Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 20-Minute TAKEDOWN of Christianity (Re-Upload)

in America 90% of the nation would claim to be religious and you you define this in a way that's unambiguous you don't say well do you go to church every Sunday you don't ask that question plenty of people go to church who are not religious they go to get a date or they go for the cupcakes or something they don't go to be spiritually enlightened so you ask a different question you say is there a god that listens to your prayers if you answer yes to that you're religious by anybody's definition because your understanding of

a deity is that that deity is monitoring your daily Affairs so that's unambiguous about n this number's dropped in the last couple years but it's about 90% turns out if you go to college and get an advanced degree a master's or a doctorate where these are degrees where you actually question the state of existing knowledge the undergraduate degree doesn't really do that you're learning from textbooks that written by somebody else your doctrines are already there the higher degrees imply that you are questioning the very fabric of the knowledge you had previously learned among that Community

it's 60% it has dropped that's interesting let's keep going how about scientists of all Stripes so biologist chemist sorry let's include Engineers as well people who have form formal scientific training mathematicians as well okay what what happens next drops to 40% now if you look at this number it looks like wow so scientists the public is 90% scientists are 40% no the drop is not that significant because every scientist has a has an advanced degree so in fact the drop is not from 90 to 40 the drop is from 60 to 40 so becoming a

scientist is not as big an effect on whether you're religious as you might otherwise think most of the drop comes because you're educated educated beyond the level of college so that's 40% so now you go to Elite scientists members of the National Academy highly accomplished subset among scientists the number drops to 7% there was a headline nature the British Journal nature which said after the study was released 93% of elite scientists reject God that was supposed to be a shocking headline and I look at that and I said that's not even interesting that was the

trendline anyway what's more interesting which was not the headline is that 7% of elite scientists pray to a god is isn't isn't that a more interesting fact to you isn't that kind kind of interesting the most accomplished scientists in the world in that Community 7% of them still pray to a personal God I think that is deserving of more study than the 93% who don't because something's going on there we don't know what and I have uh confronted people on this I would say to the most sort of vociferous in The Atheist Comm Community I

would say you're beating the public over the head saying telling them why why are you doing and I'm thinking before you beat the public why don't you beat them over the head okay no I'm just saying if you're going to rank if you just cuz that I understand that first because if you can't convert that 7% you've got no hope in the general public that's all I'm saying this this this is among the ranks of the scientifically educated now philosophers basically invented atheism and if you do this if you check the statistic for philosopher it's

down it's below 1% there are no religious the only religious philosophers there are they're like Theologian philosophers all right if you subtract the theologic philosophers this numbers is essentially zero all right so they're basically birthed atheism uh the philosophers and there's this talk uh I I don't know here in in Australia uh what does the Bible in the public school class or not no is it by law or is it just by tradition is it by law okay so in America there's this understanding that the state and the church are separate and by and large

that's been honored for by and large for most of the history of the country by and large and the what's interesting about America a point that was a little bit alluded to earlier today is that it was founded on the principle that the state has no religion the state is indifferent to what religion you might have so that means there's no authority over you that's going to tell you who and what to worship and that's a state that we all take for granted but so many places in the world that is not true well there's

a case in New Jersey where a middle school kid was lectured to by the history teacher in a public school and the history teacher said if you don't accept Jesus as your lord and savior you are going to hell there a little Muslim girl there said you were already damned to Hell first point second that Noah had dinosaurs on his ark third point he made is that big bang and evolution are just theories and you can take them or leave them so I I don't like I said I don't get into these I just don't

we got people who do this we've got the four horsemen we got we got our boy here um who's coming up after we got people who fight this stuff I'm not one of those really I I'm doing this cuz like I know you you all this is the bone I'm throwing you but I really I don't do this so but then I thought about it and I said you know I have an OP bed I can I mean a a letter to the editor on this that I can write and I left out the part

about Jesus I left that out because if that's how he feels he he wants you to be Christian that's okay fine I left that out I went to the rest of what he said and this was my letter as it appeared in the New York Times people cited violation of the first amendment when a new jerse that's a separation of church in state essentially New Jersey school teacher asserted that Evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's Arc carry Dinosaurs the case is not about the need to separate church and state it's

about the need to separate ignorant scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers that's the [Applause] problem if he wants to believe Jesus is a savior that's not synonymous with being scientifically illiterate because 40% of American scientists pray to a personal God what is identical with being scientifically literate is that if Noah was a human being he did not have dinosaurs on his ark because humans and dinosaurs did not coexist all right every one of those scientists knows that even the 40% who pray to God so this is this is how I've sort of split

the kingdom there then then you get the the billboard Wars okay this was fun Big Bang Theory you got to be kidding God all right this goes on this is what we we put up with all right um so then we got to then there was like let's come back praise Darwin evolve beyond belief freedom from religion founding so the billboard Wars are are in progress here there's some people who are like okay with God and okay with sort of how things evolve so they ride the the fence so here's a bumper sticker The Big

