On Science and Scientists: A Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson
NDT: So I’ve got here, live in the flesh, the one, the only, the inimitable Richard Dawkins. Richard, thanks for coming.
RD: Thank you very much.
NDT: I want to talk to you about the human mind’s capacity to know, and to think, and to believe. You know, I look at how much trouble people have with mathematics, typically. If there’s any one subject that the most number of people say ‘I was never good at —’, it’s going to be math. And so I say to myself, ‘If our brain were wired for logical thinking, then math would be everyone’s easiest subject.’ Everything else would be harder. So I’m kind of forced to conclude that our brain is not wired for logic.
RD: It’s a very good point. And it’s more than just that. I think there’s also a kind of unwarranted pride in being bad at mathematics. You will never hear anybody saying how proud they are at being ignorant of Shakespeare, but plenty of people will say they are proud of being ignorant of mathematics.
NDT: Or if they don’t use the word ‘proud’ they’ll say, ‘I was never good at math, ha ha ha’ – they’ll chuckle about it. Like it’s a joke.
RD: Yes. There was a piece in one of the British newspapers where a science writer – I think a science journalist – was lamenting the fact that many people in Britain think it takes one month for the Earth to orbit the sun, and the editor inserted there: ‘Doesn’t it? – Ed’. So he was, as it were, saying, ‘I’m the editor of a national newspaper, and of course I don’t think it really takes a month – but nevertheless it’s OK to make a joke about being ignorant of this elementary point of astronomy,’ which you would never, ever do about confusing Byron with Virgil or something like that—
NDT: Or ever be proud of such a thing. So, then you must admit that we as a human organism must have a great challenge before us to think rationally, logically, scientifically.
RD: Yes. You made the very interesting point that maybe we are not wired to be good at logic – well, you generalized from mathematics to logic – but I think it’s an interesting point that our wild ancestors, needing to survive in the presence of lions and drought and famine and things . . . you’d think logic would be pretty important for survival – if not mathematics.
NDT: Well, maybe there were early people who said, ‘Oh, there’s a creature there with big teeth. Let me investigate it further’ . . .
RD: Yes. In a way, that’s right: to be curious might be a bad thing.
NDT: Curiosity doesn’t always work.
RD: I had a cousin who, as a little boy, put his finger in the mains and got a shock, so he did it again just to make sure! So he was a real scientist, but that’s not very good for survival.
NDT: Right! So perhaps the gut reaction to run, or to be scared, or to . . . chant . . . I guess what I’m getting at is there’s so much of human civilization that derives, not from logical thinking, but from what we might simply call illogical thinking. Take illogical thinking and, say, art: I’ve got Van Gogh on the wall but no one’s going to quiz him and say, ‘How logical were you when you painted the starry night?’ So what does it mean to object, then, to people who feel this way? Because I detach myself more from that battle than you do. You are on the front lines and I’m way back watching you do this, and I’m saying sometimes people just want to – feel, rather than think.
RD: Yes. I keep pushing back to the evolutionary origins of this. When you have to survive in a hostile environment, it may be that you do need a certain amount of illogical—
NDT: Gut feeling.
RD: Yes. It may be that you need to fear things which logic tells you you needn’t . . . but maybe it’s a matter of the odds that something is actually dangerous.
NDT: Or the cost to you if it is.
RD: The cost to you. If you see a sort of rustling in the trees, it could be a leopard about to jump on you but it’s much more likely to be the wind, and the logical, rational explanation is probably it’s the wind. But when your survival depends upon the remote possibility – well, in fact not remote, the rather lower probability that it might be a leopard, the prudent thing is to be more risk averse than—
NDT: Than the statistics justify.
RD: Exactly, yes.
NDT: OK. So now we have a world where . . . we’re prisoners of this genetic moulding that has occurred; and I guess my point is I don’t object as much to that as you do.
RD: Yes, OK.
NDT: And . . . what’s the phrase, it sticks in your craw? So, OK . . . bring it on!
