Its been two weeks since I've posted. Sorry about that, but life just got busy and with the rest of the week ahead looking like more 10 hour work days due to the first round of exams, I decided I needed to be deliberate about posting.
About two weeks ago, Krista and I went out to Purdue to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson speak and while he essentially turned it into "The Neil deGrasse Tyson variety hour" instead of talking about anything new, it was still a good time. In fact, its better he probably didn't go into any research because it would've been over my head in about five minutes. It was quite refreshing to see his support for the liberal arts while still acknowledging that if we want to solve the economy's problems, we mostly need to focus on the sciences. It was very pragmatic and fairly easily applicable and everything I would've said if I was more eloquent and roughly a million times smarter. I mean, the man does outrank me in honorary doctorates by a score of roughly 20 to 0.
The interesting thing for me to watch though was how much some people really got into the rift of science vs. religion during the Q and A session. Dr. Tyson himself is a skeptic but the viewpoints he expressed seemed to align more with willfully ignorant agnosticism. Many of his supporters though strongly supported skepticism or straight out atheism and were eager to jeer those who did support religion. This confounds me because there is no natural rift between science and religion. Science is there to explain the natural while religion deals with the supernatural. A strong rejection of one usually comes from a lack of understanding of it while placing too much reliance on the other. It is a failure to recognize the legitimacy of both science and religion that causes this confusion and contempt against each other.
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