Science vs. Religion? Or the Myths of Science vs. the Myths of Religion?
by Hugh Murray
With
Fanfare on several networks, a science program debuted in primetime. “Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey” appeared on
Fox, National Geographic Channel, FX, and a Fox sports channel. Inspired by the old Carl Sagan science
series, Neil deGrasse Tyson was the host.
The program began with a brief message by Pres. Obama, and I suspect the
series will find its place in many a school classroom for the next decades.
I barely
remember the Carl Sagan series, which was shown on Pubic Television. I do recall that I liked it; learned from it;
was provoked to think by it. It was the
most popular PBS series, and retained that position for a decade. I watched the new Cosmos, and was
disappointed.
The set is
adequate, the special effects, effective, and the host speaks with an
easy-to-understand approach so effective for teaching. The problem is the content. Much of the hour revolved around Italian
thinker Giordano Bruno. A Dominican priest,
he read the ancient poet Lucretius “On the Nature of Things” and decided that
the universe was infinite. Unfortunately,
Bruno also began to question certain doctrines deemed essential to Christian
belief, and even defended the Arian heresy (anti-Trinitarian) on occasion. Warned that charges were being prepared
against him, he fled. In the new Cosmos,
he begins to see the sun as more than the center of what we now call the solar
system, but also as just another star in an infinite universe that would have
many planets with other inhabitants. The
television program rightly asserted that Bruno was rejected by Calvinists in
Geneva, Lutherans in Germany, and by leading churchmen in Oxford. But no mention is made of his success as a
man who developed an excellent method of remembering things. For that, we may have to await a new program
on National Geographic Channel’s “Brain Games.”
Eventually, Bruno returns to Italy, where he is arrested and tried by
the Catholic Inquisition. He was burned
at the stake.
The new Cosmos
program makes a hero of the scientist Bruno – a man who faces exile and is
denied help from Lutheran Germany, Calvinist Switzerland, wavering England, and
who is executed by the Roman Catholic Church in Italy. Science versus religion; the poor scientist
suffers at the hands of the cruel fundamentalist believers. However, the charges against Bruno had little
to do with science, and mainly concerned his rejection of Catholic religious
doctrines like transubstantiation, belief in the Trinity, and the virginity of
Mary. One charge is related to the TV
program: his claim of the existence of a plurality of worlds and their
eternity. If he meant those worlds were
peopled, has that been proven? NO. Are those worlds eternal? How can we answer that? My point is that Bruno was killed for his
religious views, not his scientific ones.
And his “scientific” views on some points were probably no more
scientific than those of Ptolemy. Bruno
was executed not as a martyr to science, but as a victim of religious
intolerance. Yet, at that time in
history, religious intolerance was far more common than religious toleration,
and anyone, in most nations, who openly challenged the orthodox religion in
most lands would be in trouble. The new Cosmos program is guilty of portraying
a conflict between persecuted science and intolerant religion in a false
manner. Bruno was a thinker, a dreamer,
a creative fantasist, but was he a scientist of the cosmos? (He probably was a scientist in developing
methods to improve memory, but that is not at issue.) And if Bruno was not executed for his
science, why is his story the major one on Cosmos?
If the
television program is meant to contrast the approach of science with that of
fundamentalist religion, it fails, because its major portrayal in that hour
fails because Bruno’s fantasies were not
science. Instead of presenting
science versus fundamentalist religion, the program presents scientific
mythology versus Holy Scripture mythology.
Tyson’s voice is authoritative, but he is simply reading sentences. Many others will find the sentences in the
Bible or the Koran to be more authoritative than those uttered by Tyson.
Missing from
the program about science is experiment!
How do you choose this mythology over that or even that one? Sometimes, there may be no rational way to
make a choice. But sometimes, experiment
can help. Indeed, this is one of the
essences of science. I would have begun
the program with a question of how large is the earth? I would have sought to replicate the
experiment of ancients using the length of shadows at noon in one area of
Egypt, then moving a measured length to another site, and measure the shadow
there. Using geometry and calculating
differences, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth before
Julius Caesar visited Cleopatra. Indeed,
some in the ancient world, like Aristarchus of Samos, believed in the
heliocentric view of the solar system long before Copernicus. One might ask, why was the view of
Aristarchus rejected and that of the earth-centered system accepted for so
long? What made scientists reject the
“four corners of the earth” formulae?
And so forth. Experiment is
essential to science, in the modern world, and was used to some extent in the
ancient world. However, experiment never
seemed to enter the new Cosmos program. In
the new Cosmos, the religious authorities are rejected, but not because of
experiments. Instead they are rejected because
of a new authority, the voice of a scientist, presents a counter narrative with
the aid of special effects. The program is NOT religious mythology
versus science; it is religious mythology versus scientific mythology. Experiment is absent. And the special effects are humdrum in an era
of science fiction movies.
So I see the
new Cosmos series as a failure. It fails
to promote science because it fails to include scientific experiments, their
successes and failures; uses and abuses, and their connections to the comforts
that we now enjoy. Instead, it is a
rather boring presentation.
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