Last month, The New Yorker ran a profile by Rebecca Mead of notable astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in light of his new series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which airs Sunday nights on Fox. In what has become par for the course for any scientist who lingers in the public eye, Mead addressed Tyson’s views on atheism. She cites a 2012 Big Think interview, which has received over 1.4 million views on YouTube, in which Tyson dubs himself a scientist above all. He describes himself as an agnostic, rationally “prepared to embrace the evidence” of God but rejecting any perspective for which credible proof does not exist.
The relationship between science and faith has been made increasingly more volatile by both activist atheists like scientist Richard Dawkins and what Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern has dubbed “futile” engagements like the debate between popular scientist Bill Nye and Answers in Genesis president Ken Ham that occurred in January. Tyson’s response prescribes a course that not only better reflects American public opinion and allows faith and science to coexist, but also returns science to its better nature.
Tyson’s remarks first make a critical point about agnosticism, which is too often maligned as individual indecisiveness between atheism and religion. Agnosticism instead represents a legitimate perspective open to evidentiary belief. The re-assertion of a middle road between atheism and religion symbolizes a much-needed functional and philosophical preference for malleability of opinion over certitude.
Rather than bearing out preconceived notions, agnostics display a formational perspective, subject to change based on proof. Tyson’s circumspection reflects a wider trend in American society away from the radicalization of either strict atheism or religion.
A 2011 Gallup Poll shows the percentage of the American public who say they believe in God—still a dominant 90 percent—has declined from 96 percent when the question was first posed in 1944. While self-described atheists or agnostics represent only about 1.6 percent of the population, according to a 2009 American Religious Identification Survey, 12 percent of Americans rejected “God” in favor of a generalized “universal spirit or higher power” in a recent Gallup poll. These shifting sands strongly recommend a Tysonian reappraisal.
Tyson’s perspective is even more relevant to the increasingly antagonistic relationship between science and faith. Perhaps first popularized in American public discourse by the 1925 Scopes so-called “Monkey Trial,” modern “active atheists” (in Tyson’s words) have elevated acrimony to new levels. This activism has been spurred by the emergence of science intellectuals, including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, whose vociferous atheism is inextricably wedded to their public personas.
While campaigns, petitions, and protests are certainly the prerogative of individuals, they become dangerous when applied wholesale to a discipline like science that derives its foundational credo and central legitimacy from objective inquiry. While dogma and impartiality can certainly exist as facets of an individual (as can religious belief and scientific rationality), the two are less easily reconciled on an institutional scale. Reconciling active atheism and science becomes a problem of participation and fundamentally conflicting ideology. Science, which must resist pigeonholing and generalization by its skeptical nature, is inherently incompatible with an activist movement that brands all faith practices invalid.
Tyson’s critique extends to the linguistic realm as well. “It’s odd that the word ‘atheist’ even exists,” he says in the Big Think interview cited in Mead’s New Yorker article. “I don’t play golf. Is there a word for non-golf players? Do non-golf players gather and strategize?”
This inherent irony, Tyson’s quip suggests, is easily manipulated into polarizing factionalism and combativeness—that is, the failed and frustrated approach of the atheistic Dawkins and the disappointing Nye-Ham debate. The latter, especially, fully illustrated the irreconcilability of employing logical argumentation against an opposition that twists logic to support a preordained worldview.
Rationality has little hope of changing these behaviors. Argument, however, turns what should be a vibrant public dialogue into a spectacle in which winners and losers may be proclaimed by both sides because neither will—or can—debate on the other’s terms. Rather than furthering discourse in a meaningful way, argument buries issues that require social discourse to better understand. By eschewing active atheism’s combativeness, Tyson acknowledges this fact without admitting defeat or further embroiling scientists in a war of attrition against stoic religionists whose views are unlikely to prove changeable.
For Tyson, being a scientist means releasing any aspirations to prematurely conclude, win debates, or even have debates at all. A strict reliance on evidentiary proof, without advancing premature conclusions, proclaims an openness of perspective that remains refreshingly above the fray and above reproach.
Ultimately, science continues to work regardless of the number of debates waged or religious Americans. It works best, however, when those who aspire to communicate its work to the public operate by its central principles. Every so often we need a Neil deGrasse Tyson to remind us of that.
