What Neil deGrasse Tyson Gets Wrong About God (and Atheism)

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Just because you’re smart about one thing, that doesn’t mean you’re smart about everything. And that’s especially true when smart scientists start talking about philosophical issues like the existence of God. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and today we’ll be talking about famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s thoughts on atheism and the existence of God. Before we do that, I know that you are smarter than Neil deGrasse Tyson, at least on one subject, because you click the subscribe button for our channel. Now, if you haven’t done that yet, don’t worry. Smart people make mistakes all the time, as we will see. But definitely don’t forget to click the subscribe button and to support us at trenthornpodcast.com to help keep the channel going and growing.

All right, so Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist who many people find to be smug and condescending. He has a bad habit of chiming in about many subjects or nitpicking things on the internet. He is the living embodiment of the “Actually” meme, actually. So sometimes he does this for stuff that’s true, but nobody cares, like pointing out how Star Wars tie fighters make noise in space when they shouldn’t, or how we don’t actually leap anywhere on leap day. And in other cases he opines on things outside his area of expertise, and he gets that stuff wrong. Like when he said sex couldn’t possibly be painful in other species or they’d go extinct, which is not true. There are animals that engage in sex that is painful for those involved, and they’re certainly not extinct. Or when he said that helicopters, when they lose their engines, drop like bricks out of the sky. There are helicopter pilots actually who have made videos showing how you can turn off a helicopter’s engine and use auto rotation to slow the helicopter’s descent so it doesn’t fall like a brick out of the sky.

Now, look, everybody makes mistakes when they talk about a wide variety of subjects. I know I’ve done it. But Tyson never seems to learn his lesson on this, and he continues to confidently assert things, especially in areas that are not subjects of his expertise. One of those subjects that Tyson misunderstands is the existence of God, since his opinions on that matter, they parallel those of a freshman philosophy student. As we continue though, keep in mind that Tyson does not call himself an atheist. He prefers to be called an agnostic.

I don’t call myself an atheist. Find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic.

But some of the reasons Tyson gives for not being an atheist, they really apply more to obnoxious online atheism, not atheism in general. For example, Tyson says he’s not an atheist because unlike atheists, he has no problem using BC and AD for calendar years, before Christ and Anno Domini, the year of our Lord.

The reason why I disavow the atheist title is very simple. The most visible atheists today say things, do things, and think things that I don’t do.

Such as?

Oh, they’re quick to use CE and BCE when referencing dates on the calendar, CE common era, BCE before.

Okay.

They have eschewed the BC and AD. I’m not going to say, “No, I’m taking the Christianity out of this reference because they figured out the calendar that we all use.” Clearly I’m not an atheist.

What are you?

My favorite Broadway musical of all time is Jesus Christ Superstar, which I saw in real time in New York City.

Except there are atheists who find BCE, before current era, and CE, current era, to just be silly. Richard Carrier is an atheist who doesn’t even think Jesus existed, but he still thinks that it’s stupid, in his words, to use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD, because they refer to the same division of time surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ. Tyson’s other reasons, like enjoying Jesus Christ Superstar, for example, well, only the most obnoxious of online atheists would dislike that musical because it happens to reference Jesus. So what arguments does Tyson give for defending his brand of agnosticism? Unfortunately, they reduce the case for God to being just God of the gap’s reasoning that can be rejected. We don’t know what caused X, therefore God caused X.

Is there a God then, Neil deGrasse Tyson? I’ll be about to have breaking news.

I don’t know.

Is there a God?

So what I will tell you is that there are a lot of unknowns in the universe, but just because there are unknowns does not mean there’s a deity in the unknown. The track record of people saying, “God is behind this,” and then you add a little science to it and you find out, no, we can completely explain it and control it. Then the history of that exercise is so rich with science discovering the unknowns that were previously ascribed to deity, like lightning bolts and weather systems. There was Poseidon, there was Zeus. Just look at the history of this. I’m not given reason to say we’re going to find something, God is going to be at the center of that, and there’ll be no science to apply. I have no problems if, as we probe the origins of things, we bump up into the bearded man. If that shows up, we’re good to go. Okay? Not a problem. There’s just no evidence of it.

