Watch this and learn something. And by “learn something,” I mean “my head hurts from Science but it feels so good”:

(via PhD Comics)

***Update***: Dr. Tyson has responded to this thread here.

…

This is weird for me to say: Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t get it.

In the video below, he claims to be an agnostic… but when you listen to his reasoning, it doesn’t seem like he knows the difference between an agnostic and an atheist.

[Agnostic refers] to someone who doesn’t know… but hasn’t yet really seen evidence for it… but is prepared to embrace the evidence if it’s there… but if it’s not, won’t be forced to have to think something that is not otherwise supported.

So he’s someone who won’t say definitively that god doesn’t exists, but he open to the evidence.

In other words, he’s an atheist… at least that’s the term I’ve always used for that definition.

Without going into (boring-to-me) philosophy that breaks the categories down even further (“He’s a weak atheist,” “He’s an agnostic atheist”), it sounds like Tyson is just trying to back away from using the A word.

To some extent, I understand that. He doesn’t want to be known to the public as an “atheist scientist” (like Richard Dawkins). He wants to be known as a scientist, period. There’s a huge advantage to that.

But one of the reasons so many of us respect Dr. Tyson is because he tells it like it is (and he’s so effective in the process). I have a hard time believing he just misunderstands the terminology (at least as it’s used by the general public).

He goes on to explain that one of the reasons he’s not an “atheist” is because the atheists he knows are fervent activists, fighting for that cause, debating god’s existence, etc. But again, that’s not what makes someone an atheist. You can be an atheist and never talk about it with anyone. If you don’t believe god exists, you’re an atheist. End of story. What you do with that belief is your business, but you don’t become a “bigger” atheist because you talk about it openly, and you’re not a “lesser” atheist if you don’t come out of the closet.

At the end of the video, he talks about how he wouldn’t join a group for people who don’t enjoy golf… as if all atheists do is sit around and not pray. As if there is no anti-atheist discrimination to fight against. As if we’re not opposing attempts to make this a “Christian nation.”

If people who didn’t play golf were discriminated against, then we’d make a bigger deal about that, too. But people who don’t play golf can still get elected to Congress all across the country. People who don’t believe in god are banned from even running for office in several states (at least in the books).

I’ve never said this before, but I’m really disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson after watching that video.

Had he just stuck to his opening statement of explaining that he doesn’t like labels — “the only ‘ist’ I am is an ‘scientist’” — it would’ve been fine. A copout perhaps, but a respectable copout. But hearing him elaborate on those ideas, he just fell into misguided definitions and false accusations we so often hear from Christian apologists. He should know better than that.

Am I off base?

What does Neil deGrasse Tyson say when he speaks in front of other space professionals?

You can find out in the video below, from when he gave the keynote address at the recent National Space Symposium (the actual talk begins at the 6:01 mark):

As always, if you see anything we should all watch, please leave the timestamps in the comments!

Just push play, turn the volume up, and then go back to whatever you were doing:

So, what’s it like being an atheist now? Go to the 8:07 mark

(Thanks to jrbutterfly31 for the link!)

dogmaticCURE is back with a new inspiring video, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, about the history of space exploration:

Makes you want to look out into a telescope, doesn’t it?

Over at Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham asked fellow Creationist Steve Golden to review a book promoting, among other things, the idea that evolution is real but God has a hand in the process.

Of course, this is all blasphemy to them because Christians who buy into theistic evolution are obviously the wrong kinds of Christians:

While we at Answers in Genesis acknowledge that one’s view on the origin of man is not a salvation issue, we do say that it is an authority issue. Believing in theistic evolution as a Christian means you reject the authority of God’s Word, because the creation account in Genesis teaches a literal six-day creation (Genesis 1). Even the idea of “theistic evolution” is problematic, because evolutionary ideas were created to explain a world without God. If we approach Scripture from the standpoint that it teaches absolute truth, then every branch of science must be interpreted in light of biblical teaching — not the other way around.

Because that’s how science works to them: You start with what you’re trying to prove and then try to jam together every piece of evidence you can find to support it, discarding anything that doesn’t fit your hypothesis.

Facts? We don’t need your stinkin’ facts when we got the Bible.

Scott Welty recently visited the Fermi National Laboratory (not far from Chicago) to sit in on a couple of presentations and he was shocked by what he saw: Actual science!

… here’s what I observed:

• Calm and logical presentations
• Polite and attentive audience
• An almost crushing critical eye on their own data (more on this)
• Respectively presenting results from the other detector and from the big machine at CERN without any high fiving or end zone dances (but that would have been kind of awesome).
• Questions being asked and answered without any shouting or interrupting.

… I watched as each group looked very hard for ways their data could be WRONG. That’s right. That’s the real scientific method. You have a hypothesis, you collect data, it may be suggestive of the hypothesis but before you go there you check the 999 ways you could be wrong…

Scott elaborates further on his observations at his site.

What a far cry from anything you’ll ever see Creationists do.