October 2, 2014 | 8:48pm
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Neil deGrasse Tyson attends the TIME 100 Gala, TIME's
100 most influential people in the world, at Jazz at Lincoln Center on
April 29, 2014 in New York City. Photo: Splash News
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a famous scientist. He even has a TV show. And wears a cool astronomical vest.
Only he’s not infallible.
This simple truth has been established, over much resistance, by Sean
Davis of the lively new conservative Web site the Federalist.
Davis dug into a handful of just-so stories repeated by Tyson in his
public lectures, the point of which is to make himself — and by
extension, his audience — feel superior to the dolts who aren’t nearly
as scientific as he is.
The controversy centered on an erroneous George W. Bush quote that
Tyson made a staple of his public presentations, and has come to settle
on this question: Why was it so hard for a scientist committed to
evidence and rationality to admit that he got something wrong?
In his speeches, Tyson would say that right after 9/11, Bush asserted
the superiority of “we” to “they” (i.e., Muslim fundamentalists) by
quoting the Bible for the proposition: “Our God is the God who named the
stars.”
Tyson then would highlight the absurdity of this by noting that two-thirds of the named stars have Arabic names.
Get it? The ignoramus Bush wanted to denigrate Muslims for their God
not excelling at naming stars, when it was really the English-speaking
Christian God who didn’t keep up.
Evidently, no one in Tyson’s audiences yukking it up over this story
had any idea of Bush’s posture in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when
he famously went out of his way to vouch for Islam and to call for
tolerance.
As Sean Davis pointed out in his initial piece on the dubious quote,
it really came from a tribute to the astronauts who died in the Columbia
disaster in 2003. After quoting from Isaiah, Bush said, “The same
Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we
mourn today.”
When Davis queried Tyson about the provenance of his suspect
material, the impressively factual scientist wrote an evasive,
condescending reply on Facebook. He helpfully informed Davis that “the
absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”
Really? When it comes to presidential speeches? Just because there’s
an absence of evidence that Barack Obama said in a State of the Union
Address that he wants to nationalize the oil companies, it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t said it?
This is such self-evident nonsense that Tyson was finally forced into apologizing, in a rambling, self-glorifying Facebook post.
His gracelessness has extended down to his acolytes, who have worked
to keep any mention of the controversy off his Wikipedia page. Tyson’s
most intense fans are less skeptics than worshipers.
The attitude is captured in an episode of the Netflix show “Orange Is
the New Black” by the protagonist, Piper Chapman, a sophisticated
liberal who happens to land in prison. She avows to a group of obnoxious
Christian inmates, “I believe in Nate Silver, and Neil deGrasse Tyson,
and Christopher Hitchens.”
These are the high priests of rationality and secularism, and to
question them is, from the point of view of the believers, heresy.
To be clear, it isn’t Tyson’s science that is the point of contention
here. Who doesn’t want to listen to him talk about the Large Magellanic
Cloud?
The problem is the belief of his fans — encouraged by him — that
science has all the answers; that anyone who believes in physics must
adhere to a progressive secularism; that anyone not on board is guilty
of rank anti-intellectualism.
Properly understood, science is a tool, an incredibly powerful one,
but still just a tool. G.K. Chesterton wrote long ago, “Science must not
impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to
say.”
The Bush-quote controversy reminds us that the self-styled champions
of science are, like anyone else, prone to sloppiness, pomposity and
error. Just don’t tell the adherents of the Tyson cult. It’s not polite
to scandalize the faithful.