The classical arguments for the existence of God do not reason from an absence of a natural explanation for an observation, “I don’t know.” They reason from the impossibility of a natural explanation. “I know it can’t be a natural explanation.” The question of why contingent things exist, or why objects actualize potential, or whether infinite causal chains are possible, or whether humans have intrinsic dignity and moral responsibility. These are not scientific questions where we’re just waiting on processing computers in order to figure out the answers. They are philosophical questions that we can know the answer to based on things like metaphysical, modal, and ethical reasoning. And when we reason in the correct way, those questions lead us to the conclusion of the existence of an infinite, purely actual foundation of all reality, God. But God is not a thing in the universe we detect using scientific instruments. God especially is not a bearded man hanging out in the universe somewhere. God is the ultimate foundation of reality. God is the infinite act of being itself. In other cases Tyson, in spite of being a thoughtful agnostic, he makes just the typical new atheist arguments against God.

So when you say you believe in God, which God? Is it Zeus? Is it Poseidon? Is it the Jewish God? Is it the Christian God?

In his book Aristotle on Religion, Mor Segev shows that Aristotle considered Greek mythology to be absurd, so he rejected the existence of gods and demigods, creatures like Zeus or Poseidon. However, Aristotle did believe that there was a true God, a prime mover of the whole universe. The philosopher Xenophon also said the following. He said, “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub nosed and black, Thracians that they are pale and red haired. But if cows, horses, and lions had hands or could paint and sculpture with their hands like humans, then the horses would represent the gods as horses and bullocks as bullocks, and they would create bodies in the same way as their own bodies.” But Xenophon was not an atheist, even though he recognized that many of the gods that were worshiped in his time, they’re just projections from human beings, they didn’t actually exist.

He said that beyond these false depictions of God there was a true God, or as he wrote, “One God, greatest among gods and humans, like mortals neither in form nor in thought.” So reason tells us that a purely actual, necessary, infinite, timeless, immaterial cause created and sustains the universe. I don’t believe in gods with a lowercase G like Zeus, because they’re not purely actual, necessary, infinite, timeless, immaterial. They are not God with a capital G. Once one does believe there is an infinite God, the God of classical theism, well, then you can narrow down what religion is most correct about the nature and will of God. But the fact that you have candidates you have to narrow down does not mean the question, “Which God?” is a debate stopper.

For example, if you believe there is fundamental matter in the universe, the next question’s going to be, “Which matter? Quarks, strings, mathematical points?” A similar debate arose recently on Twitter, where physicists and philosophers debated whether electrons actually exist or if they’re just fictional bookkeeping devices in the formulas of physics. Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who has a popular YouTube channel, and Philip Goff, a philosopher who defends panpsychism, kind of got into it.

Goff rejects the existence of the classical God, but he thinks the entire universe has a kind of consciousness running through it. In discussing the multiverse, Hossenfelder said, “Assuming the existence of something you cannot observe is unnecessary to explain anything you can observe.” Goff fired back by saying we can’t observe electrons, but they’re still part of our explanations. Hossenfelder said in reply that when we say that electrons exist, we mean that a certain set of mathematical assumptions turn out to be good to describe observations. Their existence is not an assumption. Now, I’m not going to try to settle the realist versus anti-realist views of science in this episode, though I’m quite a committed realist. Electrons, subatomic particles, they really do exist, and many other scientists and philosophers hold to the realist position. My point is just that answering the question, “Does X exist?” does not always involve scientific investigation. And this is especially true when we’re talking about the most fundamental elements of reality like electrons, quarks, numbers, minds, moral truths, and of course God. Now back to Tyson’s use of new atheist arguments.

And it’s odd that the word atheist even exists. I don’t play golf. Is there a word for non-golf players? Do non-golf players gather and strategize?

Belief in God is not a hobby like golf. It’s a position on a fundamental question about existence. And we have names for people who reject other fundamental aspects of existence. For example, if you think there is no purpose, you are a nihilist. If you think there should be no government, you are an anarchist. If you think there is no objective morality, you are amoral. And if you think there is no God, then you’re an atheist. And all of those big assertions about what does not exist carries a corresponding burden of proof.

There’s just no evidence of it. And this is why religions are called faiths collectively, because you believe something in the absence of evidence. That’s what it is. That’s why it’s called faith. Otherwise we would call all religions evidence, but we don’t.

Faith just means trust. People have trust or faith in God, but they also have faith or trust in other people, in the uniformity of the laws of nature, and in their own senses when they observe and record the evidence they gather from scientific experiments. The evidence for God is not going to be something material, like finding God’s energy signature in a scan of the universe. It’s going to be in the natural world having features that only make sense or at least make the most sense in light of God’s existence.

When you look at the large scale universe and you see these structures, what you have to ask yourself is, suppose all the galaxies were exactly equally spaced rather than in these filaments and structures. Perhaps you’d be asking the same thing. “Oh, look, is there some intent here? Look how beautifully ordered it is.” Ask yourself, is there some configuration of the universe where you wouldn’t ask that? Because if there isn’t, then the question doesn’t actually aim towards a unique answer. If anything you see out there looks like it’s ordered to you, then you can’t ask the question.

Yes, there is a configuration like that, one where the universe and its physical laws are totally chaotic and random and its fundamental structures do not allow life to exist. Tyson’s argument is treading into the observer effect response to the design argument for God. That argument says, “Well, we shouldn’t be surprised to find an ordered universe, because if it weren’t ordered, well, we wouldn’t be here to appreciate that fact.” But to borrow John Leslie’s firing squad example, that’s like saying we should not be surprised 50 trained marksmen all failed to execute us via firing squad, because if they had done so, we wouldn’t be here to notice that fact. So the fact that you were an observer, you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t designed, that does not explain why the design exists in the first place. You still need that additional explanation.

In fact, there have been recent non-theistic authors, authors and experts who do not believe in God, or at least the classical God, who say that the fine-tuning of the laws of nature in the universe would prove God exists, it would prove it to them, if it weren’t for the problem of evil making it unlikely the classical God exists. Astrophysicists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis defend the existence of the universe’s fine-tuning, for example, in their book A Fortunate Universe. But in that book they disagree on the cause of the fine-tuning. Barnes says that God is the best explanation, while Lewis says the multiverse is the best explanation. And Lewis takes that approach because he cannot reconcile God with the problem of evil, even though the problem of fine-tuning would lead him to the existence of God if it weren’t for the challenge of the problem of evil.

Likewise, Philip Goff, the panpsychist that I mentioned earlier, he believes that fine-tuning does show the universe has a cosmic purpose. He doesn’t just believe in atheistic materialism, but he does not believe in the traditional or classical view of God, once again because of the problem of evil. However, Goff does think that the unlikelihood of life existing is evidence of some kind of universal cosmic design or purpose, which he explains in more detail in his recent book, Why: the Purpose of the Universe. So both of those examples show that the fine-tuning argument does provide really strong evidence for the existence of God that several authors have only discounted by using not a scientific argument, but a philosophical argument like the problem of evil.

Ultimately I just hope that Tyson will see that the question of God’s existence is not one posed by ancient simpletons that we are now in a position to comprehensively answer with a naturalistic hypothesis because we have scientists now. It is a question that philosophers have always wrestled with and will always continue to wrestle with until the second coming, just as they wrestle with the existence of other fundamental realities whose existence cannot be proven by science but has to be philosophically argued, including those that make science possible itself, like the laws of logic or basic principles of non-contradiction, things like that. And so because of these basic principles like the reliability of our senses, the uniformity of the laws of nature, we can’t use science to adjudicate their existence, and science depends on these things to operate. At the least one would hope that Tyson would see that as a scientist, the question of God’s existence is beyond his area of expertise, so he should tread cautiously. Or, as he once put it …

One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.

He’s so close. He’s so close. All right, well, thank you all so much for watching. And remember, if you’d like to help our channel to grow, definitely please hit that subscribe button, and I hope that you just have a very blessed day.

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