Against the Cosmic Certainty of Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Church of Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson knows the exact atomic composition of a rose. He can tell you its evolutionary purpose, its chemical signals, its place in the taxonomy of flowering plants. He can measure the wavelength of its red petals down to the nanometer. But if you told him it made you weep with beauty, he'd ask you to prove it. And when you couldn't produce a peer-reviewed study on your tears, he'd smile, that practiced, patient smile, and explain that your emotion, while understandable, isn't really knowledge.
This man tells us to "learn to love the questions themselves," then systematically disparages every question that can't be answered with a spectrograph.
People might ask: why so bitter, Jess?
Here’s the crux of it. I despise his mockery of my brethren; the ones who dare to think outside the paradigm he was sold. Yes, maybe flat-earthers have nothing substantial to stake their beliefs upon. Maybe crystal healers can’t produce the peer-reviewed studies he demands. Maybe the girl checking her horoscope before a job interview is operating on pattern recognition rather than causation.
And yes, maybe anti-vaxxers get things wrong, but fear and misinformation flood the digital bloodstream faster than facts ever could, and they are right to question things. Laughing at them, mocking their distrust, only proves their point: that science has become another priesthood demanding belief without empathy. The Covid years showed this very clearly when those who hesitated weren’t treated as frightened citizens to be reached, but as heretics to be humiliated. In the above interview, Neil frets: “If a billion people on Earth believed in astrology, that would mean we don’t have enough people who are trained to be scientists. That’s a scary thought to me.” This isn’t education; it’s elitism, and it's painting believers as a danger to progress.
The smirk. The sigh. The smug certainty. The way human confusion was turned into late-night comedy and podcast applause. In this simple paragraph, I cannot possibly speak to the depth of the harm that people like you, Neil, have caused to my fellow humans, and I will take you down a peg.
That’s what doesn’t sit well with me. The ridicule. The faux patience of condescension. The performance of rationality as moral superiority. Neil doesn’t use science to illuminate; he uses it to elevate himself above the unenlightened. Carl Sagan, whom Neil claims to emulate, saw humility as the heart of inquiry: “Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” Neil’s church of certainty, with its sermons of scorn, betrays the open-minded wonder Carl Sagan championed.
And here’s what makes it especially galling: he knows better. When he was a junior at Harvard, he mentored high school students in a summer research program. He tells the story of one kid he evaluated harshly; accusing him of “pretending to know things he doesn’t” and warning that “this is not going to work.”
Years later, Neil says he regrets that. He says he’s learned. He says he thinks of that boy every time he writes a letter of recommendation.
But look closer. He still does this publicly, gleefully, and to millions. The cruelty he regrets in private, he’s monetized in public. The pedagogical failure that supposedly transformed him has become his brand. The performance of wisdom has replaced the practice of it. That’s impeccable brand management, Neil.
He has become the very church that once condemned Galileo: so certain of its orthodoxy it cannot imagine being wrong, so invested in its authority it must crush dissent with disdain rather than meet it with compassion.
Are you a human being, Neil, or just a very eloquent, but disgruntled robot?
The Literalist's Trap
When Neil belittles young people for believing in astrology or using crystals, he thinks he's defending rationality against superstition. He frames himself as the mature alternative: rather than surrendering to "forces beyond our knowledge," he creates meaning through evidence and control. But watch what happens when he encounters a crystal. He tells you it represents "the lowest energy state" of its molecular configuration, then declares triumphantly: "There is no energy you're going to take out of it."
As if that settles anything.
A wedding ring is also atoms in their lowest energy state. So is the cross, the flag, the photograph of your deceased mother. Does that mean they have no power? Neil's literalism cannot account for why humans invest objects with meaning, which is a phenomenon worthy of study, not ridicule. Semiotics, anthropology, depth psychology: entire fields exist to understand how consciousness relates to symbol. He seems unaware they exist.
What's worse, he's wrong even on his own terms. The placebo effect is measurable, repeatable, and scientifically validated. When someone holds a crystal during meditation and their anxiety decreases, that's real neuroscience: altered dopamine release, reduced cortisol, improved outcomes in double-blind trials. The National Institutes of Health funds this research. Major medical journals publish it. The therapeutic value doesn't lie in atomic structure; it lives in ritual, attention, and meaning-making.
