Monday, September 15, 2014

A Foolish Tweet from an Intelligent Man


This morning, as I was making my wife breakfast, I read this tweet from astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, "If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people." As a modern hero of humanism, this sort of rhetoric is often used by Tyson and other non-theists to claim intellectual high ground against theists of every stripe. However, as is the case in every claim that can be made in less than 140 characters, this line of thinking has some serious problems. For starters, there is not a person living on the planet today, who experiences "objective reality." Each of us are bound by our situatedness and our intuition. To deny that human existence is inherently subjective either shows an incredible lack of self-awareness or unbridled arrogance. Now, it would be one thing to say that those who make decisions that affect others should be capable of making well-reasoned decisions based on the evidence that is available to them, but I don't think this is what Tyson is saying. That being said, he hints that their may be a plurality of objective realities. Which means that best case scenario, Tyson is saying that 'if your belief system is not founded in well-reasoned claims about the nature of reality given the evidence that you have available to you, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.' But, I don't think that is what he is trying to say.