We continue, considering portions of an interview between Bill Moyer and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson Tells Bill Moyers Why Faith and Reason are Irreconcilable.
The segments of which this consideration will consist, in toto, are:
On the Bible and the Qur’an / Koran
The historical meaning of – star
The biblical meaning of – star
On science proving the Bible wrong
The faith of the Atheist (Dogmatheism)
EDUCATED AND ENLIGHTENED RELIGIOUS PEOPLE VS. FUNDAMENTALISTS Neil deGrasse Tyson stated:
So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, “Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it.” Then you’d say things like, “Oh, well they didn’t really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively.”
So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It’s the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we’re good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.
So, educated and enlightened religious people employ science as a worldview and judge the Bible by the current scientific proclamations de jour. But the backwards fundamentalists want to see the Bible as a science textbook and are knocking on the science doors of the schools. Well, this is utter folly as fundamentalists will tell you that the Bible is scientifically accurate on those points where it does reference science but is a volume (the Bible is not a book) about redemptive history. In the end, you can turn to the Bible for spiritual enlightenment and emotional fulfillment but, please, or so demands Tyson, do not take it seriously.
Moreover, Atheist propagandists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson (see here for this fact; that he is an Atheist crusader) want only their worldview philosophy (thinly disguised as science) to be taught within the public school classroom. Atheism does not have to knock on the science doors of the schools as the doors are wide open to it and it is ensconced within textbooks that are supposed to be about science (see Protecting the Science Classroom).
Yet, the overall point is that yet again, Neil deGrasse Tyson knows not of what he speaks and Bill Moyer is none the wiser. It is simply historically ignorant to even imagine that “when science discovers things…you would say, ‘Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it….they didn’t really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively’…reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded.”
It is a mere fact of language, any language, that there are figurative and poetic genre (allegory, metaphor, symbolism, etc.) and reading a text for context will determine this fact. One does not read the newspaper as one reads Shakespeare; genre is a fact.
To give some readily accessible example, Tyson can be proven wrong by simply referencing historical and grammatical facts.
The ancient Hebrews called what we know as the Old Testament as the Tanakh. This is an acrostic made up of the terms Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim—TNK with added vowels—Torah (law), Nevi’im (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings such as psalms, proverbs, etc.). Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC-c. 50 AD) is well known for his incessant allegorizing as were some early church writers such as Origen Adamantius (184-253 AD). The Mishna is oral tradition and the commentary was made upon it is Gemara; these were combined in writing as the Talmudim, the Babylonian or Bavli and the Palestinian or Yerushalmi that were put into writing circa 400-600AD; the Talmudim contain much allegory, metaphor, symbolism, etc.
Such examples pepper history and Tyson and Moyer, et al. should know better.
In the next segment, we will consider Carl Sagan’s and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Atheist faith: dogmatheism.
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