
We are full of psychologists who analyze the problems of the human soul.
Ο σύγχρονος κόσμος είναι ένας κόσμος υλιστικός. Και αυτό δεν το βλέπουν οι άθεοι σαν δογματισμό αλλά – το αντίθετο – σαν “πρόοδο”. Δηλαδή έχουν αναγάγει ένα ΔΟΓΜΑ σε υπέρτατη αλήθεια και έχουν και το θράσος να ομιλούν για “ελευθερία σκέψης”. Το “Φωνάζει ο κλέφτης για να φοβηθεί ο νοικοκύρης” ποτέ δεν ήταν πιο επίκαιρο.
Οι επιστήμονες και οι φιλόσοφοι παλιά πολλές φορές είχαν κάνει ανακαλύψεις ή είχαν βοηθήσει την επιστήμη ή τον τομέα τους να προοδεύσει μέσω ενόρασης/ διαίσθησης. Τώρα όλοι περιμένουν χρόνια να αναλύσουν τα “δεδομένα”. Ξεχνάνε ότι η ανάλυση των δεδομένων γίνεται στα πλαίσια συγκεκριμένης θεωρίας και άρα όσο και να τα αναλύεις δεν θα ξεφύγεις από το μοντέλο στο οποίο ήδη βρίσκεσαι.
Ψιλά γράμματα όλα αυτά για έναν κόσμο που έχει ψυχολόγους αλλά δεν πιστεύει – από ΔΟΓΜΑΤΙΣΜΟ – στην ύπαρξη της ψυχής.
Ψιλά γράμματα όλα αυτά για έναν κόσμο που έχει συνείδηση αλλά βλέπει – από ΔΟΓΜΑΤΙΣΜΟ – το σύμπαν σαν να είναι «σκοτεινό».
Civilization is built with faith, not with denial.
Culture is cultivated with affirmation, not with negation.
Societies are founded on trust and love, not on distrust and hate.
Science is based on free thought and love for the quest for truth, not axiomatic dogmatism (even when this dogmatism is related to what we call “logic” or “proof”) or obsessed blind acceptance (even when this dogmatism is related to what we call “logic” or “proof”).
New atheism is not dead. New atheism was just never alive. Not because it never had any logical sound arguments (which it did not). But most important of all because it was never based on love for something but on hate and negation for something. Never anything starting with the negation-related “‘-a” (Gr. Στερητικό άλφα) flourished as an idea. And no, a-theism did not become the exception.
Since as early as 17th century – the era of René Descartes and Benedict De Spinoza – opposition to the church and faith in “logic” was starting to be the new fashion. [1] Later on, in an era of revolutions during the 1789-1848 period, the reaction to the secular powers became synonym to reaction to the church as well, since the latter had been closely related to the first for so long. [2] Finally and after many “battles”, science finally seemed to have “won”. Everyone cheered. Together with the democratization of the world, the rise of atomism and the obviation of the privileges of the few, the church was defeated. The masses had – at last – a saying in how things were going to be in the world. And it was going to be a “logical” world at last!
But…
Was the Enlightenment enlightenment or just a… blackout? How many times had the masses the correct answer to ANY philosophical problem? What will we see if we look at the history of human civilization? Did the world “suddenly” progress in the 19th century or did we progress thousands of year ago and ever since we are in a constant decay?
Ancient Greece: Man started to wonder about his existence. Philosophy was born, along with theatre, tragedy, arts, geometry. Man questions and tries to answer big metaphysical questions. Nature is in the center of human thought. Man simply participates in the marvel of existence.
33 A.C. A man died for the sins of all people. The world seemed to change. Love appeared for the first time at the very core of a new philosophical system. Man can be God. A new era seemed to emerge.
Temporarily. The years that followed humans forgot the teaching of this Man. And the world became darker and darker every passing minute… Rome fall from the barbarians. Constantinople fell from the barbarians. And later on was completely destroyed from the other barbarians of the East.
The remains of Christianism were strong enough to act as foundation of the European civilization [3], but not strong enough to withhold the tide of darkness stemming from the inner soul of the barbarians. The barbarians who never stopped worshiping the moon or the sun, instead of the light within our soul. A few enlightened (with the true meaning of the word) men continued to spread and live by the teachings of Jesus but few paid attention.
