Skip to main content

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science and Faith: Plain Wrong



In the video, an argument seems to have been made that Science and Faith can not only easily co-exist, but the idea of any conflict between the two paradigm is largely non existing. 


By definition, science is the knowledge obtain by rigorous empirical evidence - a body of knowledge that is continually updated, proved, dis-proved and tinkered with. Science fundamentally does not claim to know anything nor does it guarantee an answer to every question that one can pose. It is a way of thinking with clarity, without dogma and and without an overriding theology.

Contrast this with what faith in essence is - an adherence to a belief based on authority and to a large degree, fear of uncertainty.

For a renowned personality like Tyson to dismiss the contrast and make little of the very fundamental impedance mismatch is, to my mind, just amazing.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automate SQL Dumps for SQLServer

The backup mechanism in SQL Server may be fine for many cases, but there are limitations with it (like restoring to a different server). I really like how I can just dump the database SQL with mySQL which can be easily processed with custom scripts. I was looking around for a mysqldump equivalent for SQLServer. I know you can do this with the SQL Management Studio through GUI in 2008 version, but I need this to be automated. This lead me to discover the SQL Server Management API . With it, you can do a SQL Dump like: using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo; using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Common; using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc; namespace SQLGenerator { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { //Connect to the local, default instance of SQL Server. { Server myServer = new Server(args[0]); Database db = default(Database); db = myServer.Databases["be"]; ...
5 comments
Read more

Better Samsung DeX Experience

Samsung Dex  is a pretty amazing technology that turns phone into a full fledged desktop PC. The original device costs about $150 but has some limitations such as not being able to use headphone jack and basically having the phone locked down. A cheaper, and arguably a more functional device can be had for less than $40 with things like the Melopow Doc  that leaves the device in a more usable state with full access to the devices ports at a much better price. And while using DeX, make sure to use the fantastic Dex MaX  app to add support for fullscreen to all your apps. Happy DeXing!
Post a Comment
Read more

Tripping on Convention over Configuration

It is with dismay that I sometimes find the trend of moving traditional configuration heavy programming models to convention based troubling. Case in point - I've been trying to adopt the newfangled Spring Data based repository framework. It's been working wonders and I got the QueryDSL support and naming convention based query generation going. After creating a bunch of these repositories, I ran into an issue with one of my custom repositories. It was not recognizing that a method in the custom repo is part of the custom side and not to be a candidate method for spring to do its voodoo magic. For some reason Spring thought the method is a property of the entity bound to the repository. After digging through the Spring code base and spending a lot of time, it finally was clear why this was happening: I had made a typo on the repository naming and the "y" was missing from custom RepositoryImpl class. If only Spring was smart enough to tell me that this is what was c...
Post a Comment
Read more