Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

For example, nowhere in the Bible is Earth described as a three-dimensional object. All references to it are flat. And until the 15th century, so too were all maps of the world, informed by scriptures. We can celebrate the cultural history of this notion, but it’s objectively false. Same holds for the value of Pi. In the Bible, a passage (I Kings VII) can only be true if Pi exactly equals 3.0. But we know better than this (so too did the earlier Babylonians, who calculated that Pi was a number between 3 and 4). But just because the Bible says Pi = 3, does not mean Pi = 3. The statement is objectively wrong, and is therefore not a matter of opinion. The fact that the people who wrote the Bible made Pi = 3 and Earth a flat disc is of some historical interest and worthy of study in history class, philosophy class, or religion class. But it has no place in the field of science, whose goal is to find truths of the universe that sit independently of opinion.