What Neil deGrasse Tyson Gets Wrong About God
Science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson professes skepticism about the existence of God. In particular, Tyson points out the natural evil suffused throughout the world: “The ways life is made miserable by natural causes,” he says.
Given suffering, Tyson tells us that philosophers have maintained it must be the case that either God is not all powerful or God is not all good, otherwise God would prevent the suffering of our experience.
Tyson then goes on to state that if, in our scientific investigations, we suddenly bump into the “bearded man in the sky,” then so be it. But currently there is no evidence of such an entity: hence why religions are called faith; otherwise, Tyson says, they would be called “evidences.”
What are we to make of Tyson’s assessment? The answer, of course, is not much, but also quite a lot. On one level, Tyson has committed some very basic categories mistakes, such that the purported issues he raises are simply statements of personal confusion, nothing more. For example, to think God (even granting, hopefully, that Tyson does not literally think God would be a bearded man) is something science could “bump into” betrays his philosophical ignorance of what God is purported to explain. Science, of course, is concerned with etiological explanation; that is, how one physical process unfurls or relates to another physical process. God, however, is supposed to be an ontological explanation, particularly of why there are any physical processes – any physical world – to begin with. Properly understood, God is not something to be discovered within the world of physical causes, because God is supposed to be the reason why there is a world of contingent physical causes instead of nothing. To assume otherwise would be like trying to find J.R. Tolkien within the pages of The Hobbit and concluding that because Tolkien is not a character in the book, Tolkien does not exist.
Now, whether or not one thinks there are good reasons to posit a transcendent cause of the physical world is another matter (I happen to think there are quite compelling reasons to do so, many of which I detail in forthcoming book The Best Argument for God), but the point for now is that Tyson fails to understand why so many philosophers have maintained belief in the existence of God in the first place, which is to say, God is the reason why there is anything contingent –anything which is but didn’t have to be, including our physical universe – and not nothing instead. And while various scientific discoveries may indicate or confirm a creative and governing transcendence – i.e., big-bang or physical fine-tuning – the moment one thinks God is something susceptible to direct empirical discovery is the moment one has exposed themselves as having a kiddie-book conception of the divine.
What about the problem of pain, then? Tyson is certainly correct to say that some philosophers have argued – or attempted to argue, anyway – from the distribution of suffering to the non-existence of God. But only some. A great number of other philosophers, on the other hand, have shown fault with this line of attack. This debate, as one can imagine, is quite extensive, spanning literally thousands of years, so not every aspect can be covered here. Nevertheless, a quick response should be sufficient to show that the inference from suffering to God’s non-existence is, at best, hasty.
