Consider, for example, the revised, thirteen-part Cosmos series that aired in 2014. In the series, Neil deGrasse Tyson, a scientific materialist who dislikes the label “atheist,” attributes a loss of belief in God during the seventeenth century to the triumph of Newtonian physics. In the third episode, Tyson gives a detailed account of the collaboration between astronomer Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton.6 He recounts how this collaboration led to the publication of Newton’s masterpiece the Principia, in which Newton developed his mathematically precise theory of gravity. Tyson claims that the
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