Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Your point of view derives, of course, from the Judeo-Christian Bible (the Old Testament). The problem here is that plenty of people in the world who are religious believe something else, expressing no less confidence than you do in their specific belief system. The Animists, Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Shintoists, Voduns, etc. are each as certain as you that their beliefs are the moral, correct, and only ones to hold. Not to mention the countless sects within Christianity itself, whose beliefs and traditions all differ in important ways: Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lutherans, Mormons, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists, and so forth. In the past (and even in the present) differences can drive adherents to commit murder against another sect in the name of their faith. Science, on the other hand, is a system of knowing and discovery that is decoupled from your nationality or birthplace or ancestry or politics or who you worship. It’s a system of knowing the natural world that is immune to opinion, but not to experiment. When you invoke the methods and tools of science, you come up with the origins story as conveyed by scientists. You don’t come up with any faith-based description of the natural world. Had that been the case, then scientists would have been mining religious writings since antiquity for insights into how the physical world works.