Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is often asked if he believes in God. Typically, his response goes something like this: “So … the more I look around at the world, at the universe, I remain unconvinced.”
Often, he will start by referring to common Judeo-Christian descriptions of God as “someone who is all powerful and all good,” such as in this clip from CBS Sunday Morning or this one on Netflix’s Chelsea Handler Show. Then he goes on to cite things that cause human suffering, like natural disasters, pestilences, or birth defects, to conclude that that kind of God, a benevolent God, does not exist. He often qualifies by saying that if there were evidence for God, he would believe. “If you have good evidence, then I’m good for it. I’m evidence-driven.”
Or, as he put it in this clip, part of which appears in the opening segment of The Story of Everything, “I have no problems if, as we probe the origins of things, we bump up into the bearded man. … [pause for dramatic effect] There’s just no evidence of it.”
In the most recent clip I could locate of Tyson being asked this question (2025), Logan Paul and Mike Majlak of the Impaulsive podcast asked a bit more precisely: “Does any God exist?” As usual, Tyson said he remains unconvinced, but after his long-winded digression on the immorality of the Bible, Majlak brought him back to the question, except this time he cast it with a bit of a scientific slant: “Who pushed the button for the Big Bang?”
“We don’t know,” Tyson quipped, cutting him off before Majlak even finished. “It’s a frontier of science.”
“We Don’t Know”
Tyson may be America’s best-known scientific atheist, especially in the wake of his 2014 reboot of Carl Sagan’s 1980s series Cosmos. But whereas Sagan espoused, if tacitly (and against the most up-to-date science of his day), a self-existing, uncaused universe, Tyson no longer has that option. Big Bang cosmology has been the accepted model for more than half a century now, and if you’re familiar with the cosmological argument for the existence of a first cause, you know that the “Big Bang” implies some kind of nonmaterial, spaceless, and timeless cause behind the universe.
I think it’s interesting, then, that Dr. Tyson says, “We don’t know,” when asked this second question. When asked if he believes in God, he usually responds in the first person: “I remain unconvinced.” But when asked “Who pushed the button?” he gives a collective response: “We don’t know.”
What he probably means is that “We” — the mainstream scientific community — haven’t reached a conclusion on it. Fair enough, but he declines to venture an answer for himself. That’s fair game as well, and to my knowledge no interviewer has pressed him on that matter.
Brought to You in Living Color: The Evidence
Still Tyson has said, “If you’ve got some good evidence, bring it Bring it.” So for all you who are evidence-driven like him but not bound by materialist presuppositions, you can bring the evidence into your very own living room. The Story of Everything is now available on Amazon.
The theater run was originally scheduled for one week, but due to box-office success, was extended around the country (rare for a science documentary). As Dr. Stephen Meyer, whose book Return of the God Hypothesis was the basis for the film, explained on a recent ID the Future podcast, it’s now available for both home streaming on Prime Video, as well as group licensing for public showing in settings such as a school, church, or community center. The documentary has a 92 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
A Universal Human Question
Returning to the question of, “Who pushed the button?” The Story of Everything narrates the events related to the monumental 20th-century discovery that the universe had a beginning. It is almost impossible to overestimate the significance of this revolutionary shift in science, but it is only one of the three 20th-century developments covered in the film (see here for more background).
You don’t have to be a PhD astrophysicist to intuit that if it had a beginning, something had to make it start. Perhaps, contra Dr. Tyson, the question of what caused the beginning is not so much a frontier-of-science question as it is a frontier-of-human-inquiry question. Questions related to the beginning, to where we came from, and to what caused us to come into existence in the first place are relevant for everyone. While answers may venture beyond the limits of the empirical sciences, that doesn’t mean the empirical sciences don’t offer meaningful information to bear on them.
Thinking people do not need to wait on mainstream science to pronounce on these questions. The Story of Everything is not a faith-based film. It does not venture an answer to the question of Who? or What? Rather, it’s a science-based film that is also, for many, faith-affirming. It brings the evidence to you so that, as a thinking person, you can weigh it for yourself and draw your own conclusion.