Neil deGrasse Tyson Sparks Controversy: An Argument on God That Demands an Answer

Added: 2026-04-30

[00:00:00]So, to the person who says, maybe dark matter is God.

[00:00:03]>> [music] >> If the only reason why you're saying it is because it's a mystery, then get ready to have that undone. The more I look at the universe I'm just the less convinced I am that there is something benevolent going on.

[00:00:15]When you're educated and you understand how physics works and you're mathematically literate and you understand data and you understand experiment and you go up to someone who doesn't have that training and they are religious and you ask them, why are you religious and believing in invisible things that influence your life? What's wrong with you? Is religion your enemy?

[00:00:30]No, no. I mean, it's there there are factions of most religions, especially the the monotheistic religions that that make statements about the physical world. In particular, you have Genesis in the Bible for for example. And if you want to take Genesis as literal truth, yeah, you got a problem with you. You You You don't understand the actual universe if you're referencing big biblical Genesis as your understanding of nature. Um but that's not the majority of religious people. You You have an entire enlightened class of religious people who for whom religion provides their spiritual fulfillment and their spiritual enlightenment and they're not referencing their Bible, the Torah, the Quran. They're not going back to it to get an answer to their science quiz. So, they're they're drawing a line in the sand. Uh in fact, what's the number? It's 60% of scientists in the United States pray to God.

[00:01:35]Pray. No, I say excuse me.

[00:01:37]40% of Western scientists and that spread goes below that and above that, obviously.

[00:01:42]That's just the average. But that's not zero. That's my point. If it's not zero and you're productive scientist, then the answer is there does not have to be conflict between the two because empirically there are people for whom there isn't.

[00:01:57]So, that's the answer.

[00:01:58]I think you must realize that some people are going to go to your show at the planetarium and they're going to say Aha! Those scientists have discovered God because God, dark matter, is what holds this universe together.

[00:02:14]Is that a question?

[00:02:16]>> [laughter] >> It's a statement. You know You know they're going to say that.

[00:02:19]>> the history of discovery particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery is one where at any given moment there's a frontier.

[00:02:29]And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary into the unknown lies the handiwork of God.

[00:02:39]This shows up a lot. Newton even said it. He had his laws of gravity and motion and he was explaining the moon and the plan He was there.

[00:02:47]He doesn't mention God for any of that.

[00:02:49]And then he gets to the limits of what his equations can calculate. So, I don't can't quite figure this out. Maybe God steps in and makes it right every now and then.

[00:02:57]That's That's where he invoked God.

[00:03:00]And the And Ptolemy, he he he he bet on the wrong horse, but he was a brilliant guy. He formulated the geocentric universe with Earth in the middle. This is where we got epicycles and all these all this the machinations of the heavens. They were still a mystery to him. He He looked up and uttered the following words, "When I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies." These are the planets going through retrograde and back. The mysteries of the When I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

[00:03:33]What he did was invoke He didn't invoke Zeus to account for the rock that he's standing on or the air he's breathing.

[00:03:38]It was this point of mystery and in gets invoked as God.

[00:03:42]This, over time, has been described by philosophers as the God of the gaps.

[00:03:47]If If that's how you If that's where you're going to put your God in this world, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

[00:03:58]If that's how you're going to invoke God. If God is the mystery of the universe. These mysteries which we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to be more to you than just where science has yet to tread. So, to the person who says, maybe dark matter is God.

[00:04:15]If the only reason why you're saying it is because it's a mystery, then get ready to have that undone.

[00:04:19]Do you believe in God?

[00:04:20]>> Me? I So, yeah, so I'm the more I look at the universe um just the less convinced I am that there is something benevolent going on.

[00:04:31]So, if you if if your concept of a creator is someone who's all powerful and all good.

[00:04:39]That's not an uncommon pairing of powers that you might describe to a creator.

[00:04:44]All powerful and all good.

[00:04:46]And I look at disasters that afflict Earth and life on Earth, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, um congenital birth defects. You look at this list of ways that life is made miserable on Earth by natural causes.

[00:05:11]And I just ask, how do you deal with that?

[00:05:14]So, philosophers rose up and said, if there is a God, God is either not all powerful or not all good. 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.

[00:05:36]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.

[00:05:45]That's what it is. That's why it's called faith. Otherwise, we would call all religions evidence. But we don't for exactly that reason. So, so, I'm given what everyone describes to be the properties that would be expressed by an all powerful being in the gods that they worship, I look for that in the universe and I don't find it.

[00:06:09]So, I I I remain unconvinced. But if you've got some good evidence, bring it.

[00:06:14]Bring Bring it. Bring it. Okay? And so, I don't I don't lead with that information because what I believe should be irrelevant to anyone.

[00:06:30]It's not about me.

[00:06:32]It's about the real world. Genesis falls apart the moment you compare it to real science.

[00:06:38]Genesis claims Earth and life were created in days, but radiometric dating shows Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and fossils clearly document gradual change over time through evolution.

[00:06:51]This isn't debated. Genetics, DNA mutations, and observed natural selection all confirm it.

[00:06:59]Then there's the God of the gaps problem.

[00:07:03]When something isn't understood, religion inserts God.

[00:07:07]Isaac Newton even did this when his equations failed.

[00:07:10]But history shows those gaps keep shrinking. Lightning, disease, and planetary motion all now have natural explanations.

[00:07:18]And the biggest contradiction, an all good, all powerful God doesn't match reality.

[00:07:24]Natural disasters and disease are built into the system.

[00:07:28]If a creator designed this, the outcome doesn't reflect perfect goodness or control. That's why scientists rely on evidence, not faith. So, that's the selfish gene. So, let's move ahead here.

[00:07:39]The blind watchmaker. Oh, that's That's my favorite book of yours, if I may.

[00:07:44]Okay. [clears throat] Um well, the watchmaker comes from William Paley, who the theologian who said that there must be a God because if you find a watch, you pick out you pick up the watch. He's crossing a heath, he said. You open it up. This great big pocket watch in there standing Back when watches were watches all the time.

[00:08:02]>> [laughter] >> And um uh and you see all the cogwheels and springs and things. It had to have a designer, of course it did. And so, how much more do would you say that of an eye or a knee joint or anything living? So, that that's the Paley watchmaker argument. Natural selection is the blind watchmaker.

[00:08:20]It produces results that are like watches. They're beautifully designed.

