Reactions to "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"?

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Heard Tyson in an interview saying the show will give answers to the kids who are always looking up into the sky and wondering , and hopefully give them some answers and get them thinking. ? Really? All I see kids doing is looking down into their cell phone or iPad screens. I give the show a run until the summer, then it will be shelved.
 
Casilda said:
Heard Tyson in an interview saying the show will give answers to the kids who are always looking up into the sky and wondering , and hopefully give them some answers and get them thinking. ? Really? All I see kids doing is looking down into their cell phone or iPad screens. I give the show a run until the summer, then it will be shelved.
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I’m not so quick to assume that kids aren’t asking big questions. My five-year-old knows the names of our solar system’s planets, knows that comets spread the universe’s “original” matter, knows what happens when a star goes supernova, and just the other day when she heard the phrase “event horizon,” she asked, “You mean like in a black hole?” And this is all at her prompting. Kids often find interesting what they’re nurtured to find interesting.
 
Well, perhaps the show will give equal time to a revolutionary atheist government’s execution by guillotine of a Catholic scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, the Father of Chemistry. As the judge in that show trial said, “La République n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes ; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu.” (“The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed.”)

Lavoisier: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier

 
I didn’t like it at all. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is great in an interview, but his narration leaves much to be desired. It was almost patronizing for some of us who know more about the science than middle school children, but maybe that was the intended audience. I also agree with others who have said the science was dumbed down. So much so in fact that his brief description of the formation of the moon, one of the easiest things to explain, was misleading at best. Maybe fancy CGI and Seth Mcfarlane cartoons are enough for some, but I was very disappointed. Thumbs down for style over substance.
 
Or maybe they will describe the execution by firing squad or starvation in the Arctic gulags of the greatest Russian geneticists, who made the mistake of opposing the officially approved atheist state pseudoscience of Lysenkoism, like Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Nadson, or Georgii Karpechenko:

 
Or they could discuss the many scientists executed by the atheistic Pol Pot government in the Year Zero holocaust, or the many scientists executed by the atheistic Maoist government in the Great Cultural Revolution, or…
 
John_Savage said:
He wasn’t persecuted for his scientific thoughts. It was a lie. Ideologists like science when it concerns ideology. That’s why they find cosmology and evolution especially interesting.
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It wasn’t a lie. The theories which he was required to renounce by the inquisition were his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun and his belief in an infinite universe with infinite worlds among others. He wouldn’t do it, so they silenced him by burning him at the stake.
 
EmperorNapoleon said:
It wasn’t a lie. The theories which he was required to renounce by the inquisition were his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun and his belief in an infinite universe with infinite worlds among others. He wouldn’t do it, so they silenced him by burning him at the stake.
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Not true. He was burned for his theology.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When …] Bruno …] was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology.”
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Arizona_Mike said:
Well, perhaps the show will give equal time to a revolutionary atheist government’s execution by guillotine of a Catholic scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, the Father of Chemistry. As the judge in that show trial said, “La République n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes ; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu.” (“The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed.”)

Lavoisier: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Antoine_lavoisier_color.jpg
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To clarify, are you suggesting that Christianity has never had a problem with science or just that we give equal time to government agents that happen to be atheists killing their political prisoners who happen to be scientists? If the former, can you explain the potshots at evolution on CAF, the arguments for geocentrism, etc.? If the latter, I think I agree, especially re: the communists who, since the end of the Cold War have never really been called to account for their crimes by Westerners.
 
It’s essentially lying if you pick one out of the list and ignore the real reason that he ran afoul of the inquisition. A more accurate statement would be that, “among the list of offences is his stance on cosmology, although this wasn’t the reason he was killed.”
 
