Not all readers are defending NdGT:
Did Tyson actually say, “I don’t have a problem with these philosophical questions, just give me a way to test it.”? An interesting statement, given that theoretical physics has drifted quite far from that ideal. I saw Tyson once on Colbert, enthusiastically advocating theories of “string theory”, the “multiverse”, and the existence of uncountable parallel universes. All of these are notable for their lack of experimental validation, even more so for their lack of possibility of experimental validation. They are philosophical positions, but such weak ones that for anyone to take them seriously, it must be made to appear that they have the full weight of “science” behind them. I fully support the testability criterion for scientific questions. It is quite a contradiction to invoke this criterion to dismiss philosophical (and religious) questions, while at the same time degrading science by ignoring it.
A few more:
As a professor of philosophy (for 20 years now), I have found Tyson’s point of view to be depressingly common amongst my colleagues in the sciences and in the general scientific culture.
When I have taken the time to engage scientific colleagues, I have generally found the problem to be a lack of knowledge of what it is philosophy does – and to what a degree we are rooted in logic and argument (argument being viewed as a joint good-faith attempt to get at the truth in question rather than a debate we seek to win). Most scientists seem blissfully unaware of how many metaphysical and epistemological assumptions they have, and it leads to a curious naiveté about science and its limits.
However, I am reminded of Einstein, who took a different view: “Science without epistemology is – insofar as it is thinkable at all – primitive and muddled” (quoted in Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness (Norton: 2005), p. 29). It’s strange, really. I have the most profound admiration for scientists and the work that they do. I think science is indeed one of the human race’s most beautiful and profound achievements, and I will never fail to celebrate it. But damn … scientists can be so insular and incurious sometimes about anything that escapes their net of method. And it’s tiresome to have this popular spokesman encouraging it.
Another delves deep:
I share your apprehensions about Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s scientific monism: his smug, incurious assumption that only scientific approaches to questions of truth are worth our time and energy. That’s a not even a genuine scientific approach; it’s an engineering and technological approach to life. Real science is grounded in philosophy, and not merely practical problem-solving. But even more so, a truly scientific approach to life is one that is endlessly curious about the whole spectrum of life and philosophy, not just the narrow one of the problems that material science itself can address.
But this does reveal one of my primary criticisms of modern agnostic-atheistic scientism, which try as it might to separate itself from the Judeo-Christian tradition that gave birth to it, remains stuck in its primary philosophical assumption, which is the monotheistic view that there can only be one authentic God, and that all other Gods are false idols. The problem is that if the only tool one has is a hammer, not only do all problems begin to look like nails, but those that don’t are deemed unworthy of one’s attention and ignored.
Substitute “truth” for “God”, and the equation becomes clear. Advocates for scientism like Tyson are as convinced as any fundamentalist Christian that there can be only one true Way to find the Truth, and it just so happens to be theirs. All other ways are false, and pointless, and a waste of time. It does not occur to them, just as it doesn’t occur to a lot of traditional Christians, Jews, or Muslims, that the world we live in may in reality be polytheistic, with many truths, and many paths to these truths, each with their own relative value. That would be blasphemy to fundamentalist advocates of both scientism and monotheistic religion. And despite their many differences, both scientism and the Abrahamic religions have much in common at the philosophical level: a blind, cult-like certainty that theirs is the one true God, and all other Gods are false, graven images that must not be held in any esteem whatsoever.
This comes out in the most annoying aspect of Tyson’s version of Cosmos (and Sagan’s original one as well), which is the smug sense of certainty Tyson radiates as he presents the history and triumph of science. There is no room in his public presentation of science for what truly makes it valuable: its inherent attitude of doubt and skepticism, even about itself and its findings. Instead, we are presented with science as another form of certainty about how the world really works, and its own methods as the one true way of knowing and understanding that emerges from the failures of all other approaches to life’s difficulties. As if the world secular science has created were some kind of paradise, when even the most cursory look around would empirically show otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong; science is wonderful, but it simply isn’t the answer to most of life’s problems. Making it so becomes a problem in itself, and distorts the fundamental philosophical wisdom from which science sprang: an unbounded curiosity about reality. Those amateurish attempts of college freshmen to understand the paradoxes of consciousness and self are not worthless foolishness, any more than are those of a child wondering why the sky is blue. They are simply uneducated and in need of a rigorous, disciplined approach. And there are more important matters to address in life than merely working out the problems of why the sky is blue, that science has a very hard time even formulating the questions for, much less coming up with answers.
Tyson is right in the narrow sense: there are many questions that are rather worthless for scientists to address, but not because they are worthless questions with no way to find meaningful answers, but because science is not the right tool for addressing them. A whole body of religious, spiritual, artistic, literary, cultural and philosophical approaches remain better ways to approach such matters. And there, too, there is no one right and true way either. Monotheism has created a massive distortion in the western mind that requires the pluralism of the modern secularism as a counterpoint. But science cannot be that counterpoint if it, too, insists on being the only game in town.
The Dish 