[00:08:24]Eyes are beautifully designed.

[00:08:26]Certain flaws, but they're obviously designed. And they come about not through any design process, not through any deliberate design, but through the blind watchmaker, which is natural selection. So, it's a So, that's hard for people to accept, especially if they're deeply religious.

[00:08:41]>> Yes.

[00:08:41]>> Because they have They already have an account.

[00:08:43]>> Yes.

[00:08:43]>> Now you're saying one of the acts of their God is some random force operating He didn't have to be there at all.

[00:08:49]>> He didn't have to be there at all. And I think where people get confused and even some of our people have made this mistake. Uh Fred Hoyle, who was the architect of the steady state universe, who pejoratively invented the name Big Bang to describe the universe beginning in one point. He said that in a pejorative way. He wanted the universe to be a steady state. Um he did a calculation for how you would get an eye, a fully functioning eye, and how long that would take. And it was some impossibly, you know, 10 to the some very high power number of years given the rate at which you have um a defects in a in a in a in a genome.

[00:09:35]And what Correct me if I'm wrong.

[00:09:38]The rebuttal to that is natural selection is not completely random.

[00:09:43]Well, no. That's right. It It actually wasn't an eye. It was a It was a hemoglobin molecule, but it's the it's the same argument anyways. What he overlooked was that it doesn't happen all in one go. He He imagined all the bits coming together at random.

[00:09:59]Um and everything >> one case that doesn't work and has another random thing that doesn't work.

[00:10:03]Yes. And you do that forever. If you do that forever, of course you won't but what what you need is let's let's use the eye even though he didn't. Um you need a slightly less good eye or then a slightly less good eye and a slightly less good eye. And you start with just a uh a sheet of light-sensitive cells which just detect whether it's light or dark, that's useful. It's not like >> It's better than not having it. It's better than not having it. You can tell when when it's night or day. You can tell whether there's a predator flying overhead. And then if you have a um a slightly cup-shaped if you if you if you bend that retina from a flat thing into a slight cup then if it's coming from that direction it hits that side of of the We are on video on video. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:10:46]Uh-huh.

[00:10:47]Uh [clears throat] and so you get it's not an image but it but it gives a slight directionality.

[00:10:51]>> Mhm. And then and you close up and you start to get a pinhole pinhole camera.

[00:10:56]Um it's a very crude out of focus but it's sort of an image and then you need a little bit of transparent gunk in there. It's not a proper lens but it does something like a lens. And all these stages one by one they step by step they incrementally improve. And every improvement is the new starting place for the variations at that generation.

[00:11:18]>> then and then you get improvement.

[00:11:20]>> generation's not starting from zero.

[00:11:21]>> That's right. Yes. So the blind watchmaker I I just thought that was brilliantly written and it was my benchmark if I were to ever write a book for the public, I want to be this articulate. Oh wow, [laughter] that's high praise, Neil. Thank I just want you to know I just want you to know that. Thank you for that.

[00:11:40]>> Okay, let let the record show.

[00:11:42]>> [laughter] >> Climbing Mount Improbable. Well, that's what we just been talking about. Um uh Mount Improbable is a >> Just that metaphor describe it to It's a it's a metaphor where you've got a a mountain with a sheer cliff vertical cliff.

[00:11:56]And on the top of the cliff is an eye.

[00:11:58]And to produce the eye in the Fred Hoyle manner would be to leap from the bottom of the cliff to the top in one go.

[00:12:05]>> go. You cannot do do it. But if you go around the other side of the mountain you find a nice gentle slope.

[00:12:11]And so you just climb >> [laughter] >> step by step and you and you get reach the summit. Okay. So so if you think it got there in one fell swoop, there's no of course you're going to invent the god cuz what whatever but not imagining that there's another way, yes, you're stuck in one religious philosophy versus any other philosophy.

[00:12:33]>> Yes.

[00:12:33]Okay.

[00:12:34]All right, got that. And uh this one much was written about Unweaving the Rainbow.

[00:12:41]So tell me about that.

[00:12:42]>> Okay, >> [clears throat] >> um That was what what to 1998 now. Mhm.

[00:12:44]>> That that comes from Keats.

[00:12:47]Uh I did not know that. Keats complained about Newton spoiling all the poetry of the rainbow by explaining it. And so my my point was a point which you've made often enough that actually there's far more poetry in really understanding the spectrum. So I I did I tell you this? Do you remember there was this it was on YouTube it was just called double rainbow guy. Have you ever seen this?

[00:13:07]No. Double rainbow you got you should check it out. Okay, this is now back when social media was just people posting things. It wasn't the cesspool that it is today.

[00:13:16]>> Yes. So he was hiking somewhere there's some guy back when you had you needed a camcorder to take videos not a cell phone. He's hiking in the was a Sierra Madre I don't remember where.

[00:13:26]And he's you hear him sort of narrating his oh that's a nice cliff. Then he turns a corner and he says oh [sighs] a rainbow oh my gosh what what could it [clears throat] mean? Oh a double rainbow. Oh my gosh and he's cheering. You don't see him but you can easily interpret just his emotions and his breath. And then he goes prostrate to the ground. And and he he can't contain himself.

[00:13:56]What does it mean? This is a sign. And so I I felt bad doing this.

[00:14:01]You might be proud of me but I felt bad doing this. I I tweeted I put a link to this to this video and I said this is how you behave if you've never studied physics.

[00:14:15][laughter] >> YES.

[00:14:17]I BUT I THOUGHT that was kind of mean.

[00:14:19]He's having his moment. Well, in a way that's what Keats was doing. And and that's what Yeah, yeah, yes, that's right. But anyway, I can cap your story in the opposite direction. I read a story about a woman in California.

[00:14:31]She had a a lawn sprinkler and she saw a rainbow in the lawn sprinkler and she said, "What are they doing to OUR WATER SUPPLY?" [laughter] THAT'S FUNNY.

[00:14:44]Oh my gosh. So I did not know that that that Keats had that to say about Newton cuz Newton yeah, he decoded the rainbow and that was what that was his thing. It's what he did things. Uh by the way, you mentioned how beautiful the eye is even with some flaws as an astrophysicist when I would learn this very early when I took classes here actually when I was in middle school at the Hayden Planetarium uh that's when I learned about the entire electromagnetic spectrum and that the visible part of the spectrum is tiny. It's not even a full octave of the of what's out there.

