This is how smart people explain the dangers of abstract, magical religious thinking. It’s kind of roundabout, but if you read it and think about it with your brain that took billions of years to evolve out of nothing, you might get it. If not… just go back to your incense and funny hats and leave me alone…
President [George W.] Bush… in an attempt to distinguish “we” from “they” (the terrorists who flew these planes into the buildings)… he loosely quotes a phrase out of the Bible by saying “our G-d, is the G-d who named the stars.”
Now… the fact is of all the stars that have names, two-thirds of them have Arabic names. So this was not, I don’t think, his intent with that message. While the constellations are Greek and Roman, the [stars'] names are Arabic…
How does this happen? How do you get stars named with Arabic names? It happens because… there was this particularly fertile period… this 300 year period [when] the intellectual center of the world was Baghdad… was completely open to all visitors… all travelers—they were all there exchanging ideas… and it was that period where we had… advances in engineering, and biology, and medicine, and mathematics! Our numerals are called Arabic numerals! [They] create[d] a whole field called Algebra—an Arabic word—all of this is traceable to this 300 year period. And then, something happened…
The 12th century brought the influence of [the] scholar al-Ghazali. And out of his work you get the philosophy that mathematics is the work of the Devil, and nothing good can come of that philosophy. That, combined with other sort-of philosophical codifications of what Islam was and would become, the entire intellectual foundation of that enterprise collapsed and it has not recovered since.
I’m trying to explain to you… the dangers here… and so then you fast forward to 21st century America and you ask, “What influences are we feeling now?” Because that period, that [above] naming period in Islam, stopped and never recovered. That way of thinking about the natural world— revelation replaced investigation. So I fast forward to 21st century America and what do I find? You get things like this—
This is in America! Alright, so now, what I find interesting is the level of passion that it requires to actually do this, you know like paying for this [billboard], and it means a lot of people are pissed off at the Big Bang… and so Intelligent Design is basically a God of the Gaps…
What Neil is saying is that you have this clinging to doctrine—this belief that the 2,000 year old myths and ruminations and daydreams of a tribe lost in the desert have just got to be true could ruin our search for what is really true about life on Earth and the nature the Universe. I oppose “Intelligent Design” (and other non-scientific stories for the origin of life on Earth and the Universe) not just because it’s obviously false, but because it provides an opportunity for our society to turn away from the search for truth and re-immerse itself in dark-age philosophies that attempted to explain the unknowable by clinging to a singular, magical explanation of everything that simply isn’t true. it is, in fact, inherently dangerous.
See the entire presentation here.