RD: A former professor of astronomy at Oxford told me a story of an American astrophysicist who writes learned articles in astronomical journals, mathematical papers, and the mathematics is premised on the belief that the universe is between 13 and 14 billion years old. And this man writes his papers and he does his mathematics and everything – and yet he privately believes the world is only six thousand years old. Well, you may be tolerant of that because you may say, ‘Well, as long as he gets his sums right, as long as his paper is well-researched . . .’
NDT`: A well-researched paper, yes.
RD: I would say that man should be fired. He should not be a professor of astrophysics in an American university. And we might differ about that, because you might say his private beliefs are private, they’re nothing to do with me, if he does his astronomy right then that’s OK.
NDT: Yes, I agree with you that that’s how I would react. What he does at home, on Sunday, that’s his own thing – if it doesn’t enter the science classroom then I don’t care how he thinks.
RD: OK, then let me take an even more extreme example. It’s fictitious in this case. Imagine you were going to consult a doctor, and I’ll make him an eye doctor because they’re sort of . . . above the waist, but you happen to know that he privately doesn’t believe in the sex theory of reproduction. He believes that babies come from storks.
NDT: OK. I wouldn’t go to that doctor.
RD: You wouldn’t go to that doctor, but I’ve met plenty of people – especially in America – who say, ‘It’s not any of your business what he believes below the waist . . . he’s an eye doctor. Is he competent? Can he repair your cataracts?’ I don’t think he should be employed in a hospital because what you’re saying about that man is that he’s got the kind of mind which is so adrift from reality that even if he’s a competent eye surgeon, I don’t think he could be trusted.
NDT: OK, so – interestingly – you’re reacting in the way our ancestors hearing the rustle in the bushes are reacting, because most of the time it’s wind, some of the time it’s a leopard and that creates a fear factor that overrides everything else. He’s a good eye surgeon, he or she is a good eye surgeon, but there’s that lingering risk that the stork theory of reproduction might somehow affect the scalpel. So you fear that risk.
RD: I’m not sure it needs to affect the scalpel; I think it’s something—
NDT: OK, so then you object on principle.
RD: I think so, yes.
NDT: Yes, not on practice. It’s a principle thing.
RD: Take a professor of geography who believes in the flat Earth but—
NDT: —but otherwise makes perfect globes.
RD: Yes, quite. Yes, exactly. There are such people . . .
NDT: OK, so you’re a principle person. You want the whole package to be consistent.
RD: I think so.
NDT: OK, so now, given that, what do you do about it? Because I don’t really do anything. You want to change that; and we just admitted together that we are prisoners of mystical, magical ways of thinking – or illogical ways of thinking – and so you want to change the biological directive of the human mind. How do you do that?
RD: I like to use the phrase ‘consciousness-raising’. I don’t want to be dictatorial and say there should be a law against illogical thinking. I’m not that fascist! But—
NDT: You know what would happen, if you . . . let’s imagine a future where all illogical people had to move to one particular state. That would be the state where all the music and art would come from, right? All the truly creative people are some of the least logical people I’ve ever met, yet they create and they make the world a little more interesting. But that’s a different issue. OK, so what do you do? You want to consciousness-raise. Do you have tactics? Because I want to consciousness-raise too. So let’s compare.
RD: OK. I suspect your tactics may be better than mine because your tactics, I think, are to lead by example.
NDT: Yes.
RD: Well, mine are to practise logic, practise science, expose the wonder of science. I like to do all that as well.
NDT: In fact, your book has the word ‘wonder’ in it. Your memoir – An Appetite for Wonder, which any scientist has and most people have, I think.
RD: Yes, and it’s actually the subtitle of another of my books, Unweaving the Rainbow – the subtitle is Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. And that book, by the way, Unweaving the Rainbow, is my attempt to join poetry to science. The phrase, the title, comes from Keats’s attack on Newton for unweaving the rainbow. Keats thought that Newton was destroying the poetry of the rainbow by explaining the spectrum. And the message of my book is that you don’t: that by destroying the mystery you increase the poetry, you don’t decrease it.