Bang Theory God spoke and bang it happened you know so they they're excited about both God and the Big Bang but then we had this idiot back in May judgment day did this did this Judgment Day stuff reach below the equator jeez okay uh yeah it was it was now the good thing at this what unlike other predictions like Jesus will come one day this had a date okay okay you could test this was like easy to test you just sort of wait around for it all right so now it turns out that May 21st

was only the day Jesus was supposed to show up the actual end of the world is October 21st so the end of the world is still to come this year this is directly from the website so I had to tweet so this is May 21st so on May 21st or May 20th I tweeted this if Jesus actually arrives May 21st it'll be easy to convince Skeptics if he doesn't show up do the faithful become atheists that was my question now in a Twitter stream it's a it's a it's a live conversation with complete strangers everybody

depositing their 140 characters worth of thought so here this is there was a huge reaction to that Tweet now you would expect that most of my followers or at least a big fraction of them would be sort of atheistic so you'd expect people say this guy is an idiot why are we even spending any time on them well one such person did make such a reply but not in the way you might think no anyone who's read the Bible know this camping was full of from the start okay so what do you do with that

so so this is somebody complaining about the prediction of Jesus coming because he says this other guy doesn't know Jack about the Bible but this guy does and went on there are other places where people quoted that one can't know when Jesus comes so the fact that this guy's saying he knows means he doesn't read the Bible so this so so this is what's out there people who are ready to vociferously argue about who knows the Bible the least September 11th 2001 we just had our 10th anniversary of that I happen to live three and

a half blocks from what became known as ground zero uh these this image was taken outside my dining room window uh the North Tower is on fire these are 110 story buildings the World Trade Center towers uh this image is the instant the South Tower was hit it was hit from the left you can not see the entry point cuz we're blocked by this other black building it's a hotel a 50 story hotel which is just kind of in the foreground you see part of the South Tower punching out this is before the jet fuel

had ignited and when you ignite jet fuel you set a deflagration wave not a not a a a bomb wave it's a different kind of wave it's not accompanied by a shock um this is a split second after that the fuel has ignited creating more pressure and within a split second of that the entire south tower was engulfed and this is fragments of plane and bodies and office coming out the other side now why am I dragging you through this uh okay 62 minutes later both buildings had collapsed and there was Blue Sky where there

was once these buildings this is directly outside of my apartment building and the emergency vehicles had come this is the pulverized World Trade Center dust that had settled several inches of it I say this because shortly after this this gentleman got up uh president of the United States George W Bush This is actually my photo of him I was in that room at that time when he spoke see the medals there on the table I was on a committee to tell him who to give those medals to they the presidential medal of Science and so

he actually gave them to everyone we told him to give him to except he didn't read their citations he's smart enough to know not to pronounce any of the science words that were in the citations so he put the metal around the neck somebody else read the citations shortly after September 11th he gets up I don't remember where he gave the speech and he says in an attempt to distinguish we from they he says our God is the god who named the [Music] Stars this is before I was on his Rolodex you know I could

have saved him from himself okay it's a loose quote from Genesis that says god named all the stars in the sky okay first of all it's the same God so he's got that wrong but but Allah god of Islam and God of the the the Jewish they're all it's the same God they got they call them different names but it's the same book delivering you the same God apart from him getting that wrong he says our God is the god who named the stars what he he he just didn't know 2third of all stars in

the night sky have Arabic names two-thirds of all stars that have names have these are all the Arabic star names all of these I don't think this is the point wanted to make I I think he figured that out like I said it before I was on his Rolodex and so you say well how does this happen how does how do you get how do you get a culture where two where stars in the night sky are named by them what was going on how did that happen and you have to go back a thousand

years and you get to Islam in what's the golden period of Islam in that period algebra was invented algorithm is an Arabic word all these words they begin with a l 10 to one it's an Arabic word Arabic our numerals are Arabic numerals did you pause and reflect on why we call them Arabic numerals we just call them that right but somebody did good stuff with these numerals it was in bagad a thousand years ago where they invented algebra and there was advances in mathematics agiculture engineering men all of these fields all at a time

when Europe was disembowelling Heretics so something changed 12th century this gentleman came around Al gazali a Muslim scholar learned at this point Islam is maybe just a few hundred years old people are reading the Quran and interpreting it however they sort of want to and feel like it there's not a coherence to the practice of Islam until he comes around and codifies the behavior of a good Muslim in much the same way St Augustine in his book cities of God codified what it is to be a good Christian how do you burn the witches there's

a recipe for that you got they got to be upside down so the blood does you know it's a whole whole itinerary for how to be a good Muslim and in in his writings contain the assertion that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the devil two actions that you see in nature are the will of Allah well if you drop a stone and it falls Allah will that if that's your explanation your curiosity stops you combine everything happening in nature being the will of Allah to the manipulation of numbers being the work of

the devil and the entire Enterprise of that golden era collapses now historians when they look at that era they say well the Mongols came and they you know so historians think of the world in terms of wars and Kings they think less about it philosophically about intellectual movements or the absence thereof Islam rose again after this period didn't have science associated with it no new inventions in math you look at the period of Islam in Spain the period where the great alra was built there is no attendance science going on there it's done it's gone

and it is a it is a cost that exists to this day there is 1.3 billion Muslims in the world today who are not participants on the frontier of scientific discovery what's the best measure of this just check out the Nobel prizes I tally them okay how many Jews have won the Nobel Prize in The Sciences here they go 25% of all Nobel prizes in The Sciences are won by Jews how many Jews in the world about 15 million tops 15 million how many Muslims in the world 1.3 billion which is Huger way huger than

15 million how many Muslims have won the Nobel Prize in The Sciences two and half two I can't bring myself to call economics a science I'm sorry I just I just can't I've tried I've really tried I'm sorry that's how many and the physics one was a Pakistani physicist not a middle eastern physicist so Jews have 50 times the number of Nobel prizes the 180th of the population of the Muslims is 4,000 times the impact I lose sleep every night wondering how many secrets of the universe lay undiscovered because 1 fth no 17th what's the

population 1 Sixth of the population of the world is not a participant on the exploration Frontier what thoughts have gone undram of yes the moral of the story or discussion that Neil just gave is that let's focus on improving literacy levels and access to education across the world and the question of Blind Faith or religion should solve itself man and I all agree for my part and no guys I'm not anti people having faith or believing there must be a greater work of force in the universe that we can't even begin to comprehend I'm stist

call it physics call it being whatever man but I wholly disagree with however is organized religions like Christianity Islam and Etc I can actually confidently say that throughout the less than two millenniums that these religions have been mainstream they've done more harm than they've helped anyone man in terms of Oppression lives lost and Etc try changing my mind in the comment section and let's get out M even in this day and AG man the number of people in regions like my home country who elect a politician that's clearly morally B simply because they identify as

a strong Christian is buffing and disturbing and when these politicians go on to make their lives a living hell inevitably in every sense of the word these people still fail to own their mistakes and you usually hear something along the lines of May can fool us but he can never fool God so we leave it up all to God and oh not to forget when the next election CLE rolls around if the corrupt candidate just aligns himself or herself with the country's religious leaders you can rest he'll be elected again by the same people you

can't make this kind of stupidity up man and it's a trend you'll find across subsaharan Africa man I don't know about other regions around the world so I won't really I understand the importance of religion in socities from the social cohesion it Fosters to the emotional and spiritual fulfillment it offers a lot of people and people grieving that humans still had all these before religion when people subscribed to ever evolving faiths as the world around them changed not sticking to while doctrines laid out in books WR by so-called religious leaders who didn't even understand the

basics of jump Theory man anyway also before you leave guys I'd like you to remind you guys that I'd really like your help with supplying basic school materials to some of the most impoverished kids across Kenya even a single dollar man could go towards changing a kid's life and isn't that's just amazing one so I'll highly appreciate whatever it is that you can spare and you can make make the donations through the ppal link in the description in the channel it's the first link immediately after you open the description section otherwise thanks a lot I

hope you and these politicians would I disagree with our advice that [Music] and these politicians go home to Liv [Music]