Neil deGrasse Tyson Reinterprets Genesis
“If you knew nothing about science and you read say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis is an account of nature. That’s what that is. And I said to you, ‘Give me your description of the natural world, based only on this.’ You would say, ‘The world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light, much lesser than the Sun, and that in fact they can fall out of the sky.’ One of the signs of the Second Coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. So to even write that means, you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is.
“So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe, based on Bible passages, got the wrong answer. So what happened was, when science discovers things and you want to stay religious — or you want to continue to believe the Bible is unerring — what you would do is you would say, ‘Well let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it.’ Then you say things like, ‘Oh they didn’t really mean that literally; they meant that figuratively. So this whole sort of reinterpretation, of how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are, came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded.”
That was taken from a Neil deGrasse Tyson interview clip.
Science is concerned with the questions: how does it work and what is it made of? Ancient people, like the writers and readers of Genesis, were more concerned with the question: what spiritual truth does the story convey? That’s the fundamental difference between the ancient and scientific worldviews. The ancients were concerned with spirit and science is concerned with matter.
If Tyson asked the writers of Genesis if the Creation story is true; scientifically true, materially true, “an account of nature,” they wouldn’t even understand what that question means. Because science — the idea that you can objectively observe material reality and make predictions about material reality — didn’t exist. Partly because there wasn’t a divorce between spirit and matter. So to make the argument work, Tyson has to reinterpret Genesis in the scientific worldview; where there’s a separation of spirit and matter.
Now there was something similar to astronomy, as early as 2000 BC. But those somewhat-scientific attempts were a combination of astronomy and astrology. Even in the 16th century, at the time of the Copernican Revolution, when it was understood that the Sun is the center of the solar system, astronomy and astrology were still not entirely divorced.
Spirit and matter were still connected. In other words, Tyson has to go back to Genesis, holding the scientific worldview — where spirit and matter are divorced — then evaluate Genesis only on the basis of matter; the scientific worldview, to put Genesis down. But Genesis was written when spirit and matter were not divorced. So it is a spiritual document, not a scientific one.
He takes for granted that Genesis is “an account of nature,” but it’s not. Using the word “nature,” he means material reality. He’s eliminating the spiritual and keeping the material, showing that his only viewpoint is the scientific worldview.
But Genesis wasn’t written for the scientific worldview, not least because the scientific method wasn’t discovered. Which is not to say the two worldviews are incompatible. The spiritual worldview and the scientific worldview are perfectly compatible. It’s just that Tyson tries to force spirituality into the scientific method, then points out that the project doesn’t work. Rather than blame the instrument (science), he blames the test subject (spirituality).
He places science above everything else. Not understanding that as powerful as science is, it is limited to matter. Instead, he speaks as though matter is the limit, because science says it is. But a person need only look to the experience of love, to know that the material explanation of oxytocin as a bonding chemical doesn’t fully explain the phenomenon of love.
Tyson also mentions the Second Coming. In Biblical writings, “heaven” refers to abstract or spiritual reality and “earth” refers to material reality. These terms, heaven and earth, are symbolic in nature. Meaning, heaven also points to an afterlife or the domain of God. But that’s not the same thing as a literal interpretation.
Philo of Alexandria, a 1st century BC and AD Jewish philosopher, notes that the Genesis 1:1 heaven and earth: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” are a heaven and earth of abstraction. They are immaterial, but knowable. The abstractions go first. Then the material sky and planet are created, dependent on the abstract or spiritual origins.
The abstract heaven and earth serve as archetypes to the heaven and Earth of Genesis 1:8 and 1:10 — the visible world: “And God called the firmament heaven,” then, “God called the dry land Earth.” That theme of a symbolic heaven and earth — an abstract or spiritual heaven and earth, plus a material heaven and Earth, which are dependent on the immaterial, was picked up by the 3rd century Christian theologian Origen (of Alexandria).
Meaning, the spiritual interpretation of Genesis, actually coincides with the time of Christ and the emergence of the Christian tradition — as seen in Philo of Alexandria. So, the James Webb Space Telescope won’t send us images of heaven. Because “heaven” isn’t a material place in the sky and “earth” isn’t the specific planet we live on. Those words are both stand-ins for categories of reality. Even if there is a heavenly afterlife and a planet Earth.
The spiritual interpretation of Scripture wasn’t made up after science was invented; nor was the spiritual interpretation a replacement interpretation, made up because science now accounted for particular material discoveries about reality.
Now in the story of the Second Coming, as Tyson says, quoting the supposed Biblical worldview: “‘Stars are just little points of light, much lesser than the Sun, and that in fact they can fall out of the sky.’ One of the signs of the Second Coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth.” Symbolically, at the end of the world — take that however one will — the points of light we look up to, which are not as important as the Light in front of us, will crash from abstract reality into material reality.
For example, the more we have a religion of science; where science is the highest and only explanation of reality and we make science an idol to be worshipped — the closer we come to scientific abstraction colliding with material reality. That’s the end of the world. Nuclear weapons, Covid lockdowns, eugenics, etc. The light of science is important, but should never be higher than God. So again, Tyson has to reinterpret the Second Coming to fit the scientific worldview, in order to dismiss the Second Coming.
Further, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, writing The Life of Moses in the 4th century, is explaining symbolic representations within the Biblical text. It is a spiritual approach to the Bible. Saint Gregory doesn’t approach the Bible as a scientific document, which is to be taken as a forensic analysis of reality. He’s trying to explain what each “material” aspect symbolically represents. In the Christian worldview, meaning and spirit are central, not matter.
One can object that there are people who think Genesis is scientifically true. Even today, there are schools devoted to teaching that. Clearly, that approach is incorrect. Genesis isn’t a scientific document. But it would have been the best explanation of material reality — along with its primary focus on spiritual reality — before science divorced the two. Once humanity began focusing only on material reality, it became clear that Genesis isn’t a scientific work at all.
Both extremes, Creationist schools and Tyson, think Genesis is a scientific document, but it isn’t. Both groups reinterpret Genesis to fit the scientific worldview. The Creationist schools don’t even understand they are playing into the rules of the game they oppose: the scientific worldview.
There were ancient philosophers who did speculative “science,” thinking that everything was fundamentally water, fire, air, or earth. Those philosophers focused on material reality, and today we know they were wrong (except for Democritus who hypothesized atoms). However, those natural philosophers were outliers in their society. Most people were more concerned with how to live their lives properly; spiritual questions, not material questions.
Even alchemists, the forerunners to chemists, were concerned with spirit. Like astrologers, the forerunners to astronomers. Science never would have even begun, if Christianity didn’t place such an emphasis on truth, as the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche notes: saying Christianity died by its own hand; in the sense that Christianity placed such a heavy emphasis on truth, which spurred on the development of science, which in turn made many people focus only on material reality and lose their faith in spirit.
Science was pursued rigorously, because Christianity insisted there was an objective truth to reality; as science also insists there is an objective truth to reality. It’s just that science can only deal with the material world, and that objective truth. Science lacks the ability to deal with the spiritual matters which Christianity pursues as objective truth, such as God’s existence and ethics. Yet when Genesis was written, and for almost all of human history, unlike today, the world was a place of spirit more than a place of matter. That’s why Genesis was and is a spiritual document and not a scientific one.
Once humanity began the scientific method, of divorcing spirit from matter, in the 16th century, roughly two millennia after Genesis was written, some religious people did treat Genesis as a scientific document. They argued that Genesis was scientifically true. That was incorrect, but that was their best guess until science definitively proved it wrong. That scientific attempt of the Church, infamously exemplified with Galileo being labeled a heretic, was abandoned centuries ago. But the idea of reality only being material, which began with the advent of science, carried on through the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, all the way to now.
With that said, if Genesis is an account of nature, it would lose all of its significance once science accounted for nature. But Genesis isn’t an account of nature; meaning matter. Rather, Genesis is an account of spirit. That’s why Genesis didn’t — and doesn’t, need the scientific worldview to make sense. Philo of Alexandria and Origen had no problem understanding Genesis as a spiritual document. And Saint Gregory of Nyssa makes no reference to science, when explaining the symbolic representations in the Bible.
However if one only has the scientific worldview, like Tyson and many people today, one can only see Genesis as science. Tyson’s whole argument relies on him reinterpreting Genesis as a scientific document. But the writers and readers of Genesis were looking at a spiritual document.
Until science, spirit mattered more than matter.
Today, with the scientific confusion around quantum causality, free will, the vastness of our universe, and our strangely-protected little planet — it might be wise to learn from people who thought there was more to reality than matter; like Philo of Alexandria, Origen, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.
“Now the reason for all these false, impious, and ignorant assertions about God is simply that Scripture is not understood spiritually, but in accordance with the bare letter.” — Origen, On First Principles, IV, 2, 3
Dan Sherven is the author of three books, including the number one bestseller Classified: Off the Beat ‘N Path. Sherven is also an award-winning journalist, writing for several publications. Find Sherven’s work.