Yet Neil waves all this away because the mechanism offends his materialism. He confuses thermodynamic energy with psychological significance, then congratulates himself for his clarity. A true scientist would ask: "Why do humans universally create symbolic relationships with objects? What evolutionary advantage does ritual provide? How do belief and biology intersect?" But those questions can't be answered with a spectrograph, so he doesn't ask them.
The irony cuts deeper. Neil uses metaphors constantly in his own work: "stardust," "cosmic perspective," "the universe is alive within us." These are poetic framings, not literal descriptions. Yet he denies others their symbolic vocabularies. When he calls us stardust, he's doing exactly what astrologers do when they are finding correspondence between self and cosmos. The only difference is institutional authority. He mistakes social approval for cosmic truth.
And ritual? He treats it as superstition's handmaiden, but anthropology and neuroscience tell a different story. Ritual reduces anxiety, increases focus, strengthens social bonds, provides psychological scaffolding for difficult transitions. Athletes have pre-game rituals. Surgeons follow meticulous protocols. Scientists conduct peer review ceremonies. Neil himself ritualistically checks data before making claims (one hopes). To sneer someone's morning crystal practice while defending scientific protocols is pure hypocrisy, because both are structured behaviors orienting consciousness toward a goal.
The real problem is this: reduction is not explanation. Neil treats astrology and crystals as primitive errors because they lack mechanistic verification. But this assumes only mechanical causation yields truth; a philosophical position, not a scientific fact. Symbolic systems describe meaning, not mechanism. Astrology doesn't claim Mars physically pushes your temper any more than poetry claims metaphors move tides. To dismiss that because it isn't "measurable" confuses description of inner reality with description of outer physics. You cannot weigh beauty or quantify compassion, yet both are as real as hydrogen. More real, perhaps, because they're what make us care about hydrogen in the first place.
The Poverty of the Cosmic Perspective
Neil loves explaining that we're made of the same elements as the universe: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. Because of this material sameness, he says, "the universe is alive within us," and this recognition should dissolve our tribalism. His "cosmic perspective" replaces mystical feelings of unity with data-based awareness of atomic interconnection. But Carl Sagan, whose legacy Neil claims, saw deeper: “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.” Neil’s cold catalog of atoms misses this reverence, turning awe into a lecture rather than a lived connection.
But knowing we share atoms with stars doesn't automatically make us kinder. Empathy arises from consciousness; an interior quality science can describe but not generate. You cannot weigh compassion; you cannot measure the moment a stranger's suffering becomes your own. These phenomena make us human, and they resist every instrument in his toolkit.
Feeling our connection to others requires imagination, story, ritual; precisely the languages he treats as inferior. His version of cosmic awe invites us to look at the universe rather than belong to it. He gazes from orbit, measuring, categorizing, explaining. Yet the deepest sense of oneness is participatory. There's a difference between knowing every detail of a tree's molecular structure and sitting under it until you feel its pulse in your chest. The former yields data; the latter, devotion. A complete human perspective needs both.
Watch what Neil does with wonder. He celebrates feeling "large" when he looks at the night sky because he identifies with the universe's scale. But this inversion of humility, making ourselves cosmic rather than small, turns awe into ego. Wonder doesn't require feeling infinite; it asks us to feel related. Many spiritual traditions find meaning in being small, finite, dependent, transient. The Psalmist asked, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" and found liberation in that smallness. Neil asks the same question and answers, "I am as large as the universe itself." That's just ego dressed in stardust.
The fact that our DNA overlaps with bananas or that our breath circulates around the planet is fascinating, I'll give him that, but those facts describe interconnection, not communion. Communion happens when knowledge becomes reverence. Science reveals the mechanism; myth reveals the feeling. When he insists "people value what they think is true more than what is true," he forgets that value itself isn't measurable. His cosmic perspective can inspire stewardship, but without grounding in personal meaning, it turns into cosmic nihilism. You don't sacrifice for an equation. You sacrifice for love.
Science tells us what we are made of; story tells us what that means. The atoms within us may be ancient, but their arrangement into compassion, art, and love is newer than any star. The cosmic perspective becomes truly human only when it bends back toward empathy. Without that, Neil has simply escaped into the cold comfort of measurement, where nothing is sacred because nothing is felt.
Mortality, Meaning, and the Inheritance He Squandered
Neil claims awareness of death gives life focus: because time is limited, we must act with purpose. If we lived forever, life would have "no meaning" since infinite time removes urgency. He no longer searches for meaning; he creates it through knowledge, productivity, and service. His desired epitaph: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."