NDT: And I try to go there in all of my work. Whether or not I succeed, that’s my intent. So where do you differ from this? Or where else do you go?
RD: I certainly want to go all the way with that. I’m with Richard Feynman, who said, ‘When I look at a rose, I see the same beauty as a poet or a painter sees in the rose, but I also get poetic inspiration from the fact that I know that the colour is to attract insects and that’s come about by natural selection.’
NDT: I feel the same way about beautiful sunsets. I think there’s no more reproduced image when people want you to think of God, than a sunset with beams of light coming out.
RD: Impurities in the—
NDT: —in the atmosphere! So I too . . . I deeply appreciate the splendour of a magnificent sunset with a curtain of twilight colours going from, you know, deep blue to sky blue and the red sun. But I also know that the surface of the sun is six thousand degrees and is really scattering the atmosphere, you have water droplets condensing to make clouds and so I agree with the Feynman approach to that. But where else do you go, where else do you take this?
RD: Maybe I go a little bit further in the direction of good-natured ridicule, of absurd ideas like astrology, like homeopathy.
NDT: You’re saying it’s good-natured, but the people who are on the other side of your wit and intelligence . . . are they saying you’re being good-natured?
RD: Possibly not. I don’t really care about that. I have an eye to not just to the astrologers I’m talking to, but for example the radio audience or whatever it is that are listening in.
NDT: Yes, the larger . . . because, right, you have visible platforms where you share this.
RD: We both do. And the point has often been made to me that if you call somebody an idiot you’re not going to change his mind, and that’s possibly true, but you may change the minds of a thousand people listening in and so I’m less inhibited about calling him an idiot.
NDT: OK, so when you have the conversation with the individual, knowing you have a platform, even if the individual is insulted or feels bad or feels stupid, you’re relying on the fact that there are some other people who are perhaps on the fence who could be swayed by your arguments? So for me, I’m more for the one-on-one, I guess. I want to have the one-on-one conversation and the eavesdroppers are perhaps imagining perhaps themselves there. And that’s my tactic, if I can call it that – I’m feeling the one-on-one more than I’m feeling the audience.
RD: You have a huge audience.
NDT: Can I give an example? How would you have handled this case? I have a relative, right, whose father died. He’s my cousin, she’s my niece, once removed. She’s alone in the room with her father. The father is dead in a half-open casket. She reports to me – this is weeks later – and by the way, she’s a real estate agent, and majored in accounting. She said her father sat up, and she had a conversation with him. And I said, ‘What transpired?’ and she said, ‘He said, “Don’t worry, I’m in a better place,”’ and she said, ‘I’m glad, we’re sad you’re gone but I’m glad to hear.’ And so that was the conversation. So I said, ‘OK, how am I going to deal with this? This is family, how am I going to handle this?’ Here’s what I did. I said, ‘Next time this happens, ask him questions that could be really useful on this side of that barrier, like “Where are you? Are you wearing clothes? Where did you get the clothes? Is there money where you are? What’s the weather like? Who else is there? How old are you there? In your mind’s eye are you young, or are you old? Is grandma there? How old is she? If grandma’s where she is, would she make herself old? Or would she be young again?” Ask questions.’
RD: I think that’s a terrific answer.
NDT: Where you get information. And so now she’s on notice. Every time I see her, she says, ‘I got it, we’re going to go there.’ And so now she’s got her own little experiment that she’s going to do, next time dead people sit up and talk to her. So what would you – if I could just ask – what would you have done?
RD: I wouldn’t have thought of that – I wish I had. I am genuinely curious – I mean, do you think she was lying? Do you think she had a hallucination?
NDT: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I’m a trained astrophysicist, so my first explanation is that it was a hallucination, because everything we know about dead people tells us they don’t sit up and have a conversation, and of course there are no witnesses or video. But I didn’t care whether – how real she thought it was. What I cared was that I gave her tools, I think; I gave her tools so that next time this happens, she can separate an objective reality from what might have been in her mind. And then she arrives at that conclusion by herself, not by me telling her she’s hallucinating.
RD: Yes, I think that’s terrific. I mean if she was still . . . grieving, and still mourning, then I would have been inhibited in saying, ‘You were hallucinating.’
NDT: Out of sensitivity.
RD: Yes, out of sensitivity.
NDT: So there is a soft side to Richard Dawkins.
RD: Oh, surely.
NDT: Let the record show – Richard – he can be a puppy!
RD: But setting that aside, I think I would say something like, ‘I think you probably drifted off to sleep and had a dream,’ something like that.
NDT: Because these are solid moments, right?
RD: I mean, we all dream, every night, and we have experiences in our dreams which are utterly unreal, utterly surreal, and most of us don’t know we’re dreaming. It gives you an insight into what it would be like to be insane, actually. Every single night I go insane because the dreams that I have. Any rational person could immediately say, ‘This is not real.’ So I think that would be another way, a reasonably sympathetic way of saying it – but I like your way better.
NDT: I’m just saying that’s kind of my MO, if you will. This is my method of interaction. And I can tell you that – just in my own life – there’s been a sort of ‘land grab’ of me by atheists, to claim me as an atheist, and my objection is that I just don’t want a title. I don’t want to be labelled, on the grounds that if someone comes to me expecting that I fulfil a title, or some label indicates what I should say, then they will presuppose they already know my arguments in advance. And I’d rather they hear me from scratch, and hear me build an argument and build a conversation, and then we build it together. A very subtle point I’ll just insert here: when I taught in college, it was at a time when you had those transparencies that you could write on, or you could pre-prepare them, and some professors would just slap down a fully prepared transparency and there were all the notes, and they would speak to the notes.
RD: As opposed to building it up.
NDT: As opposed to building it up. And I’d say, ‘No! If you do that, they’ll just copy!’ Whereas if you draw the first part of the diagram – here’s an axis of temperature, and here’s time, and here’s – and then you assemble the ideas together and you get a far deeper understanding of what’s going on.
RD: That’s a very good didactic point for actually teaching. I’m not sure it applies to what you were saying before about being labelled. I mean you wouldn’t—
NDT: No, it does in a conversation. If you don’t know anything about me, you have to learn it. From scratch.
RD: But if you were known to be a rationalist, for example. If you were known to be a realist, if you were known to be somebody who bases his conclusions on evidence. Would you feel the need to hide that label, on the same grounds?
NDT: In the sense that someone coming into the conversation may be defensive in advance, they may have a posture in advance, they might try to line up some arguments in advance, and it denies the purity of a conversation that could have happened. The sincerity of a conversation that I value in a one-on-one encounter.
RD: Well, I think I would be the same. I mean, if I were going to have dinner with somebody, and I wanted to persuade her of my point of view, I don’t think I’d say, ‘Right, I’m an atheist!’ I think I would develop the thing step by step. Develop the transparency one step at a time. But if I were living in a country – like the United States – where it was impossible to get elected if you had that label, I think it’s a little bit like Gay Pride – it’s like standing out and saying, ‘I’m gay,’ or ‘I’m not gay, but I believe in gay marriage’, or something.
NDT: But I think part of the difference is that in the secular movement, there’s an urge to get more people to think that way, or to be that way, on the grounds that you have a better society for having done so. Or a more rationally deciding society. I don’t know a single gay person who has an objective to turn everybody gay. They just want themselves to be respected for what they are, but they’re not trying to make everybody else gay. And that’s different from, say, your book The God Delusion. There’s no book entitled The Straight Delusion saying, ‘We’re the right way to be.’ So to me there’s a difference in objective between the gay movement and the secular movement, if you will.
RD: I think you’re exaggerating the desire of the secular movement to convert everybody to our point of view. It’s more, ‘We want to convert you, not to atheism, but to the view that atheists should not be discriminated against.’
NDT: So, are we living in different times from a century ago? Did Darwin create a deeper divide? Was there a community of religious people who dug their heels in more strongly after Darwin? Because I don’t remember this level of conflict. Maybe I just was unaware. I don’t claim perfect knowledge of social and cultural mores around the world, but I remember days when religious people went to church, or synagogue, or mosque, on the weekend, and during the week you went to school and learned science.
RD: It does appear to be a real phenomenon that people who are not religious in America today are in danger of being ostracized. Though this is not true in places like Silicon Valley, where I’ve just been. I kept meeting people in Silicon Valley who said, ‘Well, what’s the problem? I’m an atheist, everybody knows I’m an atheist’ – but they live in Silicon Valley!
NDT: How about the UK, or Europe in general? It’s very atheistic, isn’t that correct?
RD: Yes, and paradoxically, many European countries have an established church and that may be no accident. It may be that the established church makes religion kind of boring, whereas in America, religion is—
NDT: We have choice of religion.
RD: Free enterprise. Choice.
NDT: Yes.
RD: You advertise your megachurch.
NDT: And I can follow the preachers I like and then—
RD: And then you go to this church and this church, rather than that church and—
NDT: That’s fascinating.
RD: In Britain people don’t go to church except to be married and buried.
NDT: The brief time I spent there while we were filming Cosmos, that’s when I learned. You know, there’s this thing called the Anglican Church, but it’s an administrative entity in practice, and beyond that nobody goes to church.
RD: Yes. It crowns the monarch—
NDT: And then it’s done!
RD: Yes.
NDT: And the rest of Europe is . . . ?
RD: I think Europe is very variable. I think in France and the traditionally Catholic countries – France, Italy, Spain – there’s a very strong anti-clericalism, but the United States stands out like a sore thumb for its religiosity. You have to get, more or less, right over Europe to the Middle East before you you start getting a similar preoccupation with religion.
NDT: Now, if we go back in time, essentially every famous scientist pre-twentieth century is religious. Galileo is religious, he’s a devout Catholic. Newton was Anglican, but he objected to the Trinity; he had some issues. And it’s not uncommon to have strongly religious people in modern times cite the religiosity of scientists of the past, and if you look at the numbers today – I haven’t checked the very latest ones, but when I did check, in the United States, as many as a third of practising, publishing scientists would claim to be religious in the unambiguous way where you ask, ‘Do you pray? Do you have an all-powerful being interceding in your daily affairs?’ And they’d say ‘Yes’. So you can’t then say being religious is in and of itself the problem; you would have to modify that argument to say it’s when you want to do this with your religion, then it’s a problem. But otherwise, for all these other people, it’s just fine.
RD: OK, let me take that point. First, I think we ought to make a big distinction between the historical point and the present day.
NDT: Sure, I conflated them. I’m sorry.
RD: Newton, Galileo . . . pre-Darwin. You couldn’t not be religious pre-Darwin – at least, you could, but you would have to be very – very stalwart in your scepticism. Because when I look around the world, it kind of looks almost obvious that there had to be a designer until Darwin came along. Who can blame Newton and Galileo? So I’m deeply unimpressed by that argument. As for the one-third of scientists in America – that’s approximately correct by the polls that I’ve seen. But if you move away from scientists generally to the elite scientists – studies have been done of both the American National Academy and the British Commonwealth Royal Society, the corresponding elite academies of science, and there it’s about 10 per cent. Now, I’ve seen you make the point that we still have to worry about 10 per cent—
NDT: Well, I don’t know if you can use the word ‘worry’: that was how people wanted to characterize me, but my actual point was that we have people such as yourself out there, you know, making the case to the public – but I don’t see you making the case to the third of scientists, our professional brethren; and what hope do you have of converting the public, leading them to more rational ways, when our own scientific community is representing in just that way to the level of a third – and even in the elite group, that 10 per cent is not 0 per cent.
RD: That’s right. But you have to put a little bit of caution on that. If you ask the scientists what they actually believe, they may say they’re religious, they may say I’m Jewish or I’m Christian. If you actually ask them, the one-third, and perhaps more particularly the 10 per cent, what they believe, they will talk about the mystery of the universe – they have a sort of reverent attitude, which I have as well and I think you have. But then if you say, ‘Do you actually believe in anything supernatural? I know you call yourself Christian, but do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead?’, of course they don’t. And so, you’ve got to subtract them off, I suspect; you subtract off the Einsteinians—
NDT: So the Einsteinian God is Spinoza’s God, a God of the universe that is responsible for laws and things and responsible for the universe that science observes. It’s just kind of untestable, that’s all.
RD: I don’t think it would even be ‘responsible for the universe’; I think it’s just God is the universe. Which is a bit different from thinking there’s an intelligence that started it all. So I think you want to subtract them off. And then you are left with a few who actually do believe in the virgin birth, and I don’t know what to make of them. I think that they are, as it were, traitors to science.
NDT: But they still do science! So you object philosophically.
RD: Like the astrophysicist I told you about. Well, we’ve been there already. But there’s something else perhaps I’ll tell you. My British foundation did a survey – we commissioned a public opinion poll – and we chose the very week of the census which took place in 2011, and the census in Britain actually asks what your religion is and you have to tick a box that says Christian, Jewish, Muslim etc. or none. So we commissioned a professional polling organization to sample those who ticked the Christian box to find out what they really believed. Obviously it was only a sample, it was a couple of thousand, but it was done professionally. And we asked them questions like ‘OK, you ticked the Christian box, do you believe Jesus is your lord and saviour?’ No. ‘Do you believe Jesus was born of a virgin?’ No. ‘Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?’ No. ‘Then why do you call yourself a Christian?’ Oh, because I like to think of myself as a good person. So that’s the kind of level that people will sink to in agreeing to tick the Christian box to get the label, to accept the label of Christian. We then said well, OK, so you like to think of yourself as a good person – it wasn’t sequential, they’re all separate questions – but you like to think of yourself as a good person; so when you’re faced with a moral dilemma in your own life, do you turn to your religion, or do you turn to your friends? Do you turn to your cultural background?
NDT: It’s an excellent question. Beautiful question. I want to comment on that, but go on.
RD: And I think it was only about 9 per cent of people who ticked the Christian box who said they turn to their religion, although a majority said that they ticked the Christian box because they like to think of themselves as a good person. So all this is showing really is: be sceptical when people tell you that they are religious. Be sceptical when people tell you ‘I am a Christian’ or ‘I am a Jew’, especially if they say I’m a Jew. That probably means that they are loyal to Jewish traditions and—
NDT: In America, generally, it means just that. Unless they’re full-out Hasidic, practising. Judaism is a culture, more than it is a religion, here in the United States.
RD: Which is fine.
NDT: I was interviewed for the New Yorker magazine and at some point the interviewer asked, was I raised in any religion? I said yes, I was raised Catholic, and that was actually the first time I had ever said that publicly. I never tried to hide it, it was just that no one ever asked. And I said, but it was kind of like we used to go to church weekly and then it kind of faded to once a month, then we became ‘Ashes and Palms’ Catholics where you just go on the holidays – and of course we celebrated Christmas. And the real point I wanted to make in this article was that it did not influence, in any obvious way, any decisions we made; my mother never came to us and said, ‘You shouldn’t do this because Jesus is watching.’ There was no such interaction in the household. But there was the urge to say, in an article on Neil deGrasse Tyson, ‘He was Catholic but now he’s a scientist and lost his Catholic ways,’ as though there was some big transition that happened.
RD: But there was no transition.
NDT: There was no transition! I see the urge of people to want to make these associations, but in our household there was never the thought, ‘What would Jesus do?’ Just: ‘What would a rational, thinking person do in this situation?’ And that’s how my whole life unfolded.
I still would rather just have no label at all. The only ‘ist’ I am, as I’ve said, is a scientist, and beyond that – have a conversation with me, as we just did!
So Richard, thanks for coming through town. This is a long overdue conversation.
RD: Yes.
NDT: Every time I see you I say, you know, ‘I want to tell him this’, and ‘I want to think about that’, and get his take on this – so it was great to have you here. So thanks again.
RD: And thank you!