[00:15:23]>> then I was just disappointed with my sight. I said, "Is this the best nature can get?"

[00:15:29]Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins are pointing to something important here. Complexity in nature doesn't require a designer.

[00:15:37]The old watchmaker argument from William Paley says that if something looks designed it must have a creator.

[00:15:44]But evolution shows a different path.

[00:15:47]Through natural selection small changes build over millions of years.

[00:15:51]The eye didn't appear fully formed. It developed step by step starting from simple light-sensitive cells.

[00:15:58]This directly answers arguments like those from Fred Hoyle who assumed everything had to form all at once.

[00:16:05]Science shows that assumption is wrong.

[00:16:07]Even the Bible raises questions about a perfectly good and loving God.

[00:16:12]In Isaiah 45:7 God says he creates both good and evil.

[00:16:17]That challenges the idea of an all good being.

[00:16:20]When you combine observable evolution with contradictions like this the idea of a perfect designer becomes harder to support with evidence.

[00:16:29]Now and I said I'd only be 10 minutes. I'm sorry I'm taking a little longer but I got to get this off my chest. So so now I'm becoming a scientist. I'm in college majoring in physics.

[00:16:45]I go to graduate school get the PhD in astrophysics.

[00:16:50]It's my life love.

[00:16:52]I've known this since I was a kid. I didn't accidentally land at the Bronx High School of Science. I knew but I wanted to become an astrophysicist not because I chose it. In a way the universe chose me.

[00:17:05]That first day in the Hayden Planetarium at age nine as a kid and I looked up and the lights dimmed and the stars came out and I was called by the universe.

[00:17:19]I had no choice in the matter.

[00:17:21]I became a student of the universe with the ambition of one day being one of its participants in research on the frontier cosmic discovery. And that ambition that inculcation stayed with me the whole time.

[00:17:38]To the point where when you become an astrophysicist when you become a scientist at all here's what I'm putting back to you.

[00:17:44]Because what we used to do and I regret it a little bit is you would go on pilgrimages to mountaintops because that's where your telescopes are.

[00:17:54]And where is the mountain? The mountain is far away from any city because cities have lights and pollution and other things that interfere with your views.

[00:18:01]So by construct the best telescopic observing sites are far removed from civilization.

[00:18:08]Which means it takes at least four modes of transportation to get there. The plane, the train, the bus, the the the the the all-terrain vehicle. Then you get to the mountaintop.

[00:18:20]And what do you have to do next? You have to then start going nocturnal.

[00:18:24]The day is now your night and the night is your day.

[00:18:28]And so that's part of the pilgrimage.

[00:18:30]There's the effort of the travel and then there's the effort of flipping your schedule and going nocturnal.

[00:18:36]Then there's the telescope itself. This conduit to the cosmos.

[00:18:42]It's a physical it's a it's a tube. It's a conduit and I sit there and I reflect on it. My specialty was the center of the of the Milky Way galaxy 30,000 light years away. And so I have my digital detectors. I've got the telescope. It's dark. It's just me on this mountain and the universe.

[00:19:00]And I look up and I just think to myself there are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years.

[00:19:09]And I'm sort of snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector.

[00:19:17]And then I start feeling bad for the photon and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said no those are probably happier photons than the ones that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

[00:19:36]But so so there's not only the fact that I'm on the mountaintop there's the knowledge and the feeling that I'm reaching out to the universe with these methods and tools of science.

[00:19:49]And then add to that the sum of 20th century knowledge about the origin of the chemical elements, something the chemist would not be able to answer without the help of the astrophysicist.

[00:20:00]You can't go to the chemist in your high school chemistry class and say, "Where did these elements come from?"

[00:20:05]The teacher wouldn't know outside of the domain of science from within the domain of chemistry. That was informed by astrophysics.

[00:20:13]We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of stars, high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives. They exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life.

[00:20:33]And so, these ideas, these cosmic perspectives, this pilgrimage to the cosmos, the people who say, "This makes me feel small because I need to see the immensity of the cosmos." And I say, "No, you're you're not thinking about it the right way.

[00:20:48]You're not By the way, when we opened our facility, I got a letter from a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania.

[00:20:54]He had seen our show, which was a zoom out from Earth, and Earth just shrinks to nothingness as you go to the edge of the universe. And he wrote me a letter says, "I'm a I specialize in the psychological effects of Oh, how did he word it? Excuse me. He said, uh "Hello, Dr. Tyson. I'm, you know, Johnny Jones. I'm I'm a psychologist specializing in the effects of things that make people feel insignificant."

[00:21:21]And I thought, "Bummer of a job. Man, is that's what you do for a living?"

[00:21:25]And he said and he said, "Needless to say, your show was the greatest elicitor of feelings of smallness I have ever seen. Will you allow me to conduct a survey on the people who visit your show?"

[00:21:38]And I thought to myself, "There's something wrong here." Cuz why does he feel small, but when I look up in the universe, I feel large?" Then I realized the problem was his ego was too large to begin with.

[00:21:50]He came to the problem thinking too highly of who and what he was to begin with.

[00:21:57]Because then everything that happened in the show destabilized his self-image.

[00:22:02]Whereas I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomenon in the cosmos.

[00:22:08]And that And it's our 15 lbs of gray matter that figured this out.

[00:22:14]There's a kinship with the cosmos that resonates deeply with new age thinking.

[00:22:20]But I'm not apologetic about that. It's what we found. If whatever we find is resonates with whoever, go ahead, take it.

[00:22:28]But what I want to know is I want you got you We're in one of the greatest centers of neurophysiology.

[00:22:34]I want somebody to put electrodes on my head.

[00:22:38]And when I reflect on our kinship with the cosmos, when I do the calculation that shows that a 15-ton meteorite that we have in the center of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, it's an iron meteorite.

[00:22:50]When I do the calculation that shows that if you take all of the iron from the hemoglobin of the people in the tristate area of New York City, you can recover that much iron out of their blood, and realize that the iron from that meteorite and the iron from your blood has common origin in the core of a star.

[00:23:08]Tell me what part of my brain is lighting up because that excites me.

[00:23:13]That makes me want to grab people in the street and say, "Have you heard this?"

[00:23:19]That it's not simply it's it's Carl Sagan said, "We you know, we are star stuff."

[00:23:24]But there's a more poetic and I think more accurate way to say it.