VeritasLuxMea said:
To clarify, are you suggesting that Christianity has never had a problem with science or just that we give equal time to government agents that happen to be atheists killing their political prisoners who happen to be scientists? If the former, can you explain the potshots at evolution on CAF, the arguments for geocentrism, etc.? If the latter, I think I agree, especially re: the communists who, since the end of the Cold War have never really been called to account for their crimes by Westerners.
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I am suggesting that the basis for scientific reasoning and the existence of an organized body of scientific research and knowledge is due to the Catholic Church, and that science has benefitted from the Church far more than it has been negatively affected. (The existence of the university system and the scientific method itself, or simply the belief that the universe is ordered and worthy of study, stand as testaments to this.) I would further suggest that the few instances that are considered to be cases of suppression of scientific progress by the Catholic Church (Hypatia, Galileo, Bruno, et al) do not appear to really be so upon further investigation, and that the instances of atheistic government’s suppression of scientific reasoning happen at an embarrassingly late date in human history compared to the three I cited.

I would also note that the atheistic examples derive from a materialistic mindset that allows the formation of both an arrogance that can regard one’s personal economic and political prejudices as “scientific” as Marxists do, and that can often include a disregard for human rights and dignity in pursuit of a Pelagian ideal that can lead to the excesses of a government that regards the creation of an earthly paradise as achievable, and worth any number of excesses.

In regard to CAFers who hold beliefs on geocentrism, I have no idea what percentage of educated Catholics hold this view but I suspect it’s rather small. Evolution is a tricker concept as the majority of Americans don’t dispute the idea of macroevolution but (per Gallup) believe it is guided and purposeful (as do I). Catholicism is a Big Tent, and I don’t agree with all my brothers and sisters in Christ on matters that are peripheral to the Faith (or indeed, in matters of politics, economics, aesthetics, etc.) Certainly individuals who are not Christian, or who are agnostic or atheist, often hold a number of views that don’t comport with the best understandings or consensus of modern scientific thought, such as a distrust in bioengineered foods, a belief in the efficacy of homeopathic treatment, echinacea, or Vitamin C as a cure-all, or idiosyncratic beliefs concerning the labor theory of value or the undesirability of childhood vaccination.
 
John_Savage said:
It’s essentially lying if you pick one out of the list and ignore the real reason that he ran afoul of the inquisition. A more accurate statement would be that, “among the list of offences is his stance on cosmology, although this wasn’t the reason he was killed.”
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Even with the cartoon on Cosmos I got the sense that Bruno was a pantheist, which is why the Calivinsts and Lutherans wanted nothing to do with him either. Much as why the Jews rejected Spinoza. So perhaps the cosmology was one more charge to level against him, but the “Holy Ghost is the soul of the world” sort of stuff is probably what got him killed.

Fortunately today the Church no longer executes people for what it considers heretical beliefs. There are of course other places & belief systems where such things still happen.
 
Why should believe anything Tyson says on any subject?

The late Michael Crichton coined the term the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in a speech.

The idea is basically this, you read a newspaper article on some subject on some subject you have some knowledge about and see that it is chock full of misinformation. Then you turn the page to politics or international affars and believe every word. Why.

deGrasse Tyson’s research about Bruno is shallow and distorted, why should we thins his pronouncements about cosmology are any better?
 
I would normally like this kind of show, but the demonizing of the Catholic Church was not science. Way too much opinion is offered up as scientific fact. The feeling was, Christianity=bad, oppressive, thought control. Science=good, liberating, freedom, progress toward becoming gods.

It wasn’t just the segment about Bruno, it permeated every fiber of the show.

But what would you expect from a “science” show produced by Seth McFarlane?
 
I watched some of it. Liked it-----but Tyson is not Sagan.

Kept hoping for Tyson to say “billions and billions…” LOL.

Worth watching anyway. 👍👍
 
I have not watched the show, but I have two comments from what I have heard already:

First: produced by Seth McFarlane - the guy who made Family Guy, American Dad, and all the other “Simpsons” ripoffs? … I’ll pass and stick to the textbooks.

Second: Giordiano Bruno was a poor choice for a “martyr for science”. Galileo would have been a better one, but I guess McFarlane and the rest probably thought the public’s getting tired of the one-trick pony. But it does not take a lot of research to see the Catholic Church could have condemned Bruno for many other reasons which have nothing to do with science - unless McFarlane wishes to push the idea that the Unitarianism and pantheism are claims of the natural sciences and not of theology.
 
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