I had taped the first episode of the new COSMOS with Neil deGrasse Tyson and I got around to watching it last night.  I enjoyed it a great deal, and the production values are breathtaking.  There were several interesting things that I noticed.  One was the use of animation to tell certain historical stories.  In particular the story of the Dominican monk Giordono Bruno.  He wasn’t a scientist, and his rational for believing the universe was infinite was his belief that god was infinite so his creation must also be infinite.  He also postulated that stars were other suns like ours and that there were worlds attached to those suns as well.  It was, one could argue, a mad insight into the universe, but sometimes a productive line of inquiry opens up because of just such a mad insight.  Of course technology in the form of the telescope vindicated and validated old Bruno’s insight.  But not in time to save him from being burned alive by the Inquisition.

So why the animation?  Partly because the producers of this show want children to watch and seeing a man die in hideous agony at the stake is not exactly PG.  I also think they were trying to avoid arousing the ire of religious conservatives.  If so they didn’t succeed.  A number of right wing commentators have found even this softened approach to be offensive and an attack against the church and religion.  That professional bloviator, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League was righteously upset and the article at the Catholic League‘s website even claimed that:

“One of the most enduring myths of the Inquisition,” he says, “is that it was a tool of oppression imposed on unwilling Europeans by a power-hungry Church. Nothing could be more wrong.” Because the Inquisition brought order and justice where there was none, it actually “saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.”

Yeah, I’m sure the Albigensians or the Spanish Jews would agree that they just flourished under the Inquisition’s imposition of order and justice.  There are other apologists who have tried to claim that “Hey, he wasn’t burned because of his theories about the cosmos — he was burned because he was spouting heresy, and that’s totally okay, because it was 1600 and there were laws against that sort of thing.”  Can we maybe just all agree that burning people alive is not okay?  Just like stoning women to death because they got raped is not okay, and imprisoning gay people just because they are gay is not okay, or throwing acid or shooting a young girl for the sin of going to school is not okay, or condemning people to death because they decided to believe in a different version of god are also not okay.   

The point Tyson was making was that when dogma trumps free thought and inquiry our species is in trouble.  We are facing real problems and challenges — climate change, antibiotic resistant diseases, etc.  Instead of raising up a generation of kids who fear and distrust the scientific method maybe we ought to be firing their imaginations and encouraging them to dream big and promulgate hypotheses, find solutions to vexing problems, and never stop questioning and pushing for a deeper understanding of our universe from the tiniest atomic particle or fragment of DNA to the largest galaxy.