Episode 18 The Big Questions

Today on The Big Questions, did man create God?

Good morning. I'm Nicky Campbell, welcome to The Big Questions.

Today we're back at Wychwood School in Oxford

to debate one very big question.

Did man create God? Welcome, everyone, to The Big Questions.

Now, the dawning of religious belief is suggested

by the graves of Neanderthals and other early hominids

who lived between 225,000 and 100,000 years ago.

By around 10,000 BC, organised religions emerged

within the first Neolithic cities, states and kingdoms,

like Gobekli Tepe in what is now Turkey,

the oldest human-made place of worship yet discovered,

and the first wooden posts

were erected at the site of Stonehenge 2,000 years later.

Hinduism, the world's oldest living religion,

began to emerge in the Indus Valley around 5,000 years ago.

Religious beliefs and practices are probably as old as mankind.

But which came first - man or gods? Did man create God?

To debate that, we've gathered together a distinguished array

of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, writers,

people from various faiths, and of none.

And you can join in, too, on Twitter,

or online by logging on to:

Follow the link to the online discussion,

and lots of encouragement, contributions,

from our extremely erudite Oxford audience.

Bruce Hood, Professor Bruce Hood,

experimental psychologist, Bristol University.

-Hi, Bruce.

-Hi, Nicky.

Right, our species, Homo sapiens,

we emerge from Homo erectus, heidelbergensis, ergaster,

about 150,000, 100,000 years ago.

Our brains grew gradually

and they got to the point that they are at today.

Why did we start to need to believe?

Well, we're a social animal,

and social groups coalesce around belief systems.

And it's a very powerful mechanism

to identify who's a member of your group,

especially if you have to take their beliefs on trust

in the absence of evidence.

Our brains have evolved to try and make sense of the world,

to try and predict it,

and an unpredictable world is pretty frightening.

So if you don't know what's going to happen with the crops

or the migration of animals,

you might try and engage in some activities to try and control that.

That's just in our nature to do this.

So I can see the origins of rituals as serving a purpose,

to try and explain the world around you,

but also as a mechanism to kind of coalesce social groups.

What about dealing with mortality, understanding mortality,

and finding solace for those we've lost?

-Was that an important factor, do you think?

-Absolutely.

I think the fact that there were ritual practices and graves,

there must have been some sense of the afterlife.

I think most of us still have this urge and need

to know what's going to happen to us.

That's never really going to go away.

And, of course, if someone provides a very good story about what happens

then that's easily understood and accepted.

-And we can understand that need.

-Yeah.

-Very much.

As we know, if we've lost loved ones.

So, Professor Teresa Morgan, here's the thing.

It's a long span of time, isn't it?

Homo sapiens, 150,000, 100,000 years.

Why did we, as a species, live until 5,000 years ago

believing in supernatural forces,

in animism and river sprites and gods of thunder,

and it took until then to get the idea of a single creator?

If God created man, it's a bit late in the day, isn't it?

We don't know very much about what people thought

more than 5,000 years ago, because they didn't leave written records,

so they didn't describe very much about, you know, what they did.

Actually, I wanted to answer Bruce more directly

and say that what worries me about that kind of explanation is,

if you take an example of something else

that is very important to us, but a bit different from religion,

something like love, a sociologist can say,

well, it's all about creating stable social structures,

and a psychologist can say, well, it's a by-product of evolution,

or it's a way of creating bonding

so that parents look after their children, all that.

But, actually, our own experience of love

and, say, love that creates a long-term relationship,

is that it's far more than that.

And I think explanations of religion that try to explain religion away

never quite capture the full richness of experience

of people who believe.

And so I would say that, you know, there's always a difference

between the insider and the outsider perspective.

-Well, I believe in fantasy...

-We didn't quite get to the question...

I appreciate what you're saying. I want to come back to it.

Arif, do you want to come in here?

There is a difference between the insider and the outsider perspective

could be said by anyone who believes any kind of conspiracy theory

or any of the 99,000 religions which you, presumably,

and all religious people, believe to be nonsense.

The other thing I would say is that, of course...

Two things about what Professor Hood said.

One of them is that it shows

that the widespreadness of religious belief,

there's no evidence whatever for its truth, OK?

It can be explained in other ways.

There isn't the slightest reason to believe that.

The other thing I would say is that

he doesn't have to show it decisively to be true

for the purposes of this debate.

He doesn't have to overcome all the competing scientific theories

for the purposes of this debate,

or any sentimentalism about love or other things.

He has to show that it's more likely

than people who believe in talking to snakes and resurrection.

Can I come back to that first point again?

Can you go with me on this?

There's lots of evidence of goddesses before

and many gods and animism and people worshipping animal gods.

But there is very little evidence

going back tens of thousands of years

of worship at monotheistic faith.

Can you just address this? Say I'm right.

Why would...? Why would...? A rare occasion!

Why would the idea of this single divine entity

come so late to mankind?

I still think you don't know, actually, whether it did or not.

-Go with me.

-Leaving that aside...

-Just pretend. Why would that happen?

I think you might say in a lot of religious traditions

that there is a tendency for a sense of multiple divinities

to coalesce over time into a sense of a single divinity.

And I think it happens for different reasons. One is that...

A sort of Bruce-type of explanation might be

that single divinities are more powerful, more complex,

and therefore more satisfying, more psychologically satisfying.

Another reason is that cultures collide

and get into wars with one another

and, as it were, you decide that your god is, first of all,

the strongest among all the local gods.

You know, there is a little bit of early evidence in the Hebrew Bible,

for instance, for believers in the God of Israel

thinking of him as the strongest of local gods.

-I'm going further back than that.

-But that coalesces over time.

Over time, it develops into the sense there is only one real God.

-Francesca.

-But surely also...

-Oh!

The fact is that monotheist gods do something wonderful,

which other gods don't do.

They're wonderful for empires.

They're wonderful for bringing a whole lot of heterogeneous people together.

-One flag, one god, one nation.

-One god.

And then you all agree with each other, "This is my guy".

For empires, that's a crucial thing to be able to do.

Let me take it back.

We're navigating some fascinating terrain here.

Going back, is there evidence of monotheism

going back 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 years?

No, but there's evidence of very much smaller groups of deities.

The question about love I thought was really interesting,

because of course love is exactly the same

as a social explanation for belief or religious practice.

Love is exactly the same. We begin to believe,

we begin to develop and construct the notion of a deity,

something beyond us, because of our continuing social bonds

with the people that have gone, with the dead people, our ancestors.

And these gods basically become more and more powerful,

but it's purely because of love.

We are unable to let go or sever bonds.

Even those of us that think that's...

Love is still... It's one of the greatest social...

It's not just a social tool, we are social beings,

-and it's what keeps us all together.

-I agree with you.

Elaine Storkey, theologian and author,

you know, we are social beings, it keeps us together,

social cohesion, and also, the creation of myths

and telling stories to each other round the fire,

the remembrance of those who are gone,

you can understand the logic

from this side of the argument about that.

But if we were created in the image of God, and I know you believe that,

what about...?

There's evidence of ritualistic behaviour by Neanderthals.

Were they, for example, created in the image of God?

Huh! There are so many things all packed into...

Take the last question first.

The last question of a rather rambling question.

Neanderthals, would they have been created in the image of God?

-If they were human beings, yes.

-They were a species of human beings.

Yes. I mean, in a sense, does it matter whether they were or not?

That's the first question.

I'm agnostic on Neanderthals, completely agnostic.

What does that mean?

I believe that they were there at some point in human evolution.

Same time as us.

Whether they were human in the same way that we are

and, therefore, in a sense,

whether they had the same relationship with God

that human life has is, for me, questionable.

-And therefore, I'm agnostic on it.

-It's interesting.

There were four or five species of human on the planet

at the same time about 50,000 years ago.

But we are the survive... Bruce.

The poignant information is that they're still here.

Genetically, we contain DNA from Neanderthals.

-Unless you're from Africa.

-That's the interesting point.

-I'd say monotheism predates polytheism.

-Ooh!

Basically, if you took all the Scriptures...

all the writing of the world and everything, removed it,

5,000 years in the future, people would say,

well, Islam and Judaism didn't believe in any god

cos we can't find any statues of the gods of Judaism and Islam.

-You can.

-Well, no, not Judaism, no. I would beg to differ.

And, of course, if you look at all world religions,

polytheistic ones, the Mayans and the Egyptians, and so on,

they always have a head god, they create a god,

in some cases, not even represented with an image.

-What I would say is that polytheism is a degeneration of monotheism.

-Oh!

And I think all that the research has shown by...

some of the research done there,

have shown that humans have a tendency to believe in superstition

and anthropomorphise the natural world, yes,

but it doesn't mean the natural world doesn't exist

just because humans anthropomorphise...

The sun exists even though people used to think it was a man or a woman,

or that the sky was made of a woman, which was an Egyptian belief.

It doesn't mean that the sky and the sun doesn't exist.

It means that humans have incorrectly anthropomorphised the natural world

and they've also incorrectly anthropomorphised God,

but people come to the conclusion of God

because God is the rational conclusion based on the problem of causality.

When you said that polytheism was a degeneration from monotheism...

There was a comedian once called Frankie Howerd,

used to go, "Ohhhph!"

-You just did that, Tim.

-I did just do that, yeah.

And, yeah, I thought when you said, "There's a comedian who used to..."

and then you pointed at me,

I thought I was going to be the comedian.

You can do a turn, if you like.

Firstly, there's absolutely no evidence

that monotheism predates polytheism.

And we need to talk in terms of evidence, don't we?

We've got to be responsible and rational about this.

We need evidence.

The oldest evidence that we have for religious practice is polytheistic.

The other thing I'd say is that

we're folding an awful lot in here together.

Religion is a modern category.

It's been very well documented, a lot of studies on this.

Religion is a way of understanding the world that we impose on things.

All of these things that we're talking about here,

ritualised behaviour by early Homo sapiens...

-And other hominids.

-And other hominids.

..civic cult in Ancient Greece,

modern Islam, Judaeo-Christian monotheism and so forth,

these are not necessarily the same categories of experience.

But the one thing that we can tell

is that all of these categories are socially responsive.

They reflect the make-up of the society at that time.

They do things that that society wants them to do.

So you don't get Islam before Muhammad.

You don't get sort of proto-forms of Judaism and Christianity

before these religions emerge.

They are historical constructs

and they emerge in that way for a particular reason.

So the civic religions of Classical Greece

responded to a civic structure,

which was basically everyone lived in a city,

so you needed a religion unifying that city.

Christianity and Islam emerged in very sort of complex situations,

but they gained power as part of, as somebody said earlier,

as part of an imperial system, so they respond very well.

These centralising religions

based around a single god who rules everything,

they're very good allegories of empire.

They do many other things well. I'm not saying that's all they do.

But they are socially responsive.

And if you want one very good piece of evidence

for the idea that religion is a social construct,

think, again, about gender, OK,

the fact that almost every society that we've had so far

has been male-dominated.

Almost every religion is male-dominated.

That is because the two are responding to each other - religion and society.

-Rabbi Charley, I saw a little twinkle in your eye there.

-Yeah.

I don't have any problem with that,

as a religious leader, as a rabbi within a congregation

who's dealing with real people who are scientists, doctors...

-What about the goddesses? Where are the goddesses?

-Yeah...

I think we're re-putting them back in

when we perceive God within our modern eyes.

I don't think that there's a problem

with the fact that revelation continues

and that we're, as religious leaders

or as people who are practising religion within a modern world,

that we can't have both, that we can't understand

that the way that we perceive the world is through our own construct,

because we are human, and so therefore,

the way that we perceive God and the way that we perceive religion

is limited by the fact that we're human.

And so I look at my text and, obviously,

there are female voices missing.

But here I am as a woman rabbi in a progressive movement,

very much a rabbi within Liberal Judaism

who practises her religion in a way that feels relevant and real to me.

And that's because I have reconstructed my view of religion

based on my own context.

That doesn't mean that God doesn't exist

because I happen to be limited by my own human powers.

I know you've...

Selina O'Grady, author of And Man Created God.

Where are you coming from on this one?!

-I would have to say that...

-Where are the goddesses?

The point very articulately put by Tim there, that the mere...

you know, the manifestation of religion in its womanless form

-shows that it's created by men, do you buy that?

-Yes, I do.

But I think that the god that we create changes over time,

so you get a Jewish God that,

for a particular tribe who've lost their homeland,

who says, I'm just going to protect you lot,

and if you obey my rules, I'll give you the Promised Land.

You get the Roman gods,

which is based on the client-patron relationship of Rome,

so you get these huge big patrons,

if you give them a lamb, with any luck,

they'll cure your fertility problems or whatever.

But it's a client-patron relationship on which Rome is based. You get the Christian God...

I'm surprised that love comes in so early,

cos in a sense, the Christian God

-seems to be the first real loving God...

-That's ridiculous.

-These Roman gods...

-It's ridiculous!

-Absolutely ridiculous.

These Roman gods do nothing but just give or not give.

-I think...

-Let her finish.

But the Jewish God, I think, is for a specific people,

and the thing about the Christian God is...

This is what Paul does so cleverly, I think, in creating Christianity,

is to open up that love and protection of a particular tribe

to a whole group of people

who are living in the first phase of globalisation, in the Roman Empire,

where they've lost all sense of community,

they were in these huge big cities,

and he gives them a sense of, look, you know, I love you all,

you love each other all,

in a way that the Jewish God just goes for this particular group.

-Then you may open it up.

-OK, love. All you need is love.

-Can you get it in previous gods and goddesses?

-Of course you do.

I think it's incredibly arrogant of any kind of Christian

-to present their own religion...

-I'm not a Christian.

..or any idea of Christianity

as being somehow more elevated, something innovative...

-I'm not saying it's more innovative. It just does it...

-It doesn't.

-Francesca, what are you, a biblical scholar or something?

-Exactly.

-Oh, you are?! Right, OK.

-I'm not saying it does it better.

-Your caricature of the Jewish God...

-No, I'm saying...

-It's...

-..was completely offensive, and I'm amazed that...

It's such an outdated idea.

Of course the Jewish God, the God of the Hebrew Bible, is a loving God.

-Listen...

-It's not about particularity,

and to suggest that Christianity somehow opens up this massive deity

-to the rest of the world is incredibly outdated and offensive.

-That's how the God was tailored.

THEY TALK OVER EACH OTHER You're all speaking at once.

Wait. Listen, we're having a civilised

Sunday morning discussion about God, all right?

-Listen, what about goddesses?

-Can I please just answer this?

-OK.

I'm just saying this is how these gods arrive.

They arrive to fulfil particular purposes.

-The Jewish God arrived to fulfil a particular purpose...

-I'm sorry.

-You've completely misunderstood.

-Can we just be clear?

It is a distortion to say that either the God of the Old Testament

or the God of the New Testament is called loving.

-I so agree with you.

-I can't think of a more spiteful character

than the Jehovah of the Old Testament.

-And anyone who looks at the history, for instance, of the Catholic Church...

-I'm not talking about...

OK, everybody. I want to talk about goddesses.

I want to talk about goddesses.

It's not a sentence I've said a lot in my life, but I do right now.

-I say it all the time.

-I know. Where are the goddesses?

Why do the goddesses or goddess

get squeezed out of the religious equation?

Partly because the goddesses were massively powerful

and they played a really important role with the male deities.

But also because gender in the ancient world,

including the ancient world from which the Hebrew Bible emerged,

the world from which the New Testament text emerged,

their notion of gender was very, very different from ours.

The deities had a very fluid sense of gender.

There wasn't just one male and one female gender.

-Transgender deities.

-Exactly.

And so different deities could perform different roles.

The goddesses become erased, sometimes literally

in terms of their statues and their cult objects,

but sometimes literary as well, from the text.

They're erased because of this prioritisation of a particular deity

at a particular political point in a particular time in history.

As Tim was saying, it's all about politics.

That's why you get hierarchies.

When a human society becomes more hierarchal,

even a very small group, it's basically earning the money,

you've got one temple, one deity,

all the money is going to come to that temple.

Whoever's in charge of the temple is going to have more political power.

It's a centralisation.

And that's where the idea of the prioritisation of one deity comes from.

So the goddesses never disappear.

People continue to worship the goddesses.

In one way, she's reinvented, if you like,

in the figure of Mary, the Queen of Heaven, within Christianity...

-Oh, dear!

-Oh! Oh! Listen...

Listen! I heard out of the corner of my ear, "Oh, dear!"

-Elaine Storkey.

-I'm sorry, this has been around 30 years.

It's a tired, wearying concept

that, somehow, Mary is a reincarnation of a goddess.

-The Queen of Heaven, her title is a goddess title.

-Let me finish.

I think what we're hearing here...

And I'm interested in the debate, it's a good debate,

because we're looking at the social constructions of religion,

the social constructions of deities and so on.

And in that sense, of course,

human beings have been creating gods since time immemorial,

and they have been worshipping them, bowing down to them,

they've made them in marble, stone, wood...

-Or trees.

-Trees, suns, moons and so on.

-Yes.

Everything. Male and female.

All kinds of genitalia going on within the Godhead.

-You're not wrong.

-Spurious relationships.

You know, really weirdo things going on between...

One persons weirdo thing is another person's...

Leaving all that aside, Nicky!

-We're not interested in your ramifications here!

-Yeah.

So nobody's disputing this. I mean, this...

Any scholar, any half-baked scholar,

can go to any book anywhere and find this out.

-Do you think...?

-Let me finish.

-Let Elaine finish, please.

Why are we giving this an enormous intellectual status

as though, somehow, this solves the problem

of religion right through the world, and explains who God is?

They're not half-baked scholars.

They're The Great British Bake Off, full-on,

full-wonderful-caked scholars.

I'm saying any half-baked scholar could find this information.

But the point is, what we're looking at here

are epistemological questions,

questions about how we know, how we do our research,

what kind of research do we do and what methodology do we use?

Actually, the questions about God are ontological questions,

about the whole nature of being, what is it to have a divine being,

and what does that divine being look like?

And that divine being is not something we can create.

As little Olivia, 12-year-old, said to her mother the other day,

"We just don't have the intelligence to create a creator.

"We're only mortal human beings with mortal minds."

On which point... On which point...

-Don't worry, everyone, there's time.

-Nice line.

I think it's the perfect segue now

into a representative of the oldest existing religion on earth.

No, it's not you, Abdullah.

It is... It is our Hindu representative, Satish Sharma,

general secretary of the National Council of Hindu Temples.

Oldest existing religion.

So, when Hinduism first emerged,

would it have been by revelation, by intuition...?

I mean, how?

It's been difficult to sit here,

but it's always good fun to see our adolescents at play!

I'll just share the lens

through which all of this discussion has happened so far.

What about the question I just asked you? Never mind lenses.

-Never mind lenses.

-OK, very straightforward.

-Yeah.

We have a tradition which says that mystics

are always followed by miscreants.

And so far in the discussions,

we haven't really touched on the notion of a mystical experience.

In our earliest records,

there are records which are recorded by mystics,

and in terms of our timeframe,

we go back a little bit further than that.

We celebrated 5,154 years of the articulation

of one of our core central texts,

because there are astronomical references within it

which help us to define timeframes.

So we work on a different cosmology and a different timeframe.

But this notion that mystics are always followed by miscreants

is very, very valuable.

There is... There is an established tradition.

We have thousands of books, and they're all the records of people

who have engaged in some sort of a practice

involving them introverting and connecting with a sense of union

with every other creature on the planet, and the planet itself.

And they've tried to articulate that.

But when you articulate a personal experience

to people who haven't had that experience,

their chattering minds get involved.

And so that's where the miscreants come.

And there are always miscreants who are happy to leverage the adulation

that mystics seem to get for political purposes.

So we have a precision that we need to...that we would apply,

and that is, you use the term "religion".

We would say that when you say "religion",

you're actually discussing theocracies.

Our perspective is that theocracies are merely dictatorships

with an invisible, immortal dictator who cannot be deposed.

And they're the ideal tool

for anybody wanting to exert political power.

-So we would separate...

-We've had a bit of that so far.

Absolutely, and it's actually very relevant,

because at this time, we have two theocracies, from our perspective,

battling for primacy of power on the earth

and, indeed, in this country.

It's wonderful here. We have a tradition of democracy

which is battling with theocracy as well.

The House of Commons was established

as a challenge to the Church of England.

-And autocracy, throw that one in.

-Yeah. Absolutely.

But the notion of the mystical experiences has primacy with us.

Once a person's had a mystical experience

then you recognise that, actually,

that mystical experience represents itself

in a gender-free environment.

Our tradition... 5,000 years.

We would say a lot more than 5,000 years,

We have never had a theocracy in India.

And that's because of the multiplicity,

the pure democracy of how you wish to engage...

-Like the caste system.

-..with divinity.

Well, "caste" is a Portuguese word,

and like all words, words have concepts behind them.

There is no word in the Indian, Sanskrit,

or, indeed, the Hindu vocabulary for "caste".

I would share with you that caste is something that was exported to India

and it has no place in the Indian Scriptures...

-Still got it, though.

-..nor, indeed, practice.

-Arif.

I think Satish actually put his finger on an important distinction,

that there is a difference between the sort of votive side of religion

and the mystery side of religion,

the side which involves social interactions,

and the side which involves a kind of inner experience.

And it's true that a lot of these explanations we've been discussing

are to do with religion as a social phenomenon.

But there is something else as well, which is the mystical experience.

But that's not to say that that has got no explanation.

There's a variety of competing psychological explanations for that

to do with behaviour of the temporal lobes

and various other sorts of theories.

Many of them... Certainly one of them is true,

and many of them have a great deal more plausibility

than the idea that any religious claim is true.

I think the conclusion would be

that religion has a variety of explanations

because it covers a variety of phenomena.

-I wouldn't dream...

-OK, I want to just move it on slightly.

But, Selina, you have been trying to jump back in.

-I'd love to say two things.

-Let me make an announcement.

We're going to talk about the relationship between religions

and god and no god in just a second.

You've led us very nicely into it, Satish, organised religion.

Meanwhile... You've been very desperate to say something.

I want to say two things.

One is that Isis was a goddess and she did incredibly well.

She really was a kind of...

It felt like a sort of religion that was going to do far better

than this little Christian Jesus cult.

-What happened?

-She didn't do it as well as...

-Do what?

..as Jesus and Christianity did under Paul.

Which is, she started addressing these questions

of a personal relationship with her devotee,

of promising some kind of afterlife, it wasn't quite clear

whether it was going to be just longer life or afterlife,

of giving you a sense of community, of doing all these things.

But that little Jewish cult under Paul

did all this much, much better, and gave you...

Which I think Teresa kind of didn't say,

you know, why we need God and why God is there,

which is a sense of aughts.

That's what religions do so well,

which is actually give you a sense of values

and how you should lead your life.

PEOPLE TALK AT ONCE Was she not apocalyptic?

-No, she's very much...

-No, that's the other Isis.

-Christ was an apocalypticist, wasn't he?

-Absolutely.

-Well...

-There's lots of evidence that Christ was an apocalypticist.

In the sense that he was a Messiah and the end of the world would come.

-In your time, he said to his disciples.

-In your time.

And he got that wrong.

-Cole Moreton, haven't heard from Cole yet.

-Yeah.

You're a very, very intelligent man and a marvellous writer.

You're not a great fan of religions. You're not a great fan of religions.

-But you're a big fan of God, I know that, that's fair to say.

-Mm-hm.

If there is no God, can you understand the logic

of the development of religion in our mind?

Absolutely I can.

I'm not a theologian or a scientist, I'm just a storyteller.

And I know that when you start to tell a story,

one of the things that happens next

is that people begin to take control of the story.

They say, "This is my story,"

and maybe it forms their community, maybe it forms their identity,

maybe they go to war on the basis of it.

And what we have seen in religion is, we've seen that...

One of the reasons why we talked about the goddess,

one of the reasons why the goddess

is very popular in contemporary culture,

why neopaganism is embracing the goddess in a big way,

is because we've had many, many years

of patriarchal, oppressive religions.

So that is bubbling up, and we're seeing that.

But we're now also in a place

where one of the stories that people are telling is...

We actually have grown up, we understand the world better,

we can do all of this on the basis of rationality and science.

And therefore, as you said earlier,

all of these stories from all of these places

have now got to be judged on the basis of science.

Well, that's another perspective. It's another act of faith.

-And when I think...

-It's not an act of faith, Cole.

It's empirical.

OK, I mean, if you're telling me that you think that science

-ultimately contains all of the answers...

-Science works.

-Praying doesn't.

-I'm not talking about working.

Science is tentative, that's the beauty of science.

It is, when it's done properly. But what I'm talking about is...

It's continued, it's tested and it survived.

We can describe what is happening in front of us in all of these different ways,

but that doesn't take away the sense of mystery,

the sense of there is something else.

It may be that all of these competing stories have an element of truth in their own way.

What they're not doing is revealing to us what mystery...

Cole, aren't you in danger of falling into the notorious

"God of the gaps" here?

That once upon a time they were saying,

there's always going to be mystery,

we're never going to understand what thunder is.

Then they understand it and the gap moves elsewhere.

Subatomic world. We're never going to understand the subatomic world.

-No, I embrace it.

-That's where God is.

Then when we understand the subatomic world,

you've got a problem.

Yeah, well, 96% of matter, we don't know what it is at the moment.

-But when we do...

-When you go...

When you go subatomic, the mystery widens.

When you go cosmic, the mystery widens.

-I want to...

-The gaps are moving.

I want to tell you something from the Indus Valley.

This is my favourite story about this. There's six blind men.

They're blindfolded in a room and they're holding on to this creature.

And they say, "What is this creature?" And one of them says, "Well, it feels like a rope."

Another one says it feels like a sail. Another one says it feels like a great big tree trunk.

They're all grasping onto different aspects of an elephant.

The elephant is still there,

even while they're arguing about what the elephant is really like.

The message is, be careful what you grasp, especially if...!

Arif, do you want to come back in here? Science.

-Yeah, one thing I would say about...

-Then we'll move on to religion.

Of course there have been thousands of gaps,

as in things we couldn't explain the time.

Every single one of them that has been explained by science hasn't been explained by religion,

so we've got about as good evidence as you could possibly have.

No gap concerning our understanding can be filled by religious beliefs.

On the point about mystery, I agree that, in a sense, one needn't be

a materialist or something.

You can certainly think that there are other things in life.

There are things that have value to people and so on,

but people can have value for each other.

People can care about things that matter, like music, the arts

or science, one another, personal relationships, political activism.

There are so many things in life that can give life...

What you're doing...

What you are doing - you're doing the same as the religions

are doing, in claiming, "This is my story and my story is true."

-No, no, that's...

-I want to move on to...

We can pick up on monotheism and religions in general.

Islam, the new kid on the block, Abdullah,

-came along very recently and is...

-Only for a couple of years!

Well, you've been coming on the show for about three years.

But Islam itself came along, what, seventh century,

-was it something out that?

-Yeah.

-670, something like that.

And so, basically, we got this monotheism...

We've had mention of this already - it's a great means

of political control and empire building, isn't it?

You know, the Islamic Empire - one flag, one empire, one nation,

-one people...

-It wasn't really an empire, though.

Well, it turned into an empire after that. But you can understand the logic, can't you,

taking it away from your religious belief?

You can understand the logic of...

-And the politically efficacious nature of monotheism.

-Not really.

People can believe in the same god and be divided. It doesn't make any difference.

-It's better than polytheism. What's the difference?

-But the point I've been trying to highlight

is, firstly, science itself is limited to the natural world,

and we don't put religion into the natural world in terms of...

At least, Muslims and Jews and others don't put religion

into natural science, saying, "This is miraculous here, here and here."

Religion... Science is limited to the goldfish bowl of its universe.

An opaque goldfish bowl.

And there's these two atheist goldfish inside this goldfish bowl

who think there is nothing outside this goldfish bowl.

But, rationally, you can deduce there must be something outside it,

and this is where rationality and a pure atheist empiricism clash.

I want to talk less about that

than the development of religious and social control.

Well, the thing is this...

-Military control.

-Well, the thing is, we approach history

with an anachronistic secular kind of perspective.

In the Indian culture, for example, dharma was, I suppose,

what they would call their entire culture. Dharma meaning law.

And, of course, the Torah, the word means law as well.

-Law...

-Religion, culture, law, were all one and the same thing.

Secularism is a very modern construct.

People didn't divide religion here.

Every country, in a way,

or every civilisation, was a "theocracy" in that sense,

because everyone's politics was driven by their morals, which was

driven by their belief in afterlife, in gods, in cosmology and so on.

-And the modern day...

-And conquest.

-And modern day religion that controls people is nationalism, I would say.

-Yeah.

Because you get the current ruling party telling us

you have to follow British values to unite this country...

-Another debate!

-Exactly! But that's also...

-You could argue that also means...

-Let me try it again.

Teresa Morgan, in terms of social control, Teresa, for rulers,

for chiefs, for kings, for...

for tribal chiefs, whatever, religion is handy, isn't it?

Oh, no question. Religion is very handy.

But anybody can use more or less anything to exert social control.

I mean, democracy is a value which autocrats

can subvert for their own use. Autocrats can...

-It doesn't invalidate the premise.

-It doesn't.

So in a sense that's neither here nor there. I think, in a way,

you are underestimating the extent to which religions are also

countercultural and demand things of their adherents

that are unexpected and often, on the face of it, unhelpful.

I mean, I certainly feel that in trying seriously to follow my

own faith tradition in my daily job, I am constantly shooting myself

in the foot and doing things that actually will not serve me well...

-Jesus Christ himself was extremely bothersome, wasn't he?

-Quite!

Didn't do him a bit of good. But I mean, so...

And that's even true of traditions like Greek

and Roman traditions, I think - Tim may disagree with me - which...

it is easy for us to think about in rather socially reductionist terms

as reflecting and serving social and political systems

because there are no longer living believers in the systems

to kind of give a different view.

But if you think, for instance, about a concept like justice

in the Greek world, it has several different ranges of meaning.

Justice can mean what is socially normative -

whatever the mass of people think, it's OK.

It can mean what the law says is OK, which may not be the same as

public opinion or what the current leaders of the city would want.

Or it can mean what the gods think is justice,

and Greeks often struggled a lot

with their sense of what the gods thought justice was,

which didn't always fit with their sense of justice at all,

either because it was too demanding or because it looked actually cruel or random. Both those.

People protested against the justice of the gods both that it's cruel,

that it doesn't fit what we would hope for, but also that

it's too high a standard for us to kind of aspire to.

-So in all sorts of ways...

-God knows best.

-Hm.

So all sorts of... And it's true all the way through the Hebrew Bible,

it's true in Christian traditions, certainly the traditions that I know a bit more about.

But they can be intensely demanding

from a perspective wholly outside society's norms, actually.

Tim, you were mentioned... in dispatches...

I actually agree with a lot of that.

I mean, I do think that the issue is not

whether religion can only be used by dominant forces in society.

