Collision w/ Jeff Durbin: Responding to Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Collision. I am Pastor Jeff Durbin. Today, we are dealing with what

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I think is one of the most unimpressive modern atheists, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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Let's get started. So this particular clip is actually fairly old, but the conversation will always be relevant and it'd be good to to deal and engage with someone like Neil deGrasse

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Tyson on the issue of theodicy. The issue of theodicy is, of course, an age old issue and question.

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It's the question of of divine providence, God's existence and God's goodness, his benevolence and the problem of evil.

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So what we're dealing with now here is the problem of evil. Now, let's go ahead and start listening to some of what

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Tyson says and we'll engage a bit with it. Do you believe in God? Me? Creator?

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Yeah. So I'm the more I look at the universe, I'm just the less convinced

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I am that there is something benevolent going on. So if you if if your concept of a creator is someone who's all powerful and all good, that's not an uncommon pairing of powers that you might describe to a creator.

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All powerful and all good. And I look at disasters that afflict earth and life on earth.

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Volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, congenital birth defects.

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You look at this list of ways that life is made miserable on earth by natural causes.

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So it's really good to to engage with this at the start by asking the question, does

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Tyson have any right a philosophical right worldview right?

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Does he have the capital to spend with you, to draw on your emotions, to make the argument that he's making right here?

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And this is very, very important because it's difficult at times to navigate conversations like this as Christians, because we have a

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Christian worldview. We have fundamental beliefs about reality, about human beings, about God, about nature itself, all those things.

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We have fundamental beliefs and presuppositions and commitments that allow for someone like Tyson to draw on the emotional heartstrings that Christians have when he talks about the problem of evil, suffering in the world, disaster, pestilence, nice biblical word there, old school word, pestilence.

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But he draws on the emotions and what he's trying to do is he's trying to use his worldview to purchase from you your emotions, to have you question, yeah, how does that work?

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How is God good? And there's so much evil and suffering in the world. The problem is, if we think about what is the worldview capital of Tyson, what does he believe about reality?

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What does he believe about human beings, human value? What does he believe about ethical absolutes?

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And if we really dig down and start asking fundamental questions first, like, hey, wait a second,

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I thought you believe from your perspective that we live in a universe, we live in a cosmos that is unguided.

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It's unpurposed. There's no ultimate order or direction to it. There's no telos.

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There's no goal to creation. I thought that you believe that human beings exist here in this world on a continuum of time and chance acting on matter.

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It's purposeless. It's meaningless. And we are all cosmic accidents.

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I mean, if I would imagine Tyson would agree with heavy hitters like Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan says human beings are just stardust.

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I mean, I imagine that Tyson is on the same page as someone like Richard Dawkins, who says that human beings are just African apes.

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I mean, if we really dig down into his worldview, we have to ask the question, do you have the right to appeal to those emotions with your philosophical commitments?

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Do you have a right to those things and those presuppositions from your worldview perspective?

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Because Tyson believes if he holds to the neo Darwinian micro mutation macro evolutionary worldview, he believes that human beings are nothing more than the descendants of bacteria.

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And so if you if you walk down the chain somewhere near the beginning, we have nothing.

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And then there's something. And then as disorder moves along and chaos happens, it's sound and fury signifying nothing.

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It lands on a point in human history where you have human beings. In the earliest stages, they were bacteria.

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And then through unguided, unpurposed, meaningless forces, they moved through a chain miraculously of all these advancements that are just amazing, miraculous moments in human history from his perspective, where they started advancing upwards and go from bacteria to fish to now we're on the land and we're moving through African apes to ta -da, here's humanity right before us today.

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Now, we have to ask the question in a worldview like that, if those are his commitments and they are, does he have a right to talk about things that are disasters as though they were meaningful?

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Right. I mean, when we're talking about the question of theodicy, the problem of evil and God's goodness and God's providence,

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God's sovereignty and power. How does it all work together? You're talking about a philosophical question.

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You're talking about something that goes beyond the descriptions we can make in the scientific method when we're talking about observation, hypothesis, testing, those sorts of things.

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He's not in the realm any longer of Tyson, the scientist. He's dealing right now as Tyson, the philosopher.

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And so let's say, great, let's do that. Let's have that conversation. We're not talking about observable evidence and hypothesis and observation, testing and all these things in conclusions.

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We're talking about philosophy. Human beings suffer in this world.

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There is, according to him, evil in this world, disasters in this world. And that's not a good thing.

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How do we have all this evil and suffering and pain and the goodness of God? Well, we should immediately stop the conversation and say, hey, wait a second,

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I thought that you believed were stardust. I thought that you believe that there's no ultimate meaning and purpose in the universe, no purposer of this universe.

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There's no goal of the universe and nothing and nobody is sustaining it. This is truly, again, sound and fury signifying nothing.

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It is just what is. So there's no real room to complain from Tyson's perspective about human beings suffering at all.

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I mean, I recently had a debate at the University of Utah with a devout atheist and a committed humanist and agnostic.

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And one of the things that I pointed out when they were trying to draw on the heartstrings of the audience was that you mentioned that you grieved at the bedside of people dying.

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Well, it's interesting to note that what is and what is a humanist who believes that their ancestors were bacteria doing grieving at the bedside of a human being who's dying?

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We don't typically shed tears when rocks tumble off of cliffs and shatter.

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But what's the difference in their worldview and between a rock and a human being?

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Both are hereby cosmic accidents. Both are not purposed. Both have no ultimate meaning and no ultimate value.

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And so what's the difference between one falling down the cliff and shattering and one stopping breathing? There really is no difference.

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Nothing is sad. Stop crying. And so do you see the point here? We have to ask the question when we're having these conversations.

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Who's got the cash in their wallet to purchase purchase those emotions? Does Tyson have the money to spend with you to draw on your emotions when talking about the problem of evil?

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Nothing is a real meaningful disaster in Tyson's worldview. He believes that we're just African apes, cosmic accidents, stardust.

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Our ancestors are bacteria. We're just protoplasm doing what protoplasm does in these conditions.

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What is the case is painful things happen. That doesn't mean that it ought to be the case that painful things don't happen.

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It just is that way. But Tyson, see, what he can't avoid is this from the Christian perspective.

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Tyson is in the image of God. He's at war with his creator. He refuses to submit to God.

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He suppresses the truth and unrighteousness. So Tyson lives daily, practically like a

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Christian with Christian presuppositions, like human beings have value, like pain and suffering are not good things and all of that.

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But he actually has a worldview that completely militates against that position. In other words, Tyson, his daily practice and how he engages with the world is not consistent with.

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It doesn't comport with his basic presuppositions and beliefs about life and reality and human beings.

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So here's the point. He's not supposed to be saying this. If he was a consistent atheist, he'd be someone like, say,

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Dawkins when he writes River Out of Eden, where he says there is no good. There is no evil. There is just blind indifference.

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Well, that's consistent. That's Dawkins in a shining moment of consistency. And Tyson would do well to listen to Dawkins.

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There is no good. There is no evil. These disasters are meaningless. This is just what happens in the cosmos.

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I mean, right now, somewhere in the universe, and it's probably happening a lot somewhere in the universe, asteroids are colliding with planets or falling into stars or black holes.

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And nobody's crying about that. Nobody's bothered by that. That's just stuff that's happening and moving around the universe.

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And so there really is no problem with nature having an upheaval and destroying human beings, which are just stardust.

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Anyways, why are you crying? Why are you upset? And why would this be any problem? See, because from a

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Christian perspective, we struggle with the issue of the odyssey. Not that we don't have an answer. We have a solid, philosophically consistent answer, a biblical answer that glorifies

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God. But we struggle with the emotions connected to the question of the odyssey, the problem of evil and suffering in the world, because guess what?

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This is not the way the world ought to be. God created the world good. He created humanity good.

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He calls it good. And then there's this problem of rebellion and evil in the world that separates

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God and man, God and the image of God. And that is where the glory of the gospel comes in.

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But yes, it is human sin and rebellion that has led to the problem of evil in the world.

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Nature itself is impacted by that as man is the pinnacle of God's creation and representative of God and creation.

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When he falls, creation falls along with him. So, yeah, we have a problem as Christians with volcanoes erupting and destroying lives.

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It ought not to be that way. God created the world good. He created the world without evil, without suffering, without death.

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And it is because our rebellion against God that we have to contend with these sorts of things. So, yeah, there is a problem of evil from a

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Christian perspective. There isn't a problem of evil or suffering from Tyson's perspective.

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So what you're seeing here is a full on high definition display of an image bearer of God who refuses to submit to God's truth and is trying to actually reason in the world in a completely contradictory and conflicted way.

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Hey, what's up, guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the

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Christian worldview. There's more as a response to this video and others at Apologia's all access at Apologia Studios dot com.

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When you partner with Apologia Studios, you make all of our content possible and we give you all kinds of amazing other content to help equip you and to train you and your friends and families in the

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Christian faith. And so go to Apologia Studios dot com, sign up for all access and get more from Collision.