Neil Explains Why There's No Good Reason to Believe in God

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Here's Neil deGrasse Tyson to explain to Logan Paul why there's no good reason to believe in God.

[00:00:05]>> You mean does that God exist? Because I guess so because you type God into look at the wiki page on God and there's thousands of gods listed there.

[00:00:14]>> Does any god exist?

[00:00:15]>> I I >> Yeah, the pantheist god exists.

[00:00:18]Pantheists just believe that the universe is god. Some pantheists believe that the universe is also a conscious person and I don't think that's the case. But it seems pretty clear to me that the universe does exist >> based on what people say about what that god is supposed to do and its influence in the world. Based on that, I remain unconvinced that anybody is in charge of anything in this world.

[00:00:45]>> You're agnostic.

[00:00:46]>> Yes.

[00:00:46]>> You refuse to believe or disbelieve.

[00:00:48]>> You don't refuse is too harsh.

[00:00:51]>> Simply not being convinced is pretty distinct from refusing to believe. And how do you even refuse to believe something? If the evidence for something is convincing, I don't know how to just will myself to not be convinced.

[00:01:02]>> I I'm I would welcome better evidence that than what has been presented in defense of the existence of somebody who's in charge.

[00:01:11]>> I would welcome better evidence and I would also welcome a definition of a god that's more recognizably coherent than a timeless, spaceless, disembodied mind, which seems to be how a lot of apologists and theologians define God.

[00:01:23]We had two guys on our podcast named Cliff and Stuart Connectley. They are uh devout Christians who spread the word, the go the gospel and um they were very convinced by the eyewitness testimony uh of Jesus.

[00:01:40]>> That doesn't actually exist. None of the accounts of Jesus or the things he did were written by eyewitnesses. The disciples to whom the gospels are attributed spoke Aramaic and were unlikely to have been able to write at all, let alone write in the coin a Greek in which the gospels were composed. Paul wrote his epistles but never encountered Jesus before the crucifixion. And his only encounter with Jesus is described in the book of Acts, which says that he saw a light and heard a voice claiming to be the voice of Jesus. That's not a very convincing eyewitness account.

[00:02:09]Also, even if there were eyewitness accounts of Jesus's miracles and resurrection, that would not be nearly enough to convince me that they happened. Is it really all that unreasonable to ask for more evidence that a guy came back from the dead than some people said they saw it?

[00:02:23]>> And that was that was I think I don't want to like misquote them, but that they cited that as some of the strongest evidence they had to um uh prove the existence of of Jesus at one point in the Bible. The accounts that say that Jesus existed, even though they were not eyewitness accounts, are enough to satisfy me that Jesus probably existed.

[00:02:43]But there's a big difference between believing that Jesus existed and believing that he is God or that there even is a God.

[00:02:49]>> Um, and you're saying that you're saying, >> not Jesus.

[00:02:51]>> Yeah. Well, Jesus is God to some people Jesus.

[00:02:53]>> No, no, no. But the existence of God and existence of Jesus, let's stick with God are separable variables. If a bunch of people say that a guy existed and they largely agree on the time and place that he existed, it's pretty reasonable to infer that he existed. If they say he did miracles, I'm going to want evidence that's a lot stronger than hearsay. I'm going to want evidence that's a lot stronger than even several independent eyewitness accounts, which we don't have.

[00:03:16]>> That's you think Jesus exists? because Thomas Jefferson, okay, one of our founding fathers, >> uh, >> published a book called the morals of Jesus of Nazareth, okay? And you know what's in that book? He took the New Testament, cut out, physically cut out with scissors, every reference to a miracle, anything mythical, magical, conversations with God, and he left in the wisdom of Jesus. And so, uh, to Jefferson, Jesus was a wise person.

[00:03:47]Yeah. Had a lot of good things to say.

[00:03:48]Yeah.

[00:03:49]>> But the the religious dimensions of him was denied in that compilation of his book. That's why I didn't call him Jesus Christ, which means Jesus the anointed one, Jesus of Nazareth. So, one can embrace the existence of Jesus. By the way, there's some people who doubt it, but I I don't have the energy to to to go that way. When I hear mythicists talk about why they don't believe that Jesus exists, they do something that a lot of apologists do, which is propose possible explanations that are not often the most probable explanations. Some mythicists, for example, proposed that Jesus was entirely invented by Paul and the gospel authors just wrote down what he told them about Jesus. That's entirely possible, but given the inconsistencies between the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, it just doesn't seem like the most probable scenario. Some say that whoever made up Jesus just looked at Old Testament prophecies and cobbled together a story that fits all those prophecies. That too is entirely possible, but given how many details about Jesus are not consistent with these prophecies, it doesn't seem like the most probable scenario. For example, if someone were to make up a person who perfectly fits the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah, they would have named him Emmanuel of Bethlehem, not Jesus of Nazareth.