17th century. While science and logic were on the rise, few people noticed the deafening silence of one of the wisest thinkers of that time. Pascal [Blaise Pascal] stood silent and troubled [4] next to the hordes of people enthusiastically screaming “rationalism” with no one paying attention. The masses had already decided on the path they would follow…
18th century. The world’s first freemasons’ Grand Lodge was established. [12] The new religion without God demanded space. [13] Some enlightened people still advocated the logic of believing in God (e.g. Newton) but the many were already too excited to listen. Some few suggested there were limits to the all mighty logic (e.g. Kant) but even fewer listened. Philosophers keep talking about how everything must be based on logic and not faith. While science and logic set the foundations of their imperium, many cheered when Rousseau [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] talked against the church but few paid much attention when the same man spoke against science, as if it were the greatest evil of all times. [5] (this is why wise people should talk simply to the stupid, because the latter will use whatever they like and throw away the rest) Man was now considered as tabula rasa and should be taught nihilism, should be made to understand that he is just a gear in the vast mechanism of the soulless universe.
19th century. The era of revolutions against the establishment, part of which was the church. The era of optimism. The era of communism. The era of logic. Nietzsche [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche] wrote that God is dead and everyone cheered. Few people understood that the great thinker wrote that phrase as a sad conclusion [4] and not as a triumphant cry for science, which he hated as much as he hated rationalism (he was the founder of irrationalism after all).
For sure the church made mistakes. But the mistakes were due to NOT following the teachings of Jesus and not because it did! Unfortunately few noticed that and the hordes of barbarians found saw a great opportunity to express their hatred and the “My arm aches, let’s cut the head” mentality prevailed. The City [Κωνσταντινούπολη] had fallen. The barbarians won. Now they were just solidifying their power. The poems of Marx to Satan and the image of Lucifer on the cover of the first Encyclopedia of Diderot clearly show the character of a heavily anti-Christianic era. The massive eugenics experiments of the West ling before Hitler (experiments which are actually continued until today), show that the barbarians have won. And the participation of the Clinton’s head campaign manager for the 2016 elections in satanistic dinners along with other prominent members of society, no matter how the establishment tries to disguise them as “art“, show that this era of darkness is here too stay. People is the new power. And the new power wants anything old destroyed. Not because it is wrong. But simply because it is old. God, the One, society are dead. Now the individual (or nature) is the new god.
Belief in the ability of human to control things. This was the main premise of magic. This is the main premise of science. The distance from Romanticism [6] to Marxism [7] is so small. When people can have more cars, why even bother listening to “crazy” people like Kierkegaard [Søren Aabye Kierkegaard] or Shestov [Lev Isaakovich Shestov]? The ideological victory of communism [8] established the destruction of the church and Christianity which so many regard as the “absolute evil”, while in fact it was the basis of the western civilization. Magic and the faith in imaginary things (e.g. parallel universes, fields [9] etc) won over the pure, primitive and all honest acceptance of one’s empirical data [10] (seeing the resurrection, experiencing miracles, feeling God, feeling that I exist as a conscious being, knowing that I have free will et cetera). Belief in a new system of ethics rose. A new system of ethics where man as an individual is the new god. The good of society or the cosmos seem irrelevant to the “freedom” of the individual. And of course with no one setting the foundations, each and every one sets his own. Belief in Logic returned. But people had forgotten that logic as founded by Aristotle supported the existence of a First Mover. Having forgotten how Christianity helped create universities as we know them today (part of which were many atheists, like Adam Weishaupt) and was the basis of Humanism in Europe, people “started” believing in the freedom of different opinion for the sake of… difference. But only if the different opinion was non-Christian. [read Religion and Science Unification – Towards religional science, Harmonia Philosophica for the fake cases of Hypatia and Galileo] The world started becoming more logical and we forgot that the most important things – love, emotions, fantasy, inspiration, acceptance, forgiveness, axioms, art, (autoanaphorical) consciousness, ethics, life itself – are not based on logic.