That last line reveals everything. The drive to "win a victory for humanity" sounds noble until you examine its assumptions: progress is linear, victory is measurable, worth requires monumentality, individual achievement matters most. This worldview excludes indigenous wisdom (where worth comes from harmony, not conquest), feminist ethics of care (where meaning lies in tending, not winning), Buddhist non-attachment (where striving is the problem), and ecological interdependence (where being part of the web is enough).
What makes this particularly tragic is that he inherited something better. He tells us his father was active in the civil rights movement, his mother was a gerontologist who cared deeply about the plight of others. When he encountered racism and injustice, his parents never taught him bitterness. They said, "These people don't know any better. You have to talk to them, teach them." That's grace. That's wisdom. That's seeing the humanity in your opposition.
His parents modeled compassion; he's chosen conquest. They taught him to educate; he's built a career on mockery. The tombstone he wants is a rejection of everything they tried to give him. They anchored him in the human condition; he's escaped into the cold comfort of cosmic detachment.
Mortality may sharpen purpose, but meaning isn't measured by efficiency. Infants, the elderly, the disabled, those in contemplative retreat... they live lives rich in significance without measurable output. The obsession with achievement confuses value with utility, suggesting a person in a coma has no meaning, a child has no meaning, a mystic in silence has no meaning.
His creed of "I make meaning" assumes the self is sole author of significance. That view exiles mystery. Many people find meaning in experiences arriving unbidden: love, beauty, coincidence, grace. A parent holding their newborn doesn't "create" meaning; they encounter it. Someone watching their father die doesn't "manufacture" grief; they are unmade by it, then slowly remade. There's humility in allowing life to reveal itself rather than forcing it into purpose. Neil's framework allows no room for revelation, only construction.
He's replaced one faith with another: the religion of progress. He claims freedom from superstition, but his belief that knowledge and productivity redeem mortality functions as secular salvation. He imagines redemption not in heaven but in humanity's advancement. Yet civilizations rise and fall; the cosmos will eventually erase every trace of our works. If meaning depends on permanence, we're doomed to despair. Paradoxically, the willingness to love, create, and hope despite impermanence is what makes human life holy.
Neil cannot face the possibility that meaning might be intrinsic, not earned. So he clings to productivity the way a fundamentalist clings to scripture: both are hedges against the void. Death reminds us life is precious not because it ends, but because it is. Meaning doesn't have to be a monument left behind; it can be the tremor of presence moving through a single moment of honesty, compassion, or awe. That requires more courage than control, and more faith than fact.
When Reading Sacred Texts Like Instruction Manuals
Neil was raised Catholic but drifted away early, finding teachings "less and less convincing." Later in life, he systematically acquired religious texts (Torah, Quran, Gospels, Buddhist sutras, Mormon scripture) so he could speak "informedly" about religion. But he treats them mainly as anthropology, not revelation. He argues people should build worldviews only on objective evidence and warns that civilizations unravel when belief outweighs data.
Reading sacred texts as a scientist to "understand where people are coming from" is like dissecting a song to find its meaning. Religion, in its truest sense, is participatory knowledge; a lived relationship with mystery, not a set of claims to verify. People pray not to alter physics but to align their hearts. Demanding proof of that is like demanding proof of beauty before you paint, proof of love before you marry. Some truths are discovered not by measurement but by participation. A scientist who cannot see that has forgotten what science is for. Neil, do you go to a symphony and then criticize the musicians for not solving equations?
He warns societies fall apart when people value belief over data. Yet history shows data without conscience is equally destructive. The Nazi regime was grounded in cold technical rationality; eugenics was considered "scientific." Modern surveillance states are triumphs of pure empiricism applied without wisdom. Facts require frameworks of care, otherwise, information without ethics becomes weaponry. Religion, at its best, has been that framework, because it's a way of binding people (religare, "to bind") into shared responsibility and mutual care.
More troubling: his "neutrality" is a belief system of its own. He presents himself as liberated from dogma, but his worldview is profoundly dogmatic; a faith in empiricism as supreme arbiter of truth. He demands evidence for God but none for the assumption that only evidence matters. His skepticism exempts itself from scrutiny. The true scientist knows even reason rests on metaphysical trust: trust in coherence, causality, reality's intelligibility. That trust is a quiet kind of faith. Neil's materialism isn't the absence of belief; it's belief pretending to be fact.
