Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the God of Love

In a video available on YouTube, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked if he believes in God. One wants to ask this question of scientists because scientists have an aura of certain knowledge in popular culture greater than that of any other profession. Because they use most rigorously the scientific method, and because that method is best suited to what they study as scientists, the results they get are more certain than the results anyone else gets in any field of knowledge: philosophers, theologians, sociologists, psychologists. Scientists are the envy of all other sages. It’s true that even in their own field, scientists have to admit that what they don’t know likely exceeds what they do, but what they know, they know. What they don’t know, they admit they don’t know. And even the fact that, taken strictly, the scientific method, paradoxically, leads to the denial of any knowledge, practically speaking, scientific knowledge is only exceeded by mathematical proof in certainty of results.

I also want to say before I get to the point that I have great respect for Dr. Tyson in his field and as a frank, outspoken person. I enjoy hearing him speak and take seriously everything he says, even when he is not talking about science.

But he does sometimes argue by tone rather than substance. In the video alluded to above he responds to the earnest question with simple logic: in all the versions of God with which I am familiar, God is defined by to characteristics: all powerful and all loving. And yet there is evil in the world (flood, famine, disease, etc.). So God is either not all powerful or not all loving.

If the possibility of God could be dismissed with such an argument, it never would have been raised in the first place. Humans have been capable of that observation since before the invention of writing.

Why is this simplistic reply inadequate? If God is all powerful, God could create a world otherwise identical to ours in which there is no famine, no disease, no war, no death (which is always the coup de grace even though it is rare that anyone mentions it as the real issue; death’s okay, but chicken pox?). But in that world, you could not exist. Neil DeGrasse Tyson would have no place in that world. We are who we are because we are in a world with these things, because we will die, because we have to negotiate with disease and mendacity and death, with desire and fear, want, and need and reluctance and the possibility of love. I suggest that if God is all loving God is willing to create that universe in order that Neil DeGrasse Tyson could exist. That’s perhaps what all-loving means. It is a willingness to create a universe in which babies die so that lovable beings may live.

That other world whose difference from ours is the argument against God also exists, say the faithful. It’s called Heaven. But you can’t get there without first being here. Abrahamists tell us, many of them, that you have to earn Heaven through virtue. I doubt that that is true. But you do have to navigate the obstacle course of earth to get there in order for it to be you who arrives.