I mean, if you believe religion is a social construct, which I do,

then clearly it follows that societies are much more than

their dominant forces. We see it in the modern world, we see it

when we talk about liberation theology, salafism, anything like this.

There are ways of being countercultural through

the religious idiom.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that religion...

So the question really is here, what is driving what?

And I think that's the... I'm quite open-minded about this, actually.

But the question is whether religion is something that we can

identify as distinct from society, that somehow stands behind it

and pushes it forward, which seems to me

more of a kind of believers' point of view,

or whether, as I would see it, religion is actually

part of the idiom of a given society

and is the flexible medium that can be used by different people

for different purposes, because, yeah, societies are complicated.

-Rupert, we haven't heard from you yet.

-Hello!

-Hello. Hello, welcome.

As we're on religion, isn't the inevitable consequence

of monotheism an in group and an out group, them and us?

We know the truth and they don't.

No, absolutely not.

I mean, one of the questionable statements made so far today is,

"If I think my religion is right then the other 99,000 are wrong."

I think, on the contrary, it's the consequence of believing in...

that we're all made in the image of God that makes...

the core element of Christianity...

What I take away from the story of the lost sheep is that

-it's actually people who are outside...

-But we've had countless

people over the years of all faiths who have been strict adherents to...

Not everybody, of course, but certain faiths

are strict adherents to the thought that they are right.

-Theirs is the only way and everyone else is wrong.

-Yes, I'm not saying...

The Catholic Church was notorious for killing heretics.

Absolutely. I'm not saying that the message hasn't been corrupted.

I'm going to a slightly higher authority in what

-I believe about God...

-..Defend religion by pretending that what you want

its message to be has been corrupted by the way it's played out in history.

-That is disingenuous!

-No, it's true.

-It's not, it's very disingenuous. And I'll tell you why.

It's hard to think of any statement that's more historically verified...

-into religious disagreement.

-It's disingenuous to take the institution of religion

and judge a set of beliefs on the basis of what people have done

in that institution is disingenuous.

What Rupert is talking about is what his particular religion

calls us to, which is a higher kind of love.

-And, actually, the two things are completely...

-A higher love than what?

Um...

-You know, if you... Well, Rupert can answer that.

-Rupert.

It's the priority of the outsider, I think, the idea that...

I mean, the Church is sometimes said to be the one organisation

that exists for the sake of its non-members. And when...

When Jesus' teaching is being taken seriously, I mean,

that's the question...

Good heavens, it's because I'm Christian that I've got

fairly robust views on the dysfunctionality of the Church.

But when the Gospel is taken seriously, then...

the message, surely no-one would deny that at the core of Jesus' message,

whether one accepts it or not, is one of radical self-giving love.

Then it's not about them and us.

Some thoughts in the audience. The gentleman there.

Hello, you, on you go.

-So, essentially...

-Quick points, please.

It seems to me that the question, "Did man create God?"

what the honourable rabbi said earlier is very important.

Ultimately, any conception of God that we have is going to be

through our hearts and minds, through two ears, one nose, two eyes, one brain.

-And so...

-Two brains, the case of some...

-Two brains, of course.

Maybe two brains in the front row. But...

It seems that obviously it's going to be anthropomorphised,

so the question then becomes, "Does God exist?"

which is, of course, an impossible question.

And I think although this question is important,

what might be more worthwhile asking is, how does God -

whatever we mean by God - realise himself in our hearts and minds?

-And, and...

-It's too late, we're 40 minutes in!

But, yes, this is interesting about social constructs and so forth.

The lady in the red top, a quick point from you, go on.

Just going off the point he just made, "Does God exist?"

I don't believe it's an impossible question to answer, it's just that

it's whether or not people want to believe that God exists or not.

And I believe that the evidence of God is all around us

if only we were to open up our eyes and accept that.

APPLAUSE

Bruce Hood, what does the concept of a divine judge,

if you've been good, if you've been bad,

tell us about, in your view, the societies from which it comes?

We've heard a lot about love, haven't we?

But I'd point out that a lot of religion is fear, and it works in that way.

And that's a way in which you can improvise

or you can put into place social control.

By not breaking the moral code.

So a lot of religions are based on fear - fear of death,

fear of infertility, fear of poverty and fear of retribution.

-So one of the...

-The fires of hell.

-The fires of hell.

I mean, if you just look through the history,

it's quite clear not only are they attacking other religions,

but within their own, they use that to control people.

-I think that's...

-It's not about control, it's about accountability.

You don't want Hitler getting off scot-free in the afterlife.

You want him to be punished, or at least

-there should be some accountability.

-It might be a better religion.

If you believed in a god of forgiveness,

-actually, that might be better.

-We're still over here.

That was an interesting diversion there,

but this whole idea of hell and punishment - carry on.

There's research showing that children will spontaneously think

or behave themselves if they think there's a ghost in the room

or they think they're being observed by some supernatural agent.

And one of the ideas is that we then kind of transpose that

father figure or that authority figure to become a divine god,

so that becomes a moral compass for how we behave.

An Ancient Greek said exactly that in the fifth century BC.

He said that there was a wise lawgiver who gave us laws

and then we carried on being naughty in private.

And that wise lawgiver also invented religion

so that we would be policed in private as well.

-It's exactly the same idea.

-Speculation.

Speculation, says Abdullah. I want to hear from you in a second,

but, Elaine, I feel I want to hear from you on this.

I want to hear your wisdom

and thoughts on this idea of divine judgment.

To the casual observer, it looks like a human construct.

Yes, and in many ways, the way in which we go about fabricating

judgment and pronouncing judgment on one another is very human.

And it's about blame, it's about vindicating ones self-righteousness.

We have all kinds of mechanisms for handling this

in society after society, where people will not

put their hands up and say, "Yeah, I was wrong. I made a mess.

"I screwed this up. I'm the guilty one. Please forgive me."

-The point about religion is that...

-Punishment.

Yeah, but the punishment is almost irrelevant.

It's the secondary issue. The big issue is...

Not if you're being punished!

The big issue is, why do people do this?

Why do people relate to each other in this kind of way?

And what do they expect as a result of it?

And Arif said earlier on that science has explained so many things

and religion explains none of these things that science has explained.

This is not what religion is about.

Religion - and I would include many scientific religions in this...

What is a scientific religion?

Secular religions which are scientistic.

