It’s high time I talked about Cosmos here. It’s been a long time since the last update to this site, and Cosmos is the kind of experience that only comes along once in a generation. It has become a sort of nucleation center toward which my family and friends have gravitated, and it seems that this pattern is playing out on a much larger scale with the general television viewing audience of the US as well, a trend which I could not be happier about. I have a few particular thoughts about the show, as well as what other people are saying about it.

I’ll begin by addressing a relatively innocuous criticism that was voiced by my father, who was not expecting the show to devote so much time towards discussing biology and its key concepts of genetics and evolution by natural selection, but rather expected a show predominantly occupied with physics and astronomy. It’s not a particularly surprising expectation, given that the title of the show itself calls to mind astronomy, that Neil Tyson is an astrophysicist, and that his predecessor Carl Sagan was an astronomer.

However, Cosmos is not about any one branch of science in particular, but about science as a whole, the aim of which is nothing less than to understand everything about the universe in which we live. This includes not only stars and planets or quarks and atoms, but also the science of life, and the history that science has provided for us regarding how we as a species and as individuals came to be. Cosmos isn’t just about the static building blocks or megastructures of our universe, but about the dynamic processes of life that have arisen from those building blocks within it. As Carl Sagan and others have put it, we are the Universe trying to understand itself–beings of fantastic complexity that have arisen from the most basic of building blocks, and which are now looking at those same building blocks and trying to understand their own existence as well as the existence of everything else in the universe around them that has been formed using those same building blocks.

Furthermore, the program’s emphasis on the different branches of science and how they interconnect, illustrated by a seemingly freewheeling tour led by Tyson, is its secret genius. In one stroke, it manages to bypass the potentially short attention spans of casual viewers by introducing a huge number of very different yet interconnected topics in a short span of time through its fantastic imagery, while at the same time illustrating the fundamental inseparability of any one topic in science from any other. There are critics out there who claim the show is too glossy and shallow; these critics want nothing less than for Neil Tyson and Cosmos to single-handedly turn back the tide of anti-science rolling over the US. Such a task is clearly impossible for a 13-part series on broadcast television, or any endeavor short of generations worth of top-notch education for every citizen.

But these critics are missing the very thing that sets Cosmos apart from other science programming of recent memory–rather than presenting a rigorous college-level course on the scientific method, physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy to a wide audience of television viewers, it is showing them particular examples of what we’ve come to understand about the world through science, the significance of each, and how every single one of them is connected to every other. If one accepts the validity of the scientific method as a way of understanding the natural world, then they must accept every piece of evidence, finding, and conclusion it has to offer–no matter the topic. If one accepts artificial selection, then one cannot logically deny natural selection. Nor can they logically deny the mechanism of DNA, or the chemistry which governs the processes of life, or the physics that allows those processes to occur. There is no cherry-picking in science, at least not in good science. No matter the specific subject of study, there is only one brand of science, and it is all-inclusive. That’s one of the best, most important, and most powerful things about science:

SCIENCE IS A PACKAGE DEAL.

You either accept it all, or leave it alone. The former choice will give you the most accurate understanding of the world in which we live that is available to us today. The latter will isolate you in your own pocket universe, away from the rest of human civilization and all of the wonders of the natural world. But this pocket universe will still be governed by the same rules as the one in which the rest of humanity lives. And that’s one of the other most powerful things about science, and indeed its single most important aspect:

THE FINDINGS PROVIDED BY SCIENCE ACCURATELY DESCRIBE THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN, WHETHER OR NOT YOU ACCEPT THEM.

You may notice that I sidestepped the words ‘true’ and ‘believe’ in that assertion. The reason is that truth is the domain of philosophy, and not that of science; science is concerned only with evidence–things that are objectively accurate descriptions of reality, no matter your own personal view on the subject, things that are testable and do not vary with the person interpreting them. Similarly, belief has nothing to do with science. Belief is reserved for notions like truth, things that cannot be empirically tested and for which you either take someone’s word for, or make up your own mind about. Belief is internal. Science doesn’t deal with internals, it deals with externals: things that are out there for all the world to see. Things that can be tested, measured, quantified, and reproduced. These things are evidence which can be used to infer facts about the natural world. These facts will exist and remain accurate whether or not you believe in them.

SCIENCE IS NOT A BELIEF.

However, your beliefs may cloud your ability to recognize and accept the facts. Belief, or dogma, inhibits the progress of science, which is a method of understanding fundamentally opposed to dogmatism. Science isn’t about accepting what you’re told at face value, it’s about questioning everything. As a result, there is no sole arbiter of science, no one person who decides what is fact and what is not, not even the esteemed Neil deGrasse Tyson himself. It is unnecessary, because evidence is by definition self-evident–he’s just the messenger, as are all scientists. And good scientists are always willing to change their worldview if presented with appropriate evidence; dogmatists rarely are. This is ultimately what makes science so effective and powerful a tool.

To be sure, science is incomplete. There are many unknowns in science, a great deal of things we still don’t know about the universe. In Cosmos, Tyson frequently points out when something is not known to present-day science. This is not to say science is inaccurate or can never be trusted; this is a reflection instead of the fact that there are limits to how much we can know–a limit to what we can discern or infer from the evidence. This can best be understood by recognizing that science can only ever disprove things, and can never truly, directly prove them. One can disprove an idea, or indirectly support its validity by disproving its opposite, if such an opposite exists and can be tested. This is the necessary prerequisite for disproving something: that it be testable.