Everybody think that enlightenment showed the way to progress (a Christian idea by the way) through the return to the ancient Greek philosophers but no one wondered for the obvious: if the ancient Greeks had all the answers, then why did they have so much discrimination, oppression and problems? (not to mention… religion) Everybody think that enlightenment showed the way to freedom of the individual, but no one wondered for the obvious: freedom of which individual and from what? We are all part of the cosmos (One, God). How can we be free from Him? Everybody think that enlightenment showed the way to light. But since when does the lights of stars at night have logic? Everybody think that enlightenment rationalized everything. But what is the rationale behind a tear of love? Everybody thought that enlightenment proved to be the end of the “disease” of faith. But isn’t that what drives a scientist believe in the axioms he uses? And how bad is faith in your fellow human and in love? How much “proof” do we need to believe in it? The evolution of thought is a good thing. However, it should be gradual and controlled, under the rule of reason and good sense and not under the shouts of hatred of a social group (anti-Christians) against the others.
The masses won. And they imposed their own illogical logic as the only true logic. The world became cold again as it was in the beginning of civilization. In a forest illuminated by the moon again, man is free to do whatever he wants – but he is already dead inside.
Darkness engulfed the light.
And stole its name…
References
Science and Religion – Some historical perspectives, John Hedley Brooke, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
The era of revolutions 1789-1848, E.J. Hobsbawm, National Bank Cultural Foundation, Athens, 2008. [p. 308-329]
Important note: Even though it is true that generalizations are to be avoided, they are usually the only possible tool to use when one wishes to analyze and understand a field as broad as the evolution of human philosophical intellect regarding belief in God. Most of the times, the tree makes you lose sight of the forest. Anyone wishing to go deeper into specifics can start his quest from the Religion and Science unification – Towards religional science article or from the List of Articles of Harmonia Philosophica here and here.
“Atheism is a valid freedom of conscience position”
OK, so is ANYTHING else.
“Do not attack it as anything else”
“ANYTHING” else? What does that even mean? Does atheism has a special immunity privilege? Surely not.
“Although it has characteristics similar to those of religion (so does Rotary), it is not a religion”
So, I will not attack atheism as a religion. (and actually why not being a religion is something good? Civilization has evolved within a religious environment after all) I will attack it as a set of beliefs. (and this is indeed the characteristic of a religion) Which is exactly what it is.
In particular, atheism is a set of beliefs which are mostly based on the philosophical DOGMA of materialism and the mechanistic view of nature – without that limiting it’s set of beliefs of course in any way. Most (if not all) atheists BELIEVE that the brain is producing what we call “consciousness” and that we are all bound to the physical laws of matter (hence what we call “free will” is an illusion). Atheists do not believe in a Creator for the Universe. Because they BELIEVE in a universe which existed for ever. And as it is mentioned in another philosophy post (in the same forum where I found the first… diamond I presented in this article), they should provide evidence for this claim. Atheists do BELIEVE that physical death is the end. (even though there have been evidence of the consciousness not being bound to just the brain)
All in all atheists believe in many things, as all people do. (I would be pleased and surprised to find atheists who do not believe in the above)
These things they believe are according to my opinion obstacles for the spiritual elevation of human kind, since they reduce our existence to a mere “machine-like” random and with no purpose existence – not too different than super-computers which happened to exist. (but computers are designed by someone – oups! wrong metaphore… hehehe…)
Religion had for a long time been the cradle of science. And remember that science was not even separate from religion for thousands of years – not until the fake-hero story of Galileo (read Feyerabend for the true nature of this case). It is not accidental after all that all civilization was developed by societies holding some kind of religion – from ancient Greeks to the Christian Europe. (one could mention Chinese civilization as an exception, but one cannot discard the deep spirituality of Confucianism) The first universities were monasteries and the lust of people to understand the mind of God is what drove scientific progress for centuries. Dawkins himself teaches and speaks against religion in a College of… St Mary.
Surely the advancement of science can be based on mere curiosity.
But apes have curiosity as well.
Trying to reach apotheosis by understanding God is surely a greater motive…