In other words, they have faith in science as producing

all the answers, all the understanding and so on.

It's not faith!

That is a very vital point to get a quick response before we proceed.

-Arif?

-Just on that particular point, it's a common trope amongst theists,

and it's completely false to say that science is some kind of faith.

There is no better evidence for anything than there is

for any of the many scientific theories, like quantum theory.

-Are you saying quantum theory is a faith?

-Of course not!

-Relativity?

-Of course not.

-You're not listening.

-You're not listening.

-What is this thing you're calling a faith?

-You're not listening.

A bunch of scientists always want to disagree with each other,

always want to disprove each other, and that's the dynamic of science.

Let me get back to punishment.

-No, let me say where I am, because I need to finish this now.

-OK.

Scientism is a faith in science, it's a faith

that, actually, science ultimately will have

all the answers to all the questions that we can have,

whereas often science simply does not have even all the questions.

It's got more answers than it did have, so it's moving like that.

-The gap is getting smaller and smaller.

-It's fantastic.

Yes, but we've got to be clear...

Can I just finish what I'm trying to say?

So basically what's going on with all of these positions,

whether they're religious, whether they're secular,

whether they're political and so on,

is that they're offering people world views

and world views are those things that are actually underneath

all of our social ramifications and our societal developments.

So world views answering fundamental questions like who or what is God?

Who am I? What is it to be a human being?

But they would say they're non-overlapping magisteria,

-they're separate.

-What is reality?

Some of the great scientists are theists,

some of the great evolutionary biologists -

Ken Miller, Francisco Ayala - are theists,

which makes the point that they are separate magisteria.

Satish, I want to hear from Satish and I'll tell you why.

I'll tell you why I want to hear from Satish -

because if we're talking about divine punishment

or retribution or reward, you are on a constant,

as we all are, as you believe, a constant cycle of reincarnation

until we reach a stage where we are free from birth and free from death.

And that's a kind of...

That's quite an optimistic view, ultimately,

because we're all heading in the right direction,

despite the fact that we may have some diversions along the way.

-Would that be an accurate way of putting it?

-It's not too bad.

Starting from the premise that both cannot be proven,

that either we're doomed and we have to be redeemed

or that we're actually on a positive journey,

assuming for a moment that neither can be proven,

the more positive one would seem to be more reasonable to adopt.

But turning to whether it can be proven,

pure scientific method, replicable,

something that anybody can do, requires...

if you want to establish, "Did the mystic establish a connection

"with some divine entity?"

you follow and replicate his experiment.

You don't talk about it, you actually be still

and know that I am divinity.

And so unless you have actually done that then it's all noise.

It's just mental cogitations and...

What's one of these mystical events like?

What is it like to experience...?

Have some of us experienced it before when we're listening to,

I don't know, Elgar's Cello Concerto or Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club?

Have we experienced it? Have we gone in a state that...?

What are you talking about?

In fact, I would suggest that it's the natural default for all of us.

We are all created to experience something within us which,

when it's removed, this body falls apart and decays and decomposes.

Have some of us experienced it without realising

that it's a mystical thing? I mean, what is it?

I would suggest that there are... The chattering of the mind,

once that ceases then you start to have an opening inside.

That opening is the first of the journeys.

But there's something Francesca said that I wanted to touch on,

which is to do with gender and to do with creating gods.

-And she can answer you. Carry on.

-Misogynists create misogynist gods.

You can identify the nature of the person who has created that god

and, indeed, that then reeks of a theocracy in its birth.

Where there is divinity, there has to be no violence.

It can't be intellectually violent,

it can't be emotionally violent and it can't be physically violent.

If there is any violence present, there is no divinity present.

So there's no divinity in any of the major religions, in that case.

APPLAUSE

Francesca.

Answer Satish, he directed something towards you, Francesca.

I think it's a real shame that... And we find this...

There's a lot about Hinduism I particularly like, actually,

as opposed to a lot of other religions.

But I think it's a real shame that in all of the people

representing different religions here,

they're so down on humanity and what it is to be a person.

Why do you want to get rid of the human body? Bodies are amazing.

What's wrong with the material world?

What's wrong with experiencing...?

You're putting words into our mouths.

Enjoy it for as many lifetimes as you wish. But a time will come.

But religion seems to want to be able to offer some kind of an escape

from the world that we have now, the world that we live in.

That's a parody.

-Rabbi Charley.

-Judaism is so much about this world.

-It is, yes.

-It's not about doing things right now

because of the reward in the next world. It's very much...

And I think a lot of Jews would talk about their relationship with God

is in their relationship with other human beings.

It's not about the future, it's about right now,

and because of that, the body is very much part of the soul.

One of the first blessings that Jews would say when they get up

in the morning is one to thank that the body still works.

Tell me about it.

Yeah, well, absolutely, it's a great thing to be thankful for.

And it's not about separating the soul from the body,

but, actually, it's in that relationship

that, actually, we find God.

How much of your day, Abdullah, do you spend...?

Because some people say that Islam is very much thinking about

what will happen in the afterlife

and it's kind of quite afterlife-centric a lot of the time.

-How often do you think about the afterlife?

-Well, you know what?

I mean, you have to look at human existence.

If we believe that human existence is more than just this life,

we shouldn't neglect our portion of...our worldly portion,

as the Koran says, do not neglect your worldly portion,

but at the same time also work towards something greater.

People, even atheists,

would work towards a future for their kids they'll never see,

which is beyond their lifetime,

-so they're working for something outside their lifetime.

-Yes.

But the point I really wanted to raise today is man

didn't really create God - God created man and man created idols.

And we shouldn't throw God out with the idols, OK,

because they're different things.

-And atheists do not have a monopoly on scientists.

-I said that.

For the vast majority of human history,

our scientists have been theists.

A lot of evolutionary biologists, as I said, are scientists. Arif.

But there is no clash between God and...

Non-overlapping magisteria, just like you two. Arif.

I think one thing about Islam is that, actually, in many ways,

Islam is very focused on life in this world

in a way that Christianity isn't.

So, for instance, Islam places constraints on a great deal

of people's everyday behaviour that Christianity doesn't.

It constrains your financial transactions, it constrains

your personal hygiene, it constrains the way you dress, it constrains...

-In many ways, it's totalitarian.

-Very negative term.

And the other thing I would say is that, of course,

Islam is not the only on, other religions do,

but many religions have a very severe and deleterious effect

on people's lives in this world.