[00:23:29]It's quite literally true that we are stardust in the highest exalted way one can use that phrase.

[00:23:37]And so, I feel and I use words. I bask in the majesty of the cosmos.

[00:23:45]I use words, compose sentences that sound like the sentences I hear out of people who had revelations of Jesus, who who who who go to um who who go on their their their pilgrimages to to Mecca.

[00:24:01]There's some commonality of feeling. I know it. Well, I don't know it. I want someone to do that experiment. Because the day you do, if the same centers in my brain are excited by these cosmic thoughts as they would be going on in the mind of a religious person, that's something to know.

[00:24:18]That's going to be really interesting finding.

[00:24:21]Because what that tells me as an educator is let me offer the universe to people.

[00:24:28]And they'll start taking it in, and they'll start achieving those feelings that they had before.

[00:24:35]And I don't so much care whether they abandon previous feelings. I've got an offering that keeps growing, that keeps becoming more majestic. When the Hubble telescope was announced that we were going to cancel Oops, that's a When it was announced that we were going to cancel the Hubble telescope, the greatest outcry to not do that was not the astrophysicist. It wasn't from within NASA. It was the public. It was all over the op-ed pages and the talk shows. The public took ownership of the Hubble Space Telescope because the universe was coming into their bedroom, into their living room, onto their computer. They were a participant on the frontier of the of discovery. And as far as I can tell, if you let them let them know that it's not simply that we're in the universe, but in fact, given the chemistry of it all and the nuclear physics of it all, not only are we are in the universe, the universe is in us.

[00:25:27]And I don't know any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.

[00:25:36]I just wanted to leave you with those thoughts. Thank you.

[00:25:38]Science already explains this clearly.

[00:25:41]The elements in your body were formed through known physical processes.

[00:25:45]Hydrogen came from the early universe, and heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron were created inside stars through nuclear fusion.

[00:25:55]When massive stars exploded, they spread those elements across space.

[00:26:00]This is confirmed through spectroscopy, where we can measure the exact chemical signatures of stars and galaxies.

[00:26:06]There's no gap here that requires a supernatural cause.

[00:26:10]The process is observable, measurable, and consistent with physics.

[00:26:15]In the Bible, Genesis says humans were formed from dust by God, but it doesn't explain how or provide any evidence.

[00:26:23]Science gives a step-by-step explanation that can be tested and verified.

[00:26:28]The key point is simple. We have real data showing where we come from, and it comes from the universe itself, not a religious claim. I want to make an important point.

[00:26:38]This is not all people in the world.

[00:26:39]This is Americans. Religious people, they you It depends on which study you get. They ask, "Do you pray to a personal God?" These numbers vary, but they're high and they're up around 90%.

[00:26:50]Okay?

[00:26:51]It might be 85. That's actually not important. That difference is not important for the point I'm about to make. It's high. Okay? In the West, in America, 90%.

[00:27:05]Okay? What percent of religious What percentage of educated people are religious? The number drops.

[00:27:13]I'm talking about graduate degrees here.

[00:27:15]Among all people with master's and PhDs, the religiosity drops somewhere around 60%. Might be 65. The point is it drops with education level.

[00:27:27]Now, let's bring in scientists. How about what percentage of scientists in America are religious? You average over all the branches, it's about 40%, maybe 35%.

[00:27:38]Uh in there, there's a range, of course.

[00:27:39]Biologists, physicists, astrophysicists are lower.

[00:27:43]The um sort of engineers and mathematicians are higher.

[00:27:48]So, you did average out to about 40%.

[00:27:51]So, this looks like This looks like scientists are 40% down from 90% from the general public.

[00:28:03]But that's the wrong No, it's 40% down from 60% cuz all scientists have graduate degrees.

[00:28:10]So, the graduate degree in any subject gets you halfway there.

[00:28:14]The science is the increment from the educated degrees. I mean, from the all educated people. That takes it down to 40%.

[00:28:23]Now, you go to the elite scientists.

[00:28:25]This is a well-known number.

[00:28:26]7% are religious.

[00:28:30]Claiming a personal God to whom they pray and intervene in their lives.

[00:28:35]I submit to you that with the current atheist fervor that has taken on over the past several years, I would say launched the modern atheistic called launched by the Dawkins book and Hitchens book and the and the Sam Harris book and the like. And I was just in Borders recently.

[00:28:55]Couldn't believe it. I was I didn't have I'm sorry. I didn't have a camera.

[00:28:58]Borders books, there it was.

[00:29:01]A section called atheism.

[00:29:04]It was like I'd never seen that before.

[00:29:06]IT'S LIKE, OKAY.

[00:29:08]>> [applause] >> THERE IT WAS.

[00:29:12]THEY HAD ENOUGH CRITICAL MASS OF BOOKS TO MAKE a section. So, here's my problem. Here's my concern.

[00:29:21]When you're educated and you understand how physics works and you're mathematically literate and you understand data and you understand experiment and you go up to someone who doesn't have that training and they are religious and you ask them, "Why are you religious and believing in invisible things that influence your life? What's wrong with you?" Okay? That's unfair.

[00:29:42]It's not only unfair, it's disrespectful for the following reason.

[00:29:51]UNTIL THAT number is zero, you've got nothing to say to the general public.

[00:30:00]These are scientists among us in the National Academy of Sciences who are religious and pray to a personal God, and I know some of them.

[00:30:10]And you're fighting the public for their religious beliefs?

[00:30:15]Figure that one out first because maybe there's an asymptote.

[00:30:20]Maybe you can't change everybody.

[00:30:24]Maybe that's telling us something. Maybe there's something in the brain wiring that positively prevents some people from ever being an atheist.

[00:30:35]And if that's the case, in a way they can't help it, and you'll never know it because you're not one of them.

[00:30:42]So I ask you first for compassion with the public, but you should target your exercise and your experiments on understanding that number because that's not zero. Yes, it's low, but it's not 1%. It's not 1/2 of a percent or 1/10 of a percent. It is 7%.

[00:30:59]One out of 14.

[00:31:01]>> [clears throat] >> If this were the National Academy of Sciences with 900, you would have 100 people in here.

[00:31:08]Did I do that right? 7%?

[00:31:13]Carry the two. What? 65?

[00:31:15]So it's 7 * 9. Yeah, so 6 Yeah, you have 65 people in here.

[00:31:20]Among elite scientists praying to their personal God.

[00:31:25]So, now, I DON'T CARE I ACTUALLY PERSONALLY DON'T CARE WHAT PEOPLE want to believe. This country was founded on religious freedoms. That's kind of that's what That's how that happened, okay? And what enabled the religious freedoms is that our Constitution makes no mention of God at all.

[00:31:45]Which means nobody's God reigns supreme over anybody else's, and therein is the religious freedom that attracted all these waves of immigrants for centuries.

[00:31:53]And so, I don't have I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me that I got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school cuz that's when we're going to fight. And I'm going to TELL YOU SOMETHING.

[00:32:09]>> [applause] [applause] >> THERE'S NO TRADITION OF scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher THAT MIGHT NOT necessarily be true. That's never happened.

[00:32:26]There are no scientists picketing out front of churches.

[00:32:30]There's been this coexistence forever.

[00:32:34]So to have the religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there, and I think back to Al-Ghazali in the 12th century and the fall of that intellectual empire.

[00:32:48]And it's got me scared in America.

[00:32:52]I wrote Do you remember that case in Jersey where this middle school kid I forgive me, I forgot his name. I met him.

[00:33:00]Mat- Matthew LeClair? Do you remember Remember this? He It is in his history class, the teacher was saying that Jesus is is the only one and true saving, Christianity is the only one and true religion, and if you were not, you were damned to hell, and he pointed to a Muslim girl and said she's damned to hell already, it's too late for her, and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs on it, and that the Big Bang and evolution are are are are not scientific. He recorded this and submitted it to the New York Times, and it became a whole exposé on this teacher. And then what happened? The ACLU came out and separation of church and state, and it's a violation of separation of church and state, and I said, you know, I don't normally get in those arguments cuz I got other I got the universe to worry about. I don't normally I let that go, but then I thought, no, people are missing something here. It's not a It's not a case of a separation of church and state. It's not.

[00:33:54]It's not.

[00:33:55]Okay? I looked at the comments and the transcript. I ignored the part about Jesus being your savior. I ignored the part about Christianity being the one and true religion.

[00:34:04]I paid attention to the statement that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs, okay? And so, I said I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times that they printed, and I'll read it to you.

[00:34:18]To the editor, people cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey school teacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. The case is not about the need to separate church and state. It's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

[00:34:41]>> [applause] [applause] >> Uh let's fix this one once and for all, okay?

[00:34:57]Let's just Let's just fix this, okay?

[00:35:00]Once and for all. Yes, Einstein and God were like that, okay? It's like God doesn't play dice with the universe. It turns out God does. That's what quantum mechanics is all about. He was wrong about that, okay? He mentions God a lot, and so all the religious people like claiming him cuz he's famous, and he's unimpeachably smart. And if you get famous, smart scientist in your camp, that boosts your camp, okay? But let's straighten this out once and for all.

[00:35:25]Here's a letter from Albert Einstein.

[00:35:30]I wrote uh in his later years, 1954, a couple years before he died. I was It It was of course a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I've never denied this, but I've and I've expressed it clearly.

[00:35:47]If something is in me which can be called religious, then it's the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

[00:35:55]Case closed.

[00:35:57]So anyone says Einstein was religious, just show them this letter, okay? The data Neil brings up is hard to ignore.

[00:36:03]Belief in God drops as scientific understanding increases.

[00:36:07]Around 90% of the general public believes in a personal God, but among scientists, it falls to about 40%. And in elite groups like the National Academy of Sciences, it drops to roughly 7%. That's not random. That's a pattern. The more someone is trained to test evidence, analyze data, and understand physics, the less likely they are to believe in divine intervention.

[00:36:32]And look at real-world consequences.

[00:36:35]When religious beliefs override science, it leads to false claims like teaching that Big Bang and evolution aren't real, or that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs.

[00:36:45]These ideas directly contradict fossil records, radiometric dating, and astronomy.

[00:36:51]Even Albert Einstein rejected a personal God.

[00:36:54]In a 1954 letter, he clearly said he did not believe in one.

[00:37:00]That removes one of the biggest names people try to use to support religion.

[00:37:05]>> [cheering] >> So much [applause] So much to talk about. First of all, uh you are You're talk You talk about the In this book, you talk about many things, but you talk about the end of the Earth as we know it, and you seem excited about the whole thing. That Is that fair to say?

[00:37:19]>> you not be?

[00:37:20]I mean, it's it's all the ways the universe wants to kill us.

[00:37:23]>> Yes. There's not enough conversation about that, I think.

[00:37:26]>> Right, right. So, you're talking about One of the things you talk about, and it's in the title, Death by Black Hole.

[00:37:31]Everyone's heard of a black hole.

[00:37:33]Everyone Different people have different levels of understanding. Mine is very rudimentary. I know what it is, a black hole. Maybe a star is imploding, light can't escape, everything's being sucked in. Is that right?

[00:37:43]>> it.

[00:37:43]>> Okay, all right.

[00:37:45]How would we How would it What would it be like to die by going into a black hole? What would that experience be like? Let's >> It's the way to go. I mean, if you have your choice of getting hit by a car, dying in a nursing home, or falling into a black hole, that's the choice is easy for me.

[00:38:00]>> You think black hole is the way to die?

[00:38:02]>> Totally. It's the way to die. Okay, well, let's explain Paint a picture for us. Let's say La Bamba Let's say La Bamba was sucked into a black hole. Tell us uh stage by stage what would happen to La Bamba.

[00:38:16]So So So he would If you go a feet-first dive, what happens >> this And this is all true what you're saying?

[00:38:21]>> Oh yeah, you can calculate it. It's there. We got it. We're on it. So your feet approach the black hole faster than your head does because the gravity is stronger at your feet. And at first, you're you're stretching, and that kind of feels good initially.

[00:38:34]>> stretching you a little bit, and it feels therapeutic. It feels kind of good. Therapeutic stretch until that difference in gravity becomes [laughter] greater Right. than the molecular forces that hold your flesh together. Ah. And at that point, you snap into two segments. And then each of those two segments, eventually they snap into two segments. You go from one to two to four to eight to 16, and you're the stream of particles descending down to the abyss.

[00:38:58]>> you feeling pain, or >> Yeah.

[00:39:03]I GUESS I'M [laughter] AN ASS NOW.

