Neil DeGrasse Tyson Destroys Bill O'Reilly (VIDEO)

In this set of Flashback Friday clips, Neil DeGrasse Tyson destroys Bill O’Reilly’s supposition that, since humans don’t understand how or why the tides rise and fall each day, that God must be the cause of this inexplicable mystery.

As background, in early 2011, Dave Silverman of American Atheists appeared on Bill O’Reilly‘s program and the two of them had the following exchange regarding whether religion is a myth:

O’Reilly: I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in…

Silverman: Tide goes in, tide goes out…?

O’Reilly: Yeah, see, the water — the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always goes in…

Silverman: Maybe it’s Thor up on Mount Olympus who’s making the tides go in and out…

O’Reilly: No no, but you can’t explain that… you can’t explain it…

Later that year, Tyson appeared on both the Colbert Report and on The Science Network to take on Bill O’Reilly’s claim. [You can see the Colbert clip here]

Tyson destroys O’Reilly’s position in the two clips below, but created quite a stir with one of his comments, that has frequently been taken out of context by people using this shortened version: “God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.” Tyson went on to created a discussion on Reddit to explain the full context of the quote and presenting a fuller version of the quote:

[In response to the view beholden by some religious people that God is the cause of various inexplicable events…] If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on. So, just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem. So that’s just simply the God of the gaps argument.

The clip was broken into two segments so that unrelated conversation could be left out, for your convenience.

Part 1

Part 2