[00:05:03]>> I don't have an if he's fine. He exists fine person, right? So, so, um, what I'm saying is his existence or not is a very different issue from whether you want to say somebody created the universe as in and is in charge of things.

[00:05:19]>> Even if you could convince me that Jesus did all of the miracles attributed to him, it still would not follow that he was the creator of the universe. Maybe he was just a powerful magician like Simon Magus. Even if you could show that he fulfilled the prophecies about the Messiah, which he didn't, the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah never claimed that the Messiah would be God incarnate.

[00:05:38]>> Can biblical explanations of the universe and scientific explanations of the universe both be true?

[00:05:43]>> Uh, the history of that exercise really has not boded well for the Bible.

[00:05:49]>> Okay, >> folks who believe in the Bible have two main reactions to that fact. They either say that the parts that are clearly impossible to square with the evidence are still true, but they're only true in a metaphorical sense, or they argue with the evidence. Those who argue with the evidence either deny it or they contrive some really tortured exesus of it that fits with the Bible, but is far from the most probable or coherent interpretation. It's um if if you go to the Bible and deduce something about how the universe must be based on the Bible and then make a prediction about the world, not a post-diction, a prediction because that's how science works at its best.

[00:06:29]>> Uh anytime anyone has done that, it's it has shown to be false.

[00:06:34]>> Either it's shown to be false or the prediction is framed in a non-falsifiable way. For example, creationists love to point to biological functions as being complex and effective and that this is evidence of design. But when you point out really janky aspects of our biology, like how the laryangeal nerve loops under the aorta, or that we have wisdom teeth that do us more harm than good and have to be removed, they either say that this is the result of original sin or that God is more like an artist than an engineer and that these are artistic flourishes. With those caveats, there are no useful predictions you can make about what future biological discoveries will look like because literally anything we end up finding can be reconciled with divine design if God is a quirky artist who puts weird features in our bodies to punish us for what Adam and Eve did.

[00:07:17]>> So the the record is not there.

[00:07:20]Enlightened religious people today don't use the Bible as a science textbook.

[00:07:24]They use it as a source of inspiration and a source of of moral compass. Even though there's a lot of sort of stuff in there you wouldn't do today because sensibility like if if your kids disrespect you, you will not stone them.

[00:07:37]>> It's interesting that even the most hardcore ultraorththodox Jewish communities don't stone people for breaking the Sabbath or not being a virgin on their wedding night, which the Bible prescribes. I think they realize that it's pretty hard for a society to survive and stick together under rules like that.

[00:07:52]>> Okay, that's in the Bible. The things you just, you know, >> is that is that did that really READ THE B? WHY YOU ASKING ME ABOUT GOD? You haven't read the Bible.

[00:08:01]>> It's not my name on the show, man.

[00:08:02]Listen, >> that makes it sound like Logan put this guy up to asking that question.

[00:08:08]>> No, >> that was good.

[00:08:11]>> Going going back quickly to >> you know Jonah of Arc burned at the stake. All right. They try to that.

[00:08:18]Okay.

[00:08:18]>> But things were very different in those times.

[00:08:20]>> Yeah. But those folks were reading the same Bible that Christians read today.

[00:08:24]>> Let me I want to ask you this question.

[00:08:25]>> Say this quickly. Uh, do you know if you read the transcripts of cuz the Catholic Church keeps very good records. If you read the transcripts, do you know like a third of why they built the case against her? It was for crossdressing.

[00:08:39]>> If you bring that up to a lot of Christians today, they'll say Joan had it coming.

[00:08:43]>> WHAT? THAT'S WHAT I'M SAYING. THAT'S OKAY. SO WHAT? WHY? Because in the Bible, in Leviticus, there's the line, "If a man dons the clothes of a woman or a woman dawn the clothes of a man, it is an abomination into the unto the Lord thy God."

[00:08:58]>> Wow.

[00:08:59]>> And they said, "Let's use that because she's she's she's not dressing in a skirt. She's she's not leading soldiers into battle side saddle." Okay. And so she's like the first, you know, uh there she is. And so they >> Dude, I've been the Bible. You >> I've been dressing up like a women. I've been dressed up like a woman since I was like 10.

[00:09:18]>> That's an abomination to the So >> that Bible passage ought to make a whole lot of famous conservatives really nervous across Neil. Let's keep out of this for a second.

[00:09:27]>> Cherry pick the Bible to say that it is it is your moral compass.

[00:09:32]>> Who pushed the button for the big bang?

[00:09:34]Commonly held belief in science community. The big bang.

[00:09:37]>> I don't think the big bang needed a cause. As Newton pointed out, motion only needs a cause if the thing that's moving was once at rest. And the big bang is just the earliest moment of the expansion of the universe. And if time began at the big bang, then the universe was never at rest.

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