[00:39:05]DOESN'T IT HURT WHEN you're torn in half?

[00:39:08]But it's worse than that, though. It's worse because the fabric of space and time funnels you. Yes.

[00:39:13]>> So that in fact, you're occupying a narrower and narrower cone of space. So you're getting extruded through the fabric of space-time like toothpaste through a tube. Right. And you say this is preferable, you say, than having like three bottles of Jack Daniel's and falling down a well, you know.

[00:39:30]>> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you had to choose, why not perform the irreversible experiment of your life? Right. Even be and become part of the cosmos in this trippy way. Yeah, well, a part of the black hole of the cosmos. Yeah, okay.

[00:39:44]You you you have been in the news. Is this correct?

[00:39:49]There's something that happened in the news that that you've been fascinated with which is we all heard recently that a comet is headed towards Earth.

[00:39:56]>> the asteroid. Asteroid. And and people are saying it's possible this thing could hit our planet in what year? Uh 2036. April 13th. April 13th, they know the date. Let me let me check. Yeah.

[00:40:08]Yeah. Oops, it's a feather from your Oh, that's a vagoda feather.

[00:40:12]>> [laughter] >> April April 13th. April 13th. So, what will happen? Where will it strike?

[00:40:18]Do they know? Oh, yeah. If [laughter] it if if it strikes and it hits the center of where we think it'll be, it'll hit it'll plunge into the Pacific Ocean.

[00:40:25]Right. Cavitate the ocean with a 3-mi wide hole, 3-mi deep. Right. And at that point, a pulse of water rushes towards the coastline of North America. Right. Oh, happy birthday to me.

[00:40:39]>> [laughter] >> THEN THE WATER SLOSHES BACK IN and it keeps sloshing. And you get these pulses. You get pulses, yeah.

[00:40:47]>> pulse that hits the west coast of North America, it reaches those million-dollar homes in Malibu, Right.

[00:40:52]>> brings them out to the ocean, Right.

[00:40:54]rushes them back and they don't have the same shape that they used to. Sure.

[00:40:57]>> They're now this tumbling mass of I think we all understand, yeah, house getting ripped apart.

[00:41:02]>> Right. Right. Okay. And so, IT JUST SOMETHING HAPPENS WHEN THE WAVE hits the house. [laughter] It becomes a smaller beachy period of particles than it was before. such a one in 45,000 chance that it'll hit. No, wait a minute. One in 45,000, that's not happening. Well, there are people who bet that they're going to win a lottery on worse odds than that. Really? Okay. So, this is the you know, we got to straighten people out.

[00:41:23]>> already working on if a if a if an asteroid's headed this way, the Armageddon idea of getting a bunch of movie stars into a >> Willis. Bruce Willis and put a bunch of people in a spaceship and they go and land on the asteroid and blow it up and then Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck make out.

[00:41:35]Is that the the >> [laughter] >> We got top people working on this problem. Yeah, I've heard that before.

[00:41:41]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, whenever a plumber says that to me, I know it's going to cost me $9,000.

[00:41:45]>> We've got like we got like the nuke folks who want to like blow the thing out of the sky and we've got like the kindler, gentler solution where you send up a spacecraft that might want to that wants to fall in by gravity but use little retro rockets and it slowly tugs it out of harm's way. Interesting.

[00:41:59]>> And that's what we want to do with this asteroid.

[00:42:01]>> Why don't we just make a black cork?

[00:42:05]>> [laughter] [cheering and applause] >> We had moved on to the asteroid.

[00:42:18]>> [laughter] >> You leave for periods of time and then come back.

[00:42:23]You know what show you're on right now, don't you? [laughter] Uh now Um as an astrophysicist, you have said that you are frustrated by how the stars in the cosmos is portrayed on television. You think that people don't pay enough attention to the accurate say >> bad. It's bad. Like in fact, forgive me, but your moon is just completely wrong.

[00:42:47]Which one? This moon?

[00:42:48]>> What do you mean which one? You got one moon here. You a moon. It's it's too large, it's the wrong phase, it's in the wrong part of the sky, and it's facing the wrong direction. I don't want to get fired or anything on your set, but I have to get that off my chest.

[00:43:00]Don't worry, we don't have a moon guy here. [laughter] We don't have specialization like that.

[00:43:05]Where should Where should the moon be?

[00:43:07]>> You come on in the middle of the night, you can't have a crescent moon cuz you're not a crescent moon. Not in the middle of the night. No, they're gone.

[00:43:12]They're gone. Crescent moons unless you live in the Arctic. Yeah.

[00:43:14]>> They're gone. So, that moon should be like turned this way. It should be like a half moon or more. It should be further over New Jersey and it should be smaller.

[00:43:23]I just have to I'm sorry.

[00:43:24]>> to get right on that.

[00:43:26]>> [laughter] >> That's clearly That's clearly the most pressing problem [applause] on this show.

[00:43:31]All right, WELL, UH DEATH >> [applause] >> BY BLACK HOLE WHICH has been nicely solved by you. We've got that one [laughter] figured out.

[00:43:39]Black cork goes right in there and we're set.

[00:43:42]Unbelievable. It's in stores now and Nova Science Now airs on PBS, so uh check your local listings and I hope you can come back cuz we've got a lot more to talk about.

[00:43:53]>> is vast.

[00:43:53]>> Yes, it is very vast. Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank >> [cheering] >> Neil points out something people don't like to face. The universe is not built for us and it's definitely not designed with care or protection.

[00:44:06]Black holes, asteroid impacts, radiation, supernovas, these are all real, measurable threats explained by physics like gravity and orbital mechanics.

[00:44:17]For example, the asteroid 99,942 Apophis was once considered a potential impact risk and scientists calculated its trajectory using math, not prayer.

[00:44:28]If there were an all-powerful protective God, you wouldn't expect a universe filled with constant, random ways to die.

[00:44:35]You wouldn't expect space to be almost entirely uninhabitable or Earth itself to face extinction-level events like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

[00:44:46]Science shows a universe governed by natural laws, not intention.

[00:44:51]These processes don't care about human life. They follow physics consistently.

[00:44:55]That's the key point. Everything we observe works without needing a guiding hand.

[00:45:00]So, Neil, you're not a climate scientist, you but you're a very distinguished scientist and astrophysicist.

[00:45:06]Um what do you think about when people say, um look, this is not settled science.