He equates spirituality with tribalism and violence, citing wars and divisions. That's like blaming art because some paintings were propaganda. Religion is a human language, capable of distortion but also profound beauty. The cure for bad religion isn't disbelief; it's deeper religion: self-aware, humble, experiential, grounded in encounter rather than decree.
Neil's binary view of science or superstition is intellectually lazy. The real frontier is synthesis: a worldview honoring both photons and prayers, neurons and numinosity. He admits perhaps "the most important role of church was community," but catastrophically underestimates how essential that is. People don't gather merely for doctrinal instruction; they gather to remember they're not alone. The ritual itself is evidence: of belonging, of continuity, of care.
When he says modern people are "spiritual but not religious," he sees freedom; yet beneath that freedom lies epidemic loneliness, record depression, social atomization. Connection requires story as much as reason. A culture that loses its stories will lose its soul, no matter how many telescopes it builds.
The Matrix, AI, and Missing the Point Entirely
Neil calls himself "a fan of AI." To him, it's another instrument raising the bar for human creativity. The artist's task? Innovate faster than algorithms, do what machines can't yet imitate. He's used AI in astronomy productively; its entrance into art only "spooks" those who can't keep up. Neil views AI through productivity: if it saves labor, it's good; if it mimics art, artists must "up their game."But art isn't an efficiency contest. The point of a poem isn't that it does something a machine can't; it's that it communicates a consciousness a machine doesn't have. When we mistake the two, we lose the thread of what makes us human.
He praises AI telescopes that "decide" what to study, as though curiosity were an algorithm. Yet curiosity isn't decision-making; it's desire. Desire arises from the ache of not knowing that only a living being feels. To equate that with computation erases what makes science beautiful: the hunger behind the question. Neil has become so enamored with answers that he's forgotten questions have souls.
His delight in AI's competence mirrors his delight in cosmic measurements: he confuses complexity with depth. More information doesn't equal more insight. A neural network predicting starlight wavelengths contributes to knowledge; it doesn't feel the night sky. If machines ever "surpass" us intellectually, their superiority will still lack soul. The measure of humanity isn't speed or accuracy but awareness, and awareness, by definition, cannot be programmed.
Then comes The Matrix. Neil analyzes the film and dismisses its central premise as “bad physics,” saying, “The Matrix has bad physics. Why would you feed humans to get energy out of them? Just burn the food. It’s much more efficient.” He treats the movie as a failed science lesson rather than a parable about perception and control.
This moment crystallizes everything wrong with his thinking. He can tell you precisely what the shadows on Plato's cave wall are made of, but he's never turned around to see the fire.The Matrix isn't about thermodynamics. It's about awakening from numbness, choosing uncomfortable truth over comfortable illusion. It's the same myth animating Plato's allegory, Gnostic scripture, Buddhist maya. By reducing it to an engineering flaw, Neil betrays a literalism incapable of recognizing metaphor. Ironically, he becomes a citizen of the Matrix himself: mistaking symbols for data, unable to see the deeper code of meaning beneath surfaces.
And notice his joke about the simulation programmer "spicing things up" with pandemics and Trump. He's doing exactly what he mocks religious people for: creating a narrative that makes him feel above the chaos. "I can see the code" is his version of "God works in mysterious ways." Same cope, different aesthetic. Same need to feel like he's in on the joke while everyone else suffers through the punchline.
This is the tragedy of his entire worldview. Van Gogh didn't just paint differently; he painted desperately. That desperation is what we recognize before Starry Night: not technique, but testimony. An algorithm can synthesize style; it cannot suffer for an idea or stake its soul on canvas.
When algorithms imitate us, they force us to ask what cannot be imitated. That question is the same one The Matrix asked. Neil corrects the math and misses the miracle. A true scientist would notice both. But he's chosen the blue pill without realizing it; the pill saying measurement is enough, data is all, the universe is dead matter awaiting his explanation.
UFOs, Evidence, and the Politics of Mystery
When military pilots, with training, multiple sensor confirmations, and institutional clearance, report unidentified aerial phenomena, Neil’s reflex is always the same: probably instrument error. He demands, “If you have an alien in a lock box and you’re not going to show it, that’s the same thing to a scientist as not having an alien at all.” That isn’t skepticism; it’s motivated reasoning defending a worldview where the extraordinary must remain impossible. Carl Sagan, by contrast, embraced the unknown: “Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.” Neil’s dismissal of mystery as error stifles the curiosity Carl Sagan saw as science’s lifeblood.
