Browse content similar to The End of God?: A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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1860. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:08 | |
Less than a year after Darwin published The Origin Of Species, | 0:00:09 | 0:00:15 | |
and Victorian society was reeling from the new theory of evolution. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:20 | |
Is this the language of science? | 0:00:20 | 0:00:23 | |
MUTTERING | 0:00:23 | 0:00:25 | |
The Natural History museum in Oxford was packed with nearly a thousand spectators. | 0:00:25 | 0:00:31 | |
I implore my hearers | 0:00:31 | 0:00:34 | |
to believe in God, | 0:00:34 | 0:00:37 | |
rather than man. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:40 | |
Making the case for evolution was a young biologist | 0:00:41 | 0:00:46 | |
called Thomas Huxley, known as "Darwin's Bulldog". | 0:00:46 | 0:00:50 | |
ALL: Huxley! Huxley! Huxley! | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
He was one of a new generation who thought religion should play no part | 0:00:54 | 0:01:00 | |
in the business of science. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:02 | |
Every step of the argument is securely based on irrefutable fact, | 0:01:03 | 0:01:08 | |
detailed precisely and unequivocally. | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
Standing against the theory of evolution was the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:22 | |
And the story goes that his attack turned personal. | 0:01:22 | 0:01:25 | |
BANGING | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
Let me ask him this one question. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:30 | |
In so proudly claiming his descent from a monkey, ape or baboon, | 0:01:30 | 0:01:36 | |
does he do so on his grandfather's side or his grandmother's? | 0:01:36 | 0:01:41 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:01:41 | 0:01:42 | |
I'm a historian of science and for me, the debate that was held here is fascinating. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:55 | |
It has become part of a popular idea | 0:01:55 | 0:01:57 | |
that there's an inevitable clash between science and religion, | 0:01:57 | 0:02:01 | |
that they're forever locked in a battle for supremacy. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:05 | |
Today, 150 years on, it would seem that science has won the war. | 0:02:05 | 0:02:11 | |
For nearly 50 of those years, Horizon and the BBC have witnessed | 0:02:13 | 0:02:18 | |
scientific advances, and reported on when science has met with religion. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:26 | |
Looking back over five decades of science programmes, I want to ask if, | 0:02:26 | 0:02:32 | |
in our modern scientific world, there is any room left for God. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:38 | |
ALL: Huxley! Huxley! Huxley! | 0:02:38 | 0:02:42 | |
The story of science and religion isn't just one of conflict. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:59 | |
It's more varied and interesting than that. | 0:02:59 | 0:03:03 | |
But signs of trouble date all the way back | 0:03:03 | 0:03:06 | |
to an Italian mathematician, his telescope and the Bible. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:10 | |
Anyone using a telescope today is following in the footsteps of a man named Galileo Galilei. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:37 | |
When he first pointed a telescope at the heavens, he was taking a radical step, | 0:03:39 | 0:03:44 | |
and what he saw would challenge accepted knowledge. | 0:03:44 | 0:03:48 | |
In 17th-century Italy, knowledge was tightly controlled by the Catholic Church, | 0:03:54 | 0:04:00 | |
the most powerful institution in Europe. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:04 | |
The accepted view was that the Earth was at the centre of the solar system. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:11 | |
That's what astronomers thought, and the Church also believed they were supported by the Bible. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:17 | |
But when Galileo started to explore the night sky with a telescope, | 0:04:19 | 0:04:23 | |
his observations told a different story. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:27 | |
He saw moons moving round the planet Jupiter... | 0:04:31 | 0:04:34 | |
..and drew a bold conclusion. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
Not everything in the night sky orbited the Earth. | 0:04:41 | 0:04:45 | |
So perhaps our planet wasn't the centre of the solar system after all. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:50 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:04:51 | 0:04:56 | |
Galileo's conclusion directly contradicted the Church's. | 0:04:56 | 0:05:00 | |
When it came to knowledge of the natural world, he thought his telescope was more reliable | 0:05:02 | 0:05:09 | |
than the Bible. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:12 | |
The Church was not convinced. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:17 | |
It found him guilty of heresy. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
Behind Galileo's downfall were two questions that are central | 0:05:22 | 0:05:26 | |
to the whole story of science and religion - who owns knowledge, | 0:05:26 | 0:05:30 | |
and what makes one source of knowledge more reliable than another? | 0:05:30 | 0:05:35 | |
Generations of scientists have thought hard about the best ways to investigate the world. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:50 | |
And over the last 50 years, many have told Horizon about the methods they use | 0:05:52 | 0:05:58 | |
to make scientific knowledge as reliable as possible. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:02 | |
Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:10 | |
The way I think of what we're doing is we're exploring, | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
we're trying to find out as much as we can about the world. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
But whatever way it comes out, nature is there, | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
and she's going to come out the way she is. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
Therefore, when we investigate, we shouldn't pre-decide what it is | 0:06:21 | 0:06:25 | |
we're trying to do, except to find out more about it. | 0:06:25 | 0:06:28 | |
At the heart of scientists' knowledge are observation and logic. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:36 | |
They make hypotheses, and test them time and again against the evidence. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:44 | |
Cosmologist Carlos Frenk has been taking part in Horizon programmes | 0:06:51 | 0:06:56 | |
for nearly 20 years. | 0:06:56 | 0:06:59 | |
We have a set of physical laws that we know, | 0:06:59 | 0:07:01 | |
from laboratory experiments, work. | 0:07:01 | 0:07:03 | |
We use these laws to formulate | 0:07:03 | 0:07:05 | |
a theory. We use that theory to make predictions and then | 0:07:05 | 0:07:08 | |
we compare these predictions with observations. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
Anything that you come up with has to be corroborated. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:17 | |
Not just by one experiment, but by many different groups. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:20 | |
That is the essence of the scientific method. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
Repeatability, rigour, accuracy and relevance. | 0:07:23 | 0:07:27 | |
This method of discovery isn't foolproof, | 0:07:32 | 0:07:36 | |
but in the last 400 years, it's uncovered some of the fundamentals of our world. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:42 | |
It's revealed what makes up the air we breathe. | 0:07:56 | 0:08:00 | |
How fast light travels. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:04 | |
Even how new life is made. | 0:08:05 | 0:08:09 | |
But, for the many of the world's great faiths, | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
there is an additional way of gaining knowledge. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:20 | |
Revelation. Direct communication from God. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:28 | |
# Every day, oh | 0:08:31 | 0:08:35 | |
-# Oh, happy day -Oh, happy day | 0:08:35 | 0:08:38 | |
# Oh, happy day... # | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
In 1973, Horizon looked at a scientific study of religious believers. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:46 | |
-# When Jesus washed -When Jesus washed | 0:08:46 | 0:08:50 | |
-# All my sins away -All my sins away... # | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
Many of the people involved believed that God had revealed himself to them directly. | 0:08:53 | 0:09:00 | |
# Watch and pray... # | 0:09:00 | 0:09:02 | |
The study was led by Sir Alister Hardy, a celebrated biologist. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:15 | |
I've come from zoology | 0:09:15 | 0:09:16 | |
and I'm looking at religion entirely as a naturalist. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:20 | |
But I do believe that | 0:09:20 | 0:09:24 | |
a systematic method can be used to study the records | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
of man's religious experience. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:31 | |
Darwin's theory of the origin of species was based on the painstaking | 0:09:33 | 0:09:37 | |
collection of huge numbers of observations in natural history. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:40 | |
In the same way, Professor Hardy hopes these records may form the basis | 0:09:40 | 0:09:44 | |
of theories about the spiritual nature of man's nature. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
Hardy and colleagues collected hundreds of stories from people who believed they'd experienced God. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:59 | |
One lady in her 80s had had a vision as a child. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:04 | |
Suddenly, without warning, I saw right through the physical world. | 0:10:04 | 0:10:10 | |
Into a realm of great beauty. | 0:10:10 | 0:10:13 | |
I found myself saying to myself, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
"Well this is, I suppose, what heaven is like." | 0:10:16 | 0:10:20 | |
Another volunteer believed she had been touched by a divine power. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:26 | |
Out of my mouth came a few words of a tongue that I didn't recognise at all, a language. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:33 | |
I can only describe it as something like the disciples | 0:10:33 | 0:10:37 | |
on the day of Pentecost when they were taken | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
for being drunk at 9am in the morning, | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
and Peter said, "These people are not drunk, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
"they are filled with the Holy Spirit, because I was so happy, | 0:10:45 | 0:10:50 | |
"supernaturally happy." | 0:10:50 | 0:10:52 | |
The volunteers in this study are not alone. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:56 | |
The belief that God has shown himself to them directly is central to many people's faith. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:05 | |
But even more believe that God has revealed himself another way... | 0:11:05 | 0:11:08 | |
ALL: Lord Jesus! | 0:11:08 | 0:11:11 | |