[00:45:11]There are still questions. I sometimes think to myself, look, there are a lot of questions still about Einstein's theories that led to nuclear fission, but we still know that nuclear power plants do operate and they do provide electricity and >> Yeah, I so, what's happening here is there are people who have cultural, political, religious, economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry-pick one scientific result or another. You can find any scientific paper that says practically anything.

[00:45:43]And the press, which I count you as part of, the press will sometimes find a single paper say, "Oh, here's a new truth."

[00:45:52]If this study holds it, but an emergent scientific truth, for it to become an objective truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it, it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people's research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That's what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence.

[00:46:22]If you want to find the 3% of the papers or the 1% of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that, that is simply irresponsible. And what How else do you establish a scientific truth if not by looking at the consensus of scientific experiment and scientific observations? Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed into law in 1963, a year when he had important things to be thinking about, he signed into law the the National Academy of Sciences cuz he knew that science mattered and should matter in governance. And and it and you know, we build our cities on the basis of science. We when you when you know, when when we fall ill, we don't we don't go to the local witch doctor. We go to a doctor even though all of that science is still, you know, I mean, there are advances going to be made. None of it is settled in the sense >> Well, so you know what is settled? You know what is settled? Settled science is the science that has come out of large bodies of research that all agree. When you see scientists arguing, I tweeted I said, "If you think scientists want to always agree with one another, you've never been to a scientific conference."

[00:47:31]Cuz people are duking it out. But what are they fighting over? Not the settled science that's been in the books. We're fighting over the the the the bleeding edge of what is not yet known. And and that is the natural course of science.

[00:47:45]Now, if you as a journalist want to eavesdrop on that meeting, you'll think scientists don't know anything about anything. But it's the body of knowledge that has accumulated over the decades that precedes this that becomes the canon of what, if you're going to base policy and legislation on, that's what you should be thinking about. So, you would say this is a moment to listen to climate science.

[00:48:05]>> I think this 50 in of I can't even picture fifth How many raindrops is that? 50 in of rain in Houston. This is This is a shot across our bow. A hurricane the width of Florida going up the center of Florida. These are These are shots across our bow. Did at what What will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can benefit from knowing about it. Uh even news reports on this channel uh that talked about the uh the fact that we have fewer deaths per hurricane. Why? Because you now know weeks in advance. We have models that have trajectories of hurricanes. In a decades gone by, it was like there's a hurricane there, we don't know. Should I stay? Should I go? And then you stay and you die. Okay? So, uh to cherry-pick science, it it's an odd thing for a scientist to observe. And I don't I didn't grow up in a country where that was a common phenomenon. We went to the moon and people knew science and technology fed those discoveries. And the day two politicians are arguing about whether science is true, it means nothing gets done. Nothing. It's the beginning of the end of an informed democracy, as I've said many times. What I'd rather happen is you recognize what is scientifically truth, then you have your political debate. Uh so, in the case of of of energy policy, whatever, it's you you don't ask is the science right?

[00:49:41]You ask should we have carbon credits or or tariffs >> response?

[00:49:45]>> The right exactly. What is the economic dimension of this? That's where the politics needs to come in and it's not.

[00:49:51]The longer we delay, the more I worry that we might not be able to recover from this cuz all our greatest cities are on the oceans and waters edges historically for commerce and transportation. And as storms kick in, as water levels rise, they are the first to go and we we don't have a system. We don't have a civilization with the capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles. That's This is happening faster than our ability to respond. That could have huge economic consequences.

[00:50:21]On that sobering note, Neil deGrasse Tyson, always a pleasure. And we are in a hurry to read the book.

[00:50:27]Thanks. Neil is exposing how people misuse science to protect belief.

[00:50:32]In real science, truth isn't based on one study or opinion. It comes from overwhelming agreement across thousands of experiments.

[00:50:40]That's how we know things like gravity, atomic theory, and the Big Bang are real.

[00:50:45]They're supported by independent evidence from physics, astronomy, and observation.

[00:50:50]Religion doesn't work like that.

[00:50:52]It often relies on cherry-picking, ignoring the full body of evidence and holding on to isolated claims that fit a belief.

[00:51:00]That's why some still reject evolution or cosmology despite decades of consistent data.

[00:51:06]Science argues at the edges where things are still unknown.

[00:51:09]Religion challenges what's already been proven.

[00:51:13]That difference matters.

[00:51:14]One system updates with evidence.

[00:51:17]The other stays fixed even when the evidence moves past it.

[00:51:21]One of the things we know from research in psychology as well as just practical matters in the conducting of scientific experiments is that one of the lowest forms of evidence you could possibly invoke is eyewitness testimony.

[00:51:39]Which is odd because it's one of the highest forms of evidence in the court of law, which disturbs me greatly. Mhm.

[00:51:45]So, if you come if you come from a lab to a science conference and say, "This is true." We say, "How do you know this?" "Cuz I saw it." Well, that's really the end of your talk and you just leave.

[00:51:57]And then we say, "Come back when you have a chart recorder or you have to just give me something that does not have to flow through your senses."

[00:52:06]Because your senses is some of the worst data-taking devices that exist. And science did not achieve maturity modern science did not receive maturity until we had instruments that either extended our senses or replaced them.

[00:52:23]And Galileo, it's not an accident that we have modern science as I've described it uh experiment verification this these tactics these methods and tools began with Galileo and Francis Bacon.

[00:52:35]And Galileo was around 1600. That was the invention in that period of the microscope and the telescope.

[00:52:41]So, it's not an accident that all this sort of came together at that time. So, now we have people who are in the act of dying and they come back from life and they report on mental experiences. And that's intriguing.

[00:52:55]It it's intriguing. Um but because it is in the realm of eyewitness testimony you can establish it perhaps as a personal truth.

[00:53:06]But it will take more than that to establish it as an objective truth.

[00:53:10]And an objective truth is the kind of truths that science discovers.

[00:53:14]And it's the kind of truth that is true whether or not you believe in it.

[00:53:18]Okay? It exists outside of your culture, your religion, your political affiliation.

[00:53:25]Personal truths, if I may consider that would be Okay, Jesus is your savior.

[00:53:34]That's your personal truth.

[00:53:36]You cannot convince someone else that Jesus is their savior in an objective way.

[00:53:44]You have to persuade them you have to persuade them in some with in some cases by war, right? Look at the wars that have been fought between religions that did not agree about who was their respective saviors.

[00:53:58]So So um sure we >> know. If I walked on water, made you unblind, turned got created loaves and fishes out of nothing. That would be amazing. And we would like investigate that. And we would say WE WOULD SAY "WHOA!"

[00:54:14]YES, WE WOULD WE would so it would be an amazing thing. And then if we if we cannot account for that for by any other known laws of physics and it's only happening with you that when we see we'd wonder if you were like alien or something first, right?

[00:54:30]But no, it would be so easy to demonstrate divinity if in fact you had the power you wanted to display. But getting back to the gentleman's point um so part of this issue is what does it mean to be dead?

[00:54:49]Okay? It used to be did you fog a mirror that was held up in front of you while you were laying there on your bed, all right? And if you didn't fog the mirror you were judged to be dead they would put you in a coffin and in some parts it is told there's a string that they put into the coffin as they buried you and they put it over a tree branch and connected to a bell.

[00:55:15]If you woke up you would pull the string and you would that's where you get the term dead ringer, okay? You would pull the string and you come rescue me because you buried a living person, okay? So then it was you're dead because your heart stops. Well, we know why a heart beats. It's electrochemical. So, you do choonk, the heart beats again. We got that one.

[00:55:43]Okay? Well, is it when you're brain dead? We can be brain dead but your heart is still beating. And you we can keep you alive. Are you dead yet?

[00:55:52]Well, no cuz your heart's still beating.

[00:55:54]Is your brain functioning? No. Okay, I can tell you this that if you're dead long enough so that your brain is deprived oxygen and then you we bring you back, you're not talking about seeing any lights because you're brain dead, okay?

[00:56:08]So plus this often happens to someone who is deathly ill to begin with and where are they? They're in a hospital. And if they go into cardiac arrest or something critical, they take you from your hospital bed to an operating table. And what is sitting above an operating table?

[00:56:27]Lights.

[00:56:29]Bright lights, okay? And so if you say, "Oh, I was dead and I came back and I saw lights."

[00:56:37]We maybe it's not all the cases but it's many of the cases, okay? Now, there were skeptics who tried to do an experiment. There are people who say they left their body Mhm. and they saw we got some of those.

[00:56:49]Montesquieu. So, here's what they When was Montesquieu? He got a rear-ended by some guy on a horse, fell off, flew up into the air, looked down at himself in agony, watched his wife come over.

[00:57:00]>> collisions in the era of horse and >> Montaigne. Montaigne, sorry. Montaigne, not Montesquieu.

[00:57:03]>> Still, they had rear-end collisions in the era of Well, you ride a horse with a guy behind you who's riding too fast.

[00:57:08]It's like a cab situation.

[00:57:10]>> Okay, I didn't know that. Okay.

[00:57:12]Okay.

[00:57:14]So, I I didn't know that.

[00:57:16]>> Well.

[00:57:19]I love stopping you mid-sentence.

[00:57:20]Rear-end collision with a horses. Uh where was I? So, so there was an experiment. So, there's some descriptions that are part of this near-death experience uh um uh literature where they come above and they see themselves down there on the bed.

[00:57:35]Okay?

[00:57:36]So, what they decided to do was for people who are about to die they would write a message facing upwards to the ceiling above the bed and suspend it there.

[00:57:48]So, if a person goes above their bed and looks down, they'd be able to read the message. So, when they rejoin their body they want they should then tell us what message they saw.

[00:57:58]That's never happened. It's just No.

[00:58:04]>> [laughter] >> That's it. Now, now now I have a cousin who when her father died was alone with him in the room and he's in an open casket.

[00:58:20]And she's otherwise completely rational, okay? I'm not saying this is a crazy person to completely She's a real estate agent uh uh uh so okay?

[00:58:30]>> Speaks for itself. Okay.

[00:58:32]>> [laughter] >> Among other Okay. So, she's in there.

[00:58:38]She tells me of a conversation she had with her dead father.

[00:58:42]And I said, "Was it in your mind?" NO, HE SAT UP AND SPOKE TO HER.

[00:58:47]I said, "What was the conversation?"

[00:58:50]And she said, "Well, he asked he said, 'Don't worry about him. He's in a better place.'" This sort of thing. So this is her eyewitness testimony. I'm not going to say it's wrong. I'm just saying it's not scientifically useful.

[00:59:03]That's all I'm really saying here, okay?

[00:59:05]I told her "Next time this happens >> [laughter] >> ask these questions and not those questions, okay?

[00:59:15]Don't say, 'Are you happy? Uh Did you How are you?' No, say 'Are you wearing clothes?

[00:59:23]Where are you?

[00:59:26]Where did you get your clothes? What temperature is it? Are you Just ask questions.

[00:59:33]Like this is this is an amazing scientific experiment you could be performing.

[00:59:38]So so That's my lesson to all of you that if you find yourself in that situation.

[00:59:44]Okay? Cuz if if a dead person sits up and starts talking to me, OH MY GOD. MY MY IPHONE IS COMING OUT. I'M GETTING CHART RECORDERS. I'M I'M GOING TO be all up in that as an experiment.

[00:59:58]>> Neil is hitting a key weakness in religious claims. Most of them rely on personal stories, not reliable evidence.

[01:00:05]In science, eyewitness testimony is considered one of the weakest forms of proof because human perception is flawed.

[01:00:12]Memory can be altered and the brain can create convincing experiences that feel real.

[01:00:18]That's why modern science depends on instruments, measurements, and repeatable results, a standard developed since Galileo Galilei.

[01:00:26]Take near-death experiences, often used to support belief in an afterlife.

[01:00:32]Studies show these can be explained by lack of oxygen, brain activity changes, and exposure to bright surgical lights.

[01:00:40]Researchers even tested out-of-body claims by placing hidden messages above hospital beds. None were ever reported back.

[01:00:48]If these experiences were real evidence of a soul or afterlife, they should produce consistent, testable results.

[01:00:55]They don't.

[01:00:56]They stay in the realm of personal belief, not objective truth. So after everything we just looked at, science, evidence, and how these ideas actually hold up, what do you think? Does the universe look like it was designed? Or does it look like it runs on its own natural laws?

[01:01:13]Drop your thoughts in the comments. I really want to hear where you land on this.

[01:01:18]And if you found this breakdown helpful, make sure to like the video and subscribe for more.