Ferrara – Creationism & The Quack Science of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Evolution and Creationism

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Some of you phoned yesterday and demanded to know why I was being a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal and would even mention the discarded and ridiculous notion of creationism on such an avant-garde program.  Of course, I didn’t have time to explain it fully, so I want to get back to it or a moment today.  I want to enlist the aid of the author of Liberty, the God That Failed, Christopher Ferrara.  Christopher knows what’s going on.  He actually read one of the pieces of hate mail I received last night.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson continues to challenge long-held religious beliefs on his weekly prime time science show on Fox, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. At the beginning of Sunday’s episode, Tyson offered up a compellingly straight-forward reason why the Earth cannot possibly be 6,500 years old, as creationists believe it to be.

As Tyson explained to his viewers, we measure Earth’s distance from other planets and galaxies in the universe by the speed of light . . .

There’s a lot more of Mike’s interviews with Christopher Ferrara just waiting for you to discover and share them. Here, here and here

“If the universe were only 6,500 years old, how could we see the light from anything more distant than the Crab Nebula?”

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Mike:  There are a couple of things working here.  One is the idea that the 6,500 year mark is somehow etched in stone, which I do not believe it to be.  There might be those out there that say it is, but that doesn’t make it so.  The second thing is you would seek to disprove that there was, at some point in time, a creator.  Why would you do such a thing and for what purpose?

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Do you wish to be of the next race of creators?  Is that how arrogant — is that the level and the lack of humility that you carry around with you, that you think yourself not worthy to be a member of our puny little race that is of the Creator?  Instead, if we eliminate the Creator, then what?  We’re the what, highest beings known to exist?  This led into a little bit of a discussion.  Some of you phoned yesterday and demanded to know why I was being a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal and would even mention the discarded and ridiculous notion of creationism on such an avant-garde program.  Of course, I didn’t have time to explain it fully, so I want to get back to it or a moment today.  I want to enlist the aid of the author of Liberty, the God That Failed, Christopher Ferrara.  Christopher knows what’s going on.  He actually read one of the pieces of hate mail I received last night.  Before he jets off to Milan today, he’s going to take a few moments and discuss this a bit.  Christopher, how are you, my friend?

Christopher Ferrara:  I’m fine.  I noticed that you made reference to some sort of objection on the part of some viewers to the introduction of religion into the program.  First of all, I find that curious because someone who says he’s a patriot would have to be basing himself, at least in part, on a document which begins referencing a creator who has endowed us with certain unalienable rights.  Is this creator a dispensable entity?  We evoke him when we please and then we forget about him otherwise?  I’m no fan of the deistic conception of God, but even the founders recognized that absent the existence of a creator, not only do we not have existence, we couldn’t possibly have any rights worth talking about.  We would have only agreements among ourselves that could be revoked at will concerning what our rights are.  We need to have a creator to endow us with our being and with our rights.  Otherwise, what are we?  We’re just bags of chemicals walking around pretending to have rights.

Mike:  But that’s what they want.  They want bags of chemicals walking around because then they’re the ones that get to tell us what the rights are.  Then you get to choose what sex of child you want to have.  If your wife gets pregnant and it’s a little girl in South Dakota and you want to get rid of the problem that is a little girl, you just go to the abortion clinic and get rid of it.

Ferrara:  I don’t understand why modern political activists who call themselves conservative wouldn’t recognize what the great Cardinal Henry Manning once said.  He said, “All human differences are ultimately religious ones.  If you probe beneath the surface of political debates, you’re going to find religious questions.  You can’t avoid them.  You have to take a position one way or the other, for example, whether we have a creator who endowed us with inalienable rights.  The idea that you shouldn’t be introducing religion into a political discussion just doesn’t make sense if you’re going to have a meaningful discussion about such things as rights, for example.

Mike:  Christopher Ferrara wrote the book Liberty, the God That Failed.  How long are you going to be in Milan?

Ferrara:  Just until Sunday.

Mike:  You’ve got a new shipment of books coming your way to sign.

Ferrara:  I’ll be here.

Mike:  Just checking to make sure because people will be anxiously awaiting their copy of Liberty, the God That Failed that they can get at the Founders Tradin’ Post signed by Christopher.  The book is doing very well.  It’s doing well because people that are reading it are commenting about it on the Twitter feed and on Facebook and talking to other people about it.  It’s kind of like one of those whisper campaigns.  [mocking] “Have you read this book called Liberty, the” — “Don’t tell anybody I’m reading this!  Don’t tell anybody in Campaign for Liberty that I’m reading this but Liberty, the God That Failed, it’s pretty compelling.”  We don’t want this secret to get out here, that there might be something beyond the realm of politics, which I always find fascinating.  I think that politics and our practices of religion or faith have always existed, in this realm anyways, on the same plane.  Obviously there is another plane where God the Father plays and he is in charge of all this.  But here in this realm, as you said, I just think it’s ridiculous to ask or to consider or to desire for your political class to stop acting the way they are currently acting and act with more virtue.  Where is it exactly that you expect them to find this virtue?

Ferrara:  It’s virtue in the air.  Rights talk is ultimately meaningless unless you get into the question of the origin of natural rights.  You can’t have natural rights unless you have a nature to begin with.  If your rights pertain to your nature, what then is human nature?  If there is no creator, who gave us a nature?  It doesn’t make any sense to speak of nature at all.  If you have no nature, there goes natural rights right out the window.  This is what evolution is all about.  We have no nature, we’re just, as I said, a collection of chemicals walking around.  We could be something else in 100 million years.  When the idea of human nature disappears, rights disappear, human dignity disappears, and you get what you have today.  You have a society that’s descending into the abyss.

Mike:  As far as Neil deGrasse Tyson is concerned and Sunday night’s Cosmos episode, you pointed out to me in an email last night: This guy is not a scientist.

Ferrara:  Let’s put it this way.  He has a Ph.D., but if you do some digging on him, what you really find out is something you would read, for example, in Alcalde, which is the official alumni publication of the University of Texas.  There is quoted about what happened to him when he went there and his Ph.D. dissertation committee, confronted with an unacceptable Ph.D. thesis, dissolved itself, effectively flunking his Ph.D.  There are intimations in the article that perhaps racism had something to do with it because he happens to be African-American, but he himself admits that it really didn’t.  I’m quoting from this article in the alumni journal.  He said, “It was a failed experiment and I moved on from that chapter of my life.  With or without skin color, I wasn’t the model student.  There was simply no room for me to be the full person that I was.”  Then later on, one of his former professors says, and I’m quoting, “Research was not his strength.  He was never going to solve any major scientific problems.  But I knew he was going to do something big because he had charisma.

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He’s warm and funny but he also has a secret backbone, ambition, confidence, and that’s taken him far.”  In other words, he was the perfect scientific celebrity.  He ultimately got a Ph.D. from Columbia but since then he has been a popularizer of science principally, one of the talking heads of the scientific establishment.

What this establishment is promoting is a creation mythology of its own, a creation mythology that doesn’t have a god in it.  And this is what Stephen Hawking has said, in all serious, the universe created itself.  Now, if you were sitting in Fordham University classroom back in the 1970s with a nice Jesuit professor, you’d get an F in philosophy for asserting this because it contradicts the fundamental rule of logic.  If the universe created itself, it had to have the capacity to bring itself into existence, but in order to have that capacity, it would have to exist in the first place.  Therefore, the proposition that the universe created itself means the universe existed before it existed.  It’s utter nonsense.

Mike:  So that’s a paradox.

Ferrara:  Well, it’s not a paradox.  It’s just nonsense.  A paradox could be true but this is worse than a paradox.  This is simply a nonsensical proposition.  A thing cannot bring itself into existence unless it first exists.

End Mike Church Show Transcript