Last summer, my wife and I were watching an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. I know: the man never has kind words about religion, but he can make us laugh, and I appreciate that he, at times, is able to critique the extreme behavior within his own political group (Maher is a self-described liberal democrat). For instance, Maher regularly, often humorously, bemoans the witch-hunting behavior of woke culture. By critiquing extreme behavior in his own political base, Maher models unbiased thinking. Unfortunately, like so many of us, Maher cannot help expressing his ignorant biases, which in Maher’s case means his views about religion.
In his documentary titled Religulous, for example, Maher spends hours questioning people who do not possess sophisticated or even rudimentary knowledge about their religious beliefs. Those people provide Maher with the desired ridiculous answers, and Maher mocks the answers and the people supplying them but based on those answers, Maher declares that all religious people are stupid and that humanity would be better off discarding religion altogether.
Now, hearing silly or stupid answers can be amusing, maybe that explains the mysterious success
of shows like Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader and Jay Leno’s old skit JayWalking, but to take silly answers from unknowledgeable people as criteria for truth is, to say the least, bizarre. In a similar vein, I should base my acceptance or rejection of evolution based on the explanations and opinions of the boys on my son’s little league baseball team.
If I have questions about evolution, I should seek out qualified, unbiased biologists, and if Maher has questions about religion, shouldn’t he dialogue with holy, knowledgeable men and women of different faiths? Maher does not.
In fact, he rarely completes an episode of his show without launching at least one logical fallacy at a religious group or religious person, which is why my wife and I do not watch his show regularly. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see Maher, on the episode I watched with my wife last summer, interview a famous astrophysicist (Neil deGrasse Tyson) and express to him genuine concern about the mystery of existence. In doing so, I believe Maher briefly cast off his tv-personality facade and revealed the existential dilemma we all face.
The Interview
The interview between the two men occurs in season 19, episode 8 of Real Time with Bill Maher, which can be viewed through HBOMax, but for our purposes, YouTube has a clip of the interview’s first five minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9j-OKo1jtE.
Maher’s profound question, the question he says will “make your head hurt,” occurs throughout the clip. Even though Maher uses different words, and even though he seems embarrassed to ask the question simply or outright, he is basically wondering this: why is there something instead of nothing? Not surprisingly, Neil deGrasse Tyson never supplies Maher with an adequate answer. In fact, both men respond inadequately to the question. Neil begins explaining the big bang theory, but before finishing, he changes the subject to smugly claim that the “why” question is only for armchair philosophers and the religious man living on a mountain, reductionist claims Neil obviously makes because he is frustrated with Maher for persisting with the“why” of the big bang instead of the science, or the “how,” of the big bang.
And Neil’s comments about philosophers and religious thinkers are strange coming from a public intellectual, especially if one considers that Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, wrote an 800-page book, Being and Time, about the very question, “why is there something instead of nothing,” a question Heidegger and numerous philosophers since Plato have explored with wisdom and acuity. To Neil’s mocking words about religious people, I would like to kindly ask him how he thinks George Lemaitre would respond. Lemaitre was a Belgian Catholic priest and physicist who first proposed the theory of the big bang, though Lemaitre initially called it the cosmic egg. Does Neil know that Father Lemaitre slowly convinced an initially skeptical Einstein about the science of the big bang?
Anyway, Maher listens to Neil and then accepts the big bang theory because Neil is “smarter than the preacher,” though I’m not sure why someone would ask a preacher about the science of the big bang, unless the preacher was also a scientist. It is not surprising, however, that both Maher and Neil, popular atheists with little to no knowledge of theology or philosophy, speaking in front of a studio audience of Maher’s secular and skeptical supporters, avoid the seriousness of the question and mock religion. In Neil’s defense, he is a fine popular science speaker about the physics of the cosmos, but it is clear from this interview that the man simply does not know how to discuss issues philosophically, and instead of a deep discussion, Neil and Maher revert to sarcasm and logical fallacies.
Of course, we are all sometimes guilty of committing reductionist or straw man fallacies against people who share different beliefs from our own, so I can relate to Maher and Neil. I made similar comments about religion when I was a seeking but skeptical agnostic, and when I first converted to Catholicism, I was guilty, at times, of verbally scapegoating some of our protestant brothers and sisters.
But today, enlightened by tough Grace, not unlike Peter’s painful recognition when the cock crowed, I am aware of and constantly on guard about my own potential to scapegoat others, so I understand that Neil and Maher’s behavior is not dissimilar from my own behavior at times, but that awareness frees me from anger.
And that freedom also allowed me, while I was watching the episode with my wife and silently noting each logical fallacy, to recognize the deeply human aspect of Maher’s question, a question that genuinely interests and fascinates him. Of course, he reverts back to his normal attitude when Neil begins to straw man religion and philosophy, but nonetheless, I recognized that Maher’s typical mask for the cameras is probably just that, a mask and that an aspect of his true self was momentarily revealed with his persistence to Neil that the very existence of the cosmos seems remarkable. Maher even mentions that the isolation he had experienced because of Covid caused him to ask some of the deeper questions about life. We can all relate. In fact, is it possible that Maher had recently, and perhaps many times prior, been faced with what the theologian David Bentley Hart refers to as the “primordial astonishment” of existence? By “primordial astonishment,” Hart means that mysterious feeling we all have when the strangeness of existence, which we so often neglect, confronts us powerfully in a moment that bewilders us.
Let’s say, for example, we are taking our daily walk; we walk by a row of bushes we have passed thousands of times before without ever really noticing. All of the sudden, on this particular day, something strange happens. We stand amazed at the row of bushes, which are actually crepe myrtle shrubs, and for the first time, we really notice their tender branches being bent by the pink and purple flowers shaped like grape clusters. We see the flowers now like explorers in a strange land discovering something exotic, something never-before-seen, and during this primordial astonishment at the sheer gift of existence, we might ask ourselves, “Why is all this here? Why am I here?” And we feel awe and wonder that anything, including ourselves, should exist at all.
So perhaps Maher, isolated as we all were at the height of the covid pandemic, perhaps more aware of his surroundings because his normal routines were halted, experienced some moments of “primordial astonishment.”
And perhaps Bill Maher was remembering one of those moments when he asked Neil about the strangeness of the big bang. How could the universe have once been so infinitesimally tiny? Does life have purpose and meaning, or is the universe a vast practical joke? But just when the questions get interesting, Neil and Maher abandon them for bad jokes, jokes, and negative comments that are increasingly common among the secular, which makes it difficult to discuss with them anything that even whiffs of the transcendent. At times, the popular and ignorant negativity towards religion can be frustrating. I highly doubt, for example, that a detailed explanation to Neil and Maher about their intellectual mistakes would convince them that their attitudes toward religion are incorrect. Secular ideology increasingly reminds me of William Blake’s “mind-forged manacles,” manacles imprisoning an increasing number of its victims to only an immanent view of life, a view that is sad and lonely for many.
But I don’t despair. In fact, as I thought about the negative comments in the interview and the momentary glimpse into Maher’s deeper humanity, I began to meditate on the Gospels, those imperishable blueprints for how we Christians should act towards others, especially those who disagree with us, and I remembered how Christ was often present and available to all types of
sinners.
So just as Christ ate and drank alongside sinners and tax collectors, so will we Christians eat and drink alongside an increasing number of our atheist brothers and sisters, and even if many of them are wandering in a desert far from God’s presence, it would benefit us Christians to realize that many of them, despite their often superficial, stubborn insistence on the immanent, inwardly thirst for a conversation about those transcendent moments of wonder when existence seems like gifted manna from heaven.
