| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||||
| ||||
It was pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and presumably many others, that the the tides are in fact well understood as the gravitational pull of the moon on large bodies of water, and are periodic because the Moon's orbit is periodic, thanks to the conservation of angular momentum. Hopefully it was also pointed out that the Sun goes up and down because the Earth spins at a constant rate, also thanks to the conservation of momentum. But O'Reilly already had an equally sophisticated rebuttal ready:
I'm sure some "pinheads" have now also explained to him that the Moon is widely understood to have "gotten there" after being broken away from the Earth during an impact with a large asteroid early on in it's lifetime, the Sun was formed over millions of years from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust under gravity, and Mars doesn't have the Moon because, well, that's ridiculous, the moon was formed 36 million miles away as already mentioned, but it does have two moons of it's own which are believed to be asteroids which were "captured" when they approached Mars with the correct velocity and distance to be pulled into orbit by, you guessed it, gravity.
O'Reilly obviously isn't an idiot, though he may have an extreme misunderstanding of current scientific knowledge and what actually constitutes a legitimate question for scientific debate. And I don't want to argue that there aren't questions where invoking God could be a legitimate answer, or that science can or will explain everything without leaving room for the existence and influence of a deity. But in choosing to question things that are non-starters for debate among the scientific community, he employs an anti-scientific tactic that is all too common these days. He tries to give the impression that all science is merely theories, and that we don't have to believe any of it if we don't want to because it is no less speculative than religion. We, of course, do not have to believe anything that science tells us, but we ought to, because the vast majority of it is not speculative at all and engineering based on scientific knowledge has provided enormous benefits to society time and time again. The idea that the Moon causes the tides, for example, is not speculative because in essence it really only relies on the observations that gravity and the Moon both exist, the rest is just natural consequences of these two facts. Most scientific ideas are of the same nature, they rely only on empirical facts, and while there is a level where the deeper causes of certain phenomena are not completely explained, competing theories on how these phenomena arise will never change the fact that they exist.
However, the view that science is merely made up of theories, and that "theories" is synonymous with "speculations" has been pretty hard to shake. The prevalence of this idea can probably be partially explained by the fact that as kids we are taught about the plasticity of science in allowing for new theories when new data conflicts with a prevailing theory. However, this process only occurs at the deepest levels of inquiry, and has inevitably led only to even deeper understanding. So it should not be misunderstood as the idea that science cannot lead to certainties or that any scientific theory could completely change at any moment. Sadly, science continues to be undermined when people like Bill O'Reilly imply (often intentionally) that even its simplest and best understood explanations have no better grounding than any other explanation we might invent. These types of insinuations have been especially pernicious when it comes to issues like climate change, which is built around a lot of really well understood concepts. But despite being well understood, those that have something to gain by opposing measures to curb climate change have found it easy to sew doubts among the public because, hey, all these scientific theories are just guesses, right?
I'd like to see someone explain to O'Reilly, one by one, every phenomena that O'Reilly views as proof of God, until getting to the early stages of the universe and tiniest length scales. Then, maybe, we might get an interesting debate on the merits of religions and whether supernatural ideas can provide satisfactory explanations to our deepest questions about nature. But I don't see that happening. Anyway, here's Colbert's much more humorous take on O'Reilly's response (about halfway through the clip):
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Crisis in Egypt - Anderson Cooper & Bill O'Reilly | ||||
| ||||
My Dad has been confused for Bill O'Reilly in airports multiple times.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I just spent twenty minutes trying to find a proper picture of him to do a side-by-side comparison for all y'all. I guess it will have to wait for another day.
First off, I was just telling someone how my favorite time of the day in Stadium was around 10:30 in the winter when we'd watch Daily Show/Colbert and just bro out.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I didn't expect the second rebuttal clip to be as funny. But I was wrong!
Third, I realized the last time he was on the Daily Show that I love Neil deGrasse Tyson.
There's a meme based off of this now.
ReplyDelete