This may sound like a shortcoming, but it is in fact science’s greatest strength. Using only the ability to disprove things, we’ve developed all the technology and artificial wonders you see around you today, from the computer or smartphone you’re reading this on to the car, bus, or train you might have taken to work. We’ve developed scientific theories like evolution by natural selection, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, which have been stunningly successful in explaining the world around us. The basis of this success is not that they have been proven, but that they have never been disproven, not by any experiment or observation, not even once in a century of scientific inquiry and investigation. Theories like quantum mechanics and relativity have successfully explained many observations and predicted the outcome of many experiments, and natural selection has similarly been extremely successful in explaining the history of life on Earth.

But still, none of this is definitive, incontrivertible proof, because some future observation or experiment may at any point provide evidence which contradicts any of these theories, and once that happens, they either need to be modified to account for the discrepancy or discarded entirely. It takes only one finding–one which must be able to be replicated–to disprove something. And that is what science does: it seeks to disprove. When it can, such ideas are thrown out. When it cannot, those ideas must be taken seriously and considered to be accurate descriptions of reality. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stated through the voice of Sherlock Holmes:

‘WHEN YOU HAVE ELIMINATED THE IMPOSSIBLE, WHATEVER REMAINS, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, MUST BE THE TRUTH.’

Although, he really should have said “fact” instead of ‘the truth’. But this is the very essence of a successful theory: an idea which could be disproven if certain assumptions are incorrect, but has not been, and thereby supports the accuracy of the assumptions or ideas underlying it. This is very different from an idea which cannot be disproven–these ideas are in the domain of belief, not fact, and are fundamentally unscientific. If science can never disprove it, no matter what, it is not within the realm of science to explain, address, or even consider.

There are many who do not understand the subtleties of this concept, and who perceive the advance of collective human knowledge through science as an assault on religion, or that science somehow disproves God. It does no such thing. I say this as both a scientist and an athiest–not one who is violently opposed to religion, but one who is merely happy to live without it. There are some questions, such as the nature of God, which will forever be beyond the reach of science, because they are not testable and hence can never be disproven, or supported by disproving their opposite. As long as these ideas or questions remain untestable, they will forever be beyond the reach of science, and those who value religion and what it teaches them need not be afraid of what science has to offer. Their religion will be able to give them answers which science will never be able to. Furthermore, practitioners of science generally have no real desire to take these things away from the religious or the spiritual–those who truly understand what science is recognize its boundaries, and restrict their inquiries to its proper domain. Only dogmatists will ever claim to know everything–whether that dogma is propagated through religion, or by misguided interpretation of science.

SCIENTISTS, AT LEAST GOOD ONES, WILL NEVER CLAIM TO KNOW EVERYTHING; ONLY DOGMATISTS WILL.

Rather, it is religion that often steps into the realm of science, a historical accident, a holdover from the times when we didn’t have science and had nowhere else to turn but to religion for physical understanding as well as spiritual understanding. The result is dogma. It is with dogma that science has a beef, not religion at large. When someone makes the claim that all of creation is 6000 years old, that’s a testable claim which science can investigate, and science has disproven it by not one but many different lines of evidence, from the present concentrations of radioactively decaying elements and their products, to radiocarbon dating of fossils, to geological strata of the earth, to how long it would take Earth to cool from the heat of its formation, to the fact that we can see not just 6000 light years out into space, but out to over 13 billion.

When religion is conflated with dogma, it sets up a false conflict between science and religion. Only when science and dogma ram horns is science considered controversial or subversive, whether that dogma be religious, political, or otherwise. Science and religion can coexist, because they are intended to answer fundamentally different types of questions. Further understanding of the physical universe takes nothing away from God or what religion can teach us about ourselves. Science will never be able to answer every question that beings like us can ask. The knowledge it can provide us with is quantifiable. Finite. God is the infinite, and if He or Anyone Else is there, They will forever know more than we do, and science will never crowd Them out; we will forever be in Their shadow.

Not only is there no inherent conflict between science and religion, as the ultra-religious at one end of the spectrum or the extreme atheists at the other may claim, but science can also add to the beauty of the natural world, and need not detract from it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The more that beholder understands about what they are seeing, the more beauty it is possible to derive from it. One can look at a sunset and appreciate the aesthetic appeal of a pretty arrangement of colors. Or, they can also contemplate the complex interplay of the universal building blocks that allow us to perceive it: the nuclear fusion inside the sun that generates the light, which travels millions of miles through vast space to refract in Earth’s atmosphere and ultimately interact with our retinas, from which our brains, the most complex structures in the known universe, reconstruct that beautiful image. Science need not detract from or reduce beauty. It can augment it, just as it augments our understanding of the Universe and our place in it.

Cosmos operates according to this philosophy. If one is willing to accept the simple but profound premise that the world operates in an ordered fashion, and that the rules governing this order can be discerned through observation and logical reasoning, then Cosmos is ready to take you on a guided tour of everything we currently know about the world in which we live, and about ourselves: in other words, everything science has to offer from millennia of observation, experimentation, and reasoning. There are wonders out there in the real world beyond anything the human imagination can muster.

If you’re willing to entertain this notion and embark on this journey, always remember that science and religion need not conflict, but rather can complement each other. In an infinite universe, there is always room for an infinite supreme being in addition to our finite selves, should you feel the need to invoke one. Cosmos, and science itself, are about everything. But even that still leaves plenty of room for religion and spiritualism. When someone claims that science and religion are mutually exclusive, or attempts to undermine any conclusion of science, whether it be evolution or the age of the Universe, examine their reasoning. If they have none, then examine the dogma they’re trying to sell, and why they’re selling it–dogma is the last resort of those who have no reasoning, but it is no substitute. And above all else:

QUESTION EVERYTHING.