Opinion The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a very famous and popular scientist. He even has a TV show. And wears a cool astronomical vest. Only he’s not infallible.

This rather basic truth has been established over the past couple weeks, over much resistance and at the cost of much abuse, by Sean Davis of the lively new conservative website, the Federalist.


Davis dug into a handful of just-so stories repeated by Tyson in his public lectures, the point of which is to make himself — and by extension, his audience — feel superior to the dolts who aren’t nearly as scientific as he is.

The controversy centered on an erroneous Bush quote that Tyson made a staple of his public presentations, and has come to settle on the head-scratching question: Why is it so hard for a scientist committed to evidence and rationality to admit that he got something wrong?

You can see Tyson using the Bush quote in a talk at something called The Amazing Meeting, which describes itself as “the leading conference in the world focused on scientific skepticism.” This scientific skepticism is, judging from the reaction to Tyson, to be distinguished from skepticism about people who cloak themselves in science.

When Tyson puts up a slide with George W. Bush’s name on it, the audience laughs, prepared to have its prejudices confirmed, and Tyson obliges with his bogus quote.

Tyson says that right after Sept. 11, Bush asserted the superiority of “we” to “they” (i.e., Muslim fundamentalists) by saying, “Our God is the God who named the stars.”

Tyson can’t even begin to catalog all that’s wrong with this quote. He says that the God of Islam, Judaism and Christianity is the same God (a theologically contested claim, but put it aside).

He also says the passage is in Genesis, instead of Isaiah (but also put that aside).

Then, Tyson drops the hammer: Two-thirds of the named stars have Arabic names!

Get it? Bush wanted to denigrate Muslims for their God not excelling at naming stars, when it was really the opposite. It is the English-speaking Christian God who failed to keep up.

How stupid can one Bible-thumping, war-mongering, Muslim-hating president get? Tyson magnanimously allows that Bush didn’t know him yet, so he couldn’t call the astronomer to get word on just how idiotic this celestial put-down of Islam was.

This is an entertaining story, especially if you’re really tickled by how much smarter Tyson is than lesser mortals who don’t host TV shows popularizing science.

Evidently, no one yucking it up over this story knew enough to wonder how it possibly could be true. It’s only remotely believable if you are completely ignorant of Bush’s posture in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.

He famously went out of his way to vouch for Islam and to call for tolerance. Here is part of his statement at an Islamic Center in Washington, a few days after the attacks:

The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

Note the absence of any taunts about the Muslim God not logging enough names of stars.

As Sean Davis pointed out in his initial piece on the dubious quote, it really came from a poetic tribute to the astronauts who died in the Columbia disaster in 2003. After quoting from Isaiah, Bush said, “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.”

In fairness to Tyson, it’s always easy to fall for quotes that are too good to check and to rely on fuzzy material in speeches, especially when you are playing for laughs. But when you are assuming a position of intellectual superiority based on your rigor, it’s especially important to resist these tendencies (which should be resisted, regardless).

When the indefatigable Davis queried Tyson about the provenance of his suspect material, the impressively factual scientist wrote an evasive, condescending point-by-point reply on Facebook.

Tyson could have said of the Bush quote, “You know, I might have messed that one up, and will check it out. Thanks for raising it.” Instead, he said he had an “explicit memory” of Bush saying it, and of “making a note for possible later reference in my public discourse.” (Most people who do public speaking do public speaking; Tyson does “public discourse.”)

Tyson helpfully informed Davis, “One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”

Really? When it comes to presidential speeches? Just because there’s an absence of evidence that Obama said in a State of the Union address that he wants to nationalize the oil companies, it doesn’t mean he hasn’t said it?

This is such self-evident nonsense that Tyson finally tweeted at a professor who suggested he simply admit error and apologize, that he would indeed apologize — as soon as he found an appropriate medium and occasion. No one to this point had realized that Tyson lacks for mediums and occasions to express himself.

This bullheaded gracelessness has extended to Tyson’s acolytes. They have worked to keep any mention of the controversy off of the Wikipedia page on Tyson, and tried to exact revenge against the Federalist on its Wikipedia page, for daring to expose a mistake by Tyson the Magnificent.

Of course, this is the opposite of what should be the reaction of the “reality-based community” to the exposure of a factual mistake. But Tyson’s most intense fans are less skeptics than worshipers.

The attitude is captured in an episode of the hit Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black,” by the protagonist Piper Chapman, a sophisticated secular liberal who happens to land in prison. She says at one point to a group of obnoxious Christian inmates, “I believe in Nate Silver, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Christopher Hitchens.”

“Believe” is the right word. These are the high priests of rationality and secularism and to question them is, from the point of view of the believers, heresy.

To be clear, it isn’t Tyson’s science that is the point of contention here. Who doesn’t want to listen to him talk about supernovas and the large magellanic cloud?

The problem is the belief of his fans—encouraged by him—that science has all the answers; that anyone who believes in physics must adhere to a progressive secularism; that anyone not on board is—to borrow from the accusations of Tyson's defenders—guilty of anti-intellectualism, climate “denial” and racism.

Properly understood, science is a tool, an incredibly powerful one, but still just a tool. G.K. Chesterton wrote long ago, “Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

The Bush quote controversy reminds us that the self-styled champions of science are, like anyone else, prone to sloppiness, pomposity and error. Just don’t tell the adherents of the Tyson cult. It’s not polite to scandalize the faithful.