If you think all the people who are homosexual

and the things they've suffered because of religion.

All the people that have Aids, all of the things that are going on

in Raqqah and Jeddah right now because of your religion.

Everyone's conscious...

That might be easy for you to say,

but everyone's conscience is a totalitarian.

Everyone's conscience guides them throughout the entire day...

What do you mean, everyone's conscience is totalitarian?

What does that mean? In a sentence.

It encompasses every aspect of your life,

so we would like to think that a person's conscience would guide them

through every aspect of their life -

what they do, how they treat people, helping people and so on.

Everyone's conscience is totalitarian,

just saying the word...

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

A person who does not have a totalitarian conscience

is a hypocrite who acts on pragmatic principles.

My conscience doesn't tell me how to dress.

My conscience doesn't tell me

how I should prostrate myself in a certain direction five times a day.

-We disagree, but...

-Elaine Storkey, let's get on to the basic point,

and I know you'll go off on a flight of fantastic erudite, philosophical,

theological rhetoric, as you do, and that's why we have you on here.

We cherish your presence. Answer this question - there are...

I heard Brian Cox talking the other day about the cosmos

and about the universe, and it's just overwhelmingly awesome

and it's mind-boggingly wonderful,

and he said out there, there are billions of planets

where it is quite possible that there will be life out there.

Say that there were to be a planet there with intelligent life,

and there is every possibility that that is the case somewhere -

we may never, we will never know about it -

would they have the same god that we do?

Of course, of course, because if we...

LAUGHTER

If God is creator of the entire universe...

-They'd be monotheists, would they?

-No, monotheism is...

-That's just a word.

-OK. But it would be the same god.

The god who created the whole of...

He or she would have transmitted the divinity,

god-consciousness to them.

The understanding of God is that God is actually the eternal creator,

the one who put everything into place.

The big bang, within seconds of the big bang,

all of the structures and the fabrics

of the possibility of creation were already there

and we've been working on those structures ever since.

And so the concept of God as creator, and then God as incarnator.

Creating a world that created itself.

Yes, but that carries on working with God, creating itself.

But then God becoming part of the world -

and this is why Francesca is so utterly wrong about the fact

that Christianity doesn't care about the body.

Of course it does, Christ became a body, he was a body...

In order then to push through mortality.

Francesca, you've got to answer that question.

Let's get a clear answer, go on.

In order to push through mortality, in order to deny human experience.

Not at all. In order to embody love.

This is a god who became a human, who supposedly didn't have sex,

didn't have very many... much to do with women,

told people to reject their family....

-Oh, please, give us a break!

-I'll be back with you.

I'm talking about the biblical portrayal,

obviously I don't believe this.

He told people to reject their family

and to give up on their sense of tradition.

This is not a god who cherishes what it is to be a human

by becoming materially embodied, this is about a god

that puts it on like a dressing gown and then takes it off again.

It's absolutely ridiculous to think that that poor crumpled corpse

on a cross is somehow a celebration of what it is to be human.

Well, I do think I have a right to reply to that.

You do have a right to reply, of course you do.

But first of all, Jesus was very, very fully human

in the sense that he was there to demonstrate love,

he was there to actually call human beings to a different

kind of life, a different life of love towards one another,

love towards God, of actually wellbeing,

of going the extra mile, of forgiveness.

Most of all of forgiveness and not allowing somebody...

Please let me finish.

Not allowing somebody else's damage to damage you,

-but to actually be able to transcend that.

-Teresa.

The whole issue of women is such a nonsense

because the people who supported Jesus financially were women.

Some of the disciples were women.

And yet they're not represented in the literature.

And yet where are these women represented in the religion?

All over the place.

I'm afraid you need to read the Gospels better and...

I'm going to stay with the women.

You need to... She's a biblical scholar, to be fair.

-Well, there's scholarship and scholarship.

-Are you serious?!

Oh, hang on. This is good, I'm going to stay with this one.

Francesca, there's scholarship and scholarship.

What I find really interesting about scholarship quite often is

there's an awful lot of intellectual gatekeeping and there's an awful

lot of older-generation scholars who like to keep younger scholars down.

-No.

-There's nothing wrong with my scholarship, I assure you.

OK, to be fair to Francesca, where I agree with you is...

God bless the peacemakers, that's what I say.

I have a great deal of sympathy with both of you, I would like to say.

I mean, where I sympathise with you,

as I don't think it is sensible to deny that there is

a very worldly-denying and body-denying strain in Christianity,

there's no question,

but all the major religious traditions that we're talking about

are very complex things and they have within them both...

They have things about them that we may find difficult

and not like - a world-denying strain in Christianity

I don't like very much, a strain in Christianity

which colludes with worldly rulers I don't like very much,

but that's not the whole of the tradition.

One thing I find...

We were talking a minute ago about science and religion -

one thing I find discouraging a little bit

about debates between science and religion and scientists...

That's not really what this is, but yeah.

Well, we have been talking about it

and I think it's an important kind of framing issue

in the argument, is that we think about and talk about

and evaluate science on its aspirations,

on the best of it, on what it hopes to achieve.

We slightly tend to ignore all the ways in which science is also

socially framed and socially controlling.

Self-regulating, that's the point.

But it's not, it's drug company-regulated,

it's politically-regulated...

But that's not science.

-Bruce.

-No, can I please...?

-No, that's quite a thing to say. Bruce.

-It's fundamentally wrong.

-No, no.

No, you have to sign a declaration if you have a conflict of interest

if you're producing a scientific paper.

Now, of course, drug companies driving the agenda,

but a good scientist will be accountable,

their results will be replicable, everything will be evidence-based.

And repeatable. Listen, the last word,

and it's going to be a 20-second sentence from Cole Morton.

Cole Morton.

Well, as long as we're on the planet, Homo sapiens,

-will God be around?

-Yes.

God created man and woman equal in his image,

and it's preposterous to think that Christians exist on another planet,

but if God does exist, then that god exists in that other planet

and it's the kind of god that Elaine and Arif and Francesca

and my friend here are all trying to describe and to get to or to ignore.

Thank you all very much indeed.

That was for you, that round of applause.

As ever, debates continue.

Next Sunday we're live from Uxbridge, do join us then.

For now, it's goodbye from everyone here in Oxford,

and have a great Sunday. Thanks again for watching.