He’s right that evidence matters; he’s wrong that absence of evidence justifies contempt. The mature scientific posture is provisional openness: hold the question, test it, remain humble. His public tone turns skepticism into cynicism. That doesn’t protect science; it sterilizes it. It discourages witnesses, amateurs, and unconventional thinkers, shrinking the very pool of data that discovery depends on.
By demanding proof only from instruments and institutions he already trusts, Neil builds a circular fortress: only NASA-grade data count, and NASA has none, therefore aliens are irrelevant. Historical irony: when Galileo saw Jupiter’s moons, his critics sneered, “Your telescope deceives you.” Every paradigm shift begins as low-resolution data. Real curiosity asks how we might test further, not how we can dismiss faster.
His media persona turns inquiry into entertainment: the smirk, the punchline, the “you silly humans” shtick. It makes good television but bad education. Science communication should model how to think, not who to laugh at. When he jokes that believers “just want to feel special,” he performs the same ego inflation he condemns, by asserting superiority over the credulous masses instead of inviting them into better reasoning. People rarely join clubs that parody them.
The fascination with UFOs, consciousness, or cosmic visitors isn’t childish; it’s the same curiosity that once asked whether Earth moves, what lightning is, or why we dream. To scold that impulse severs science from its root emotion: wonder. Wonder isn’t gullibility; it’s the readiness to be surprised. A civilization that loses that readiness may gain precision, but it loses imagination.
Neil treats data as if it exists independently of interpretation. Yet even in physics, observation depends on the framing of thresholds, instruments, and the human questions we choose to ask. Declaring only certain forms of evidence “valid” already embeds a worldview. Karl Popper called this “the myth of the given.” When indigenous peoples reported lights in the sky for centuries before radar existed, were they wrong, or simply speaking in a language Neil’s sensors can’t yet translate?
Statistically, the universe almost guarantees other intelligences. Neil concedes this, and then shrugs it off as irrelevant. The real question isn’t whether aliens exist but what their existence would mean for consciousness, ethics, and our place in the cosmos. Those are philosophical and spiritual questions, the very ones he refuses to touch because they can’t be graphed. Yet that border between the measurable and the meaningful is precisely where science and philosophy should meet. His refusal to go there isn’t rigor; it’s fear.
He pathologizes humanity’s longing for connection beyond Earth as ego, but that longing might actually be empathy trying to extend to the cosmos. To hope we’re not alone isn’t arrogance; it’s affection. The same impulse that drives art and ethics; the wish to find kinship in the unknown. We don’t search for aliens because we think we’re special. We search because we suspect we’re not, and we want to meet our family.
The Tyranny of Objective Truth
A constant refrain: people must build worldviews only on “objective truths,” not “what they think is true.” Neil warns that valuing belief over evidence leads to civilizational collapse, positioning himself as the defender of rationality against superstition, emotion, and wishful thinking.
It’s an impressive performance, until you notice how often he contradicts himself. He tells us to “learn to love the questions themselves,” then shuts down every question that makes him uncomfortable. He urges humility, “don’t overvalue your own thoughts”, while speaking with unshakable confidence about Mars colonization, simulation theory, the impossibility of God, and the meaninglessness of infinity. He preaches reverence before the unknown while positioning himself as its gatekeeper.
Watch the rhetorical sleight of hand: he insists, “I don’t want to be that guy,” the cranky elder railing about kids these days; then proceeds to dismiss every concern about social media, loneliness, AI, and the modern psyche. Perform humility, then ignore it. The self-awareness appears just long enough to be cited as evidence of reasonableness, then disappears the moment it might require restraint.
Even physics, the field he claims as bedrock, has moved beyond his conception of objectivity. Quantum mechanics shows that observation alters outcome; Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle establishes the limits of measurement. Einstein spent decades wrestling with the philosophical implications of relativity. Neil’s “objectivity” isn’t modern physics; it’s 19th-century materialism dressed in contemporary vocabulary. Real physicists know reality is participatory.
Science doesn’t capture reality itself; it builds models. Beautiful, predictive fictions that help us navigate it. But a model is not the thing. A topographical map tells you true things about terrain, but you cannot drink the blue lines when you’re thirsty. When Neil treats scientific models as Reality-with-a-capital-R, he commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. He’s literalized the metaphor.
Scientific “objectivity” isn’t a view-from-nowhere; it’s a view-from-everywhere-humans-can-look. It’s a social practice requiring trust, transparency, and ethics. But honesty, fairness, and credit are norms that aren’t scientifically provable. You cannot run an experiment to confirm that integrity matters. Those are moral commitments. Neil wants objectivity without acknowledging it rests on non-objective foundations.
There are kinds of truth science cannot measure: moral, aesthetic, existential. Empirical truth tells you what is; moral truth asks what should be. When Neil insists only measurable truth counts, he’s not defending truth itself; he’s defending one kind of truth and calling it the whole. That’s reductionism, and it’s the same mistake fundamentalists make when they claim only revelation counts. Both of them mistake a window for the world.
The greatest scientists (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman) knew better. They emphasized uncertainty, paradox, and the limits of knowing. Feynman said, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” Neil speaks with the certainty those giants never claimed, but not because he knows more, but because he values authority more than truth.
And here’s the final contradiction that exposes everything. Asked what advice he’d give his younger self, Neil says he wouldn’t give any: wisdom, he explains, comes from living your own mistakes. You must experience things yourself; no one can shortcut that for you.
Fine. But then why devote a career to telling everyone else what to think? Why write books, give interviews, and build a media empire around being the arbiter of rational thought? If experience is the only teacher, his public persona collapses. Unless, and here’s the uncomfortable truth, he doesn’t believe in what he says. It’s just another performance of humility, deployed when it flatters him and discarded when it constrains him.
Objective truth exists. But it isn’t the only truth that matters, and it isn’t as objective as Neil pretends. The tragedy is that genuine science is beautiful precisely because it admits its limits. Neil has traded that beauty for the cheap satisfaction of always being right.
Conclusion
Neil deGrasse Tyson could have been the voice that showed us science and spirit aren't enemies. Instead, he chose to make them competitors, and in doing so, has stunted the growth of both. Carl Sagan, whose mantle he claims, knew better: “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” Neil’s binary worldview (equation over prayer, data over devotion) betrays the cosmos’s richness and the human heart’s complexity.
The universe Neil describes is made of hydrogen and helium, carbon and nitrogen, equations and measurements. All of that is true. But the universe I live in is also made of grief and joy, mystery and longing, the smell of rain and the ache of love and the terror of death and the stubborn hope that maybe, somewhere, someone is looking up at the same stars and wondering the same things.
Both universes are real. Both require different languages to describe. A complete human life requires both.
The cosmos deserves better. We deserve better. We deserve scientists who can hold both the equation and the prayer, who can measure starlight, and then openly shed tears at its beauty, who can know the mechanism and still honor the mystery. We deserve voices that enlarge us, not diminish us; that invite us into the conversation, not shame us out of it. We deserve wonder without gullibility, rigor without contempt, knowledge without arrogance.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has chosen certainty. In doing so, he's betrayed the very universe he claims to serve.
The stars are still there, cold and distant and breathtakingly beautiful. They don't need him to measure them. They were doing just fine before we arrived, and they'll be doing fine long after we're gone. But we, fragile and temporary beings, we need something more than measurements. We need meaning. We need connection. We need to know that the universe that made us might also, in some strange and beautiful way, see us in return.
That question, that yearning, isn't superstition. It's the most human thing there is. And it's the one thing Neil deGrasse Tyson, for all his knowledge, cannot understand.
"The meaning of life is to give life meaning."
ReplyDeleteI've always liked this line. Though it is older, I got it from a song about an ancient, nigh-omnipotent species that traded emotions for power but eventually discover that emotion is what is worth living for. Not longevity or power. The simple act of feeling. They nurture the evolution of humans and grant it their knowledge through dreams, but knowledge without insight or experience can easily be turned into a weapon and humanity wipes itself out. The Forever doom humanity to extinction the same way they doomed themselves: power without feeling.
That's what I get from what Tyson has become. He's traded curiosity for popularity. He traded objectivity for recognition. It's an easy trap he's never considered himself to be in.
Men like him are why I will never call myself an atheist. I am agnostic, since I can never know there are no gods. To outright deny them does me and those around me a disservice because it defies curiosity.
Tyson also cries from the high tower that knowledge cannot be challenged, which makes it so that societal knowledge cannot expand. He is an echo of Plato saying that man is a featherless biped. Someone needs to be the Diogenes to his Plato, to kick down the door of his school and present to him a plucked chicken. Until he can accept that someone else can be right, he will never not be wrong.