..through holy texts, | 0:11:11 | 0:11:13 | |
like the Bible. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
For all religions that have sacred texts, scripture is a source of knowledge and insight. | 0:11:25 | 0:11:32 | |
But some believers go much further, treating scripture as literally true in every last detail. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:39 | |
It's this that led to the most intense clash between religion and science of the modern age, | 0:11:39 | 0:11:44 | |
the creationist crusade against evolution. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:49 | |
The battleground is America. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
150 years after the bitter debate in Oxford, | 0:11:57 | 0:12:01 | |
the conflict over the origins of humankind still continues. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:06 | |
For America's Christian fundamentalists, the Bible is literally the word of God. | 0:12:09 | 0:12:16 | |
Every phrase is true. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:18 | |
They believe in creationism, | 0:12:19 | 0:12:23 | |
that the world came into being just as the Bible describes. | 0:12:23 | 0:12:27 | |
For them, the theory of evolution cannot be right, | 0:12:27 | 0:12:31 | |
because it contradicts what's written in Genesis. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:35 | |
In 2006, Horizon looked at what can happen when science and the Bible conflict. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:48 | |
Throughout the 20th century, religious communities in America | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
fought to prevent the spread of Darwin's dangerous idea. | 0:12:55 | 0:13:00 | |
In 1925, in an infamous court case in Tennessee, | 0:13:00 | 0:13:05 | |
high school teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:10 | |
John Scopes taught at a time when the theory of evolution | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
had just been banned from Tennessee classrooms. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:17 | |
Keen to overthrow the restrictions, he agreed to challenge the law, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:25 | |
and became a test case for the newly imposed ban. | 0:13:25 | 0:13:29 | |
NEWSREADER: All attention focuses now on the prospect of an epic debate, | 0:13:31 | 0:13:35 | |
of science versus religion, reason versus faith. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:40 | |
This was very much a show trial. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:42 | |
On the one side, conservative Christians denouncing evolution as immoral. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:47 | |
On the other, supporters of the right to free speech. | 0:13:47 | 0:13:52 | |
After eight days of debate, Scopes was found guilty and fined 100. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:58 | |
But the impact was more than financial. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:05 | |
In the decades that followed, children across America | 0:14:07 | 0:14:11 | |
grew up learning little or nothing of Darwin's theory. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
Even into the 1980s, creationism persisted in many American classrooms. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:22 | |
It just seems that the birth of each individual child is a miracle right there, a miracle you can behold. | 0:14:30 | 0:14:37 | |
I believe that God created the world in seven days, exactly literally just how he said he did. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:44 | |
SCHOOL BELL RINGS | 0:14:44 | 0:14:46 | |
It took 60 years for the creationists to finally lose their battle. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:55 | |
In 1987, the highest court in America ruled that teaching creationism was unconstitutional. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:05 | |
It violated the required separation of church and state. | 0:15:05 | 0:15:10 | |
Creationism was banned from the science curriculum. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:14 | |
ALL: One nation under God. | 0:15:14 | 0:15:16 | |
Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
But despite the ban, creationism hasn't gone away. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:25 | |
Since the 1980s, polls have consistently found that nearly half | 0:15:27 | 0:15:31 | |
of all Americans believe God created humans just as it says in the Bible. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:37 | |
# ..and yet they're saying it's true | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
# They're teaching us about it in school now | 0:15:40 | 0:15:43 | |
# That humans were monkeys once too | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
# Whoa, I'm no kin to the monkey, no, no, no | 0:15:46 | 0:15:49 | |
# The monkey's no kin to me | 0:15:49 | 0:15:53 | |
# I don't know much about his ancestors | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
# But mine didn't swing from a tree. # | 0:15:56 | 0:15:58 | |
For scientists, ancient religious texts are not sources of knowledge | 0:15:58 | 0:16:04 | |
about the natural world, and to treat them as if they are is absurd. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:09 | |
There's no room for the God of biblical creationism in modern science. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:15 | |
But creationism, like everything else, evolves. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
And in America in the 1990s, a new version emerged, | 0:16:18 | 0:16:23 | |
claiming it wasn't based on the Bible, but on science. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:27 | |
This movement is called Intelligent Design. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:33 | