Massimo Pigliucci is a Philosopher and biologist about whom we have written in the past in both agreement and disagreement—see here.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is well, for our purposes it is enough to note that he is a militant Atheist activist whether he currently prefers to self-identify as an Atheist or not—we have also written about him—see here. The reason for referring to him as such is simple as noting that during the Atheist Beyond Belief Conference, San Diego in November of 2006 AD, session two, Tyson stated:
I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise, the public is secondary to this…if you can’t convert our colleagues, why do you have any hope that you’re going to convert the public? [emphasis added for emphasis]
In this case, Massimo Pigliucci wrote of “my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson”:
[he] has done it again: He has dismissed philosophy as a useless enterprise and actually advised bright students to stay away from it. It is not the first time Neil has done this sort of thing, and he is far from being the only scientist to do so. But in his case the offense is particularly egregious, for two reasons: first, because he is a highly visible science communicator, and second, because I told him not to, several times.
Pigliucci sets out to “carefully tackle exactly where Neil and a number of his colleagues go wrong,” which, by the way, is a full time job in and of itself. But he is referring to something specific which is illustrated via quotations from Tyson. An interviewer mentioned being a philosophy major and Tyson replied, “That can really mess you up” and agreed that philosophy there is “a little too much question asking in philosophy” and that “At a certain point it’s just futile.”
As an example, Neil deGrasse Tyson noted that “the scientist knows when the question ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ is a pointless delay in our progress.” Well, I always found that there is a simple and straightforward answer to what is the sound of one hand clapping? and that is that it is the sound of my hand slapping your face—SLAP!
Tyson’s attempt at a deeper point was that the philosopher will go off into questions such as:
How do you define “clapping”? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas.
Do you see why Tyson needs a little philosophy? He seems to neglect that fact that ideas are expressed in words (within this context and not, say, expressing ideas via paining) and thus, we must define the words with which he express our ideas.
Massimo Pigliucci notes that Richard Dawkins is “another frequent offender” and that:
…fellow scientist and frequent philosophy skeptic Jerry Coyne [about whom I have written here] pointed out that you [Tyson] ‘blew it big time’ when you disinvited philosopher David Albert from an event you had organized at the American Museum of Natural History that originally included a discussion between Albert and physicist Lawrence Krauss (yet another frequent philosophy naysayer).
Pigliucci notes that Tyson “had the privilege of remaking Carl Sagan’s iconic Cosmos series — in short, someone who is a public intellectual and advocate for science” and thus, “really ought to do better than to take what amounts to anti-intellectual (and illiterate) positions about another field of scholarship.”
Well, the fact is that Sagan’s and Tyson’s Cosmos is an Atheist Catechism disguised as science. When the premise is that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be” you know, or should know, that you are not dealing with science but exactly Tyson? Philosophy; in this case, Atheism. “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be” is not a scientific conclusion but an Atheistic, philosophical, one.
The issue with personages such as Neil deGrasse Tyson is that, just as is the case with Richard Dawkins who is supposed to be in a position of educating the public about science; is he an advocate for science or an advocate for scientism spiked with being an advocate for his interpretation of science—one which leads to the Atheism to which he wants to convert fellow scientists and the general public at large?
At one point, Pigliucci ask, “if by ‘science’ you mean an enterprise deeply rooted in the articulation of theory and its relationship with empirical evidence.” Well, I made a study of, and collected many, many quotations from the horses mouth, so called science that is, in reality, based on schools of thought, professional rivalries, attempts to protect preferred theories, etc,. etc., etc., see the series of articles titled Scientific Cenobites.
Ultimately, Massimo Pigliucci provides “a series of bullet points to keep handy anytime someone asks you again to comment about philosophy.”
He asks us to “Imagine a highly dimensional landscape of ways of thinking about a given question (such as ‘Do scientific theories describe the world as it is, or should we think of them rather as simply being empirically adequate?’).” Another way to express this is to note that anything can be modeled but the question is whether or not the model actually reflects actual reality.
And this may be why personages such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss do not want philosopher all up in the business—as it were. They want to pass off their Atheist worldviews that they hide with a façade of scientific respectability; they do not want philosophers peeking behind the curtain and pointing out that the scientific Wizard of Oz is really just an Atheist working some controls.
Because Tyson claimed that philosophy does not progress but keeps dealing with the same questions; Pigliucci takes specific aim at Tyson by noting, “your own profession of cosmology has been dwelling on ‘the same question’ (the origin and evolution of the universe) since the pre-Socratic atomists (philosophers, by the way).”
And, of course, Genesis 1:1 states, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Consider it this way In the beginning [time], God created the heavens [space] and the earth [matter] and it just so happens that this is a scientific prediction that the universe is a time, space, matter continuum.
Pigliucci points out:
The main objective of philosophy of science is to understand how science works and, when it fails to work (which it does occasionally), why this was the case. It is epistemology applied to the scientific enterprise. And philosophy is not the only discipline that engages in studying the workings of science. So do history and sociology of science…
Lastly, Pigliucci noted that “one needs to do better than dismiss a field of inquiry on the grounds that it is not wedded to a laboratory setting” and:
Neil, please have some respect for your mother. I don’t mean your biological one (though that too, of course!); I am referring to the intellectual mother of all science — that is, philosophy. As you yourself seem to have a dim perception of (see your example of Newton), one of the roles of philosophy over the past two and half millennia has been to prepare the ground for the birth and eventual intellectual independence of a number of scientific disciplines. But contra what you seem to think, this hasn’t stopped with the scientific revolution, or with the advent of quantum mechanics.
Actually, the end is that Massimo Pigliucci sent the draft of the article in question to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Tyson, basically, just dismissed it. He is not so much a lover of wisdom as a lover of Atheism.
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Source:
Massimo Pigliucci, “Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Value of Philosophy,” Huffington Post, July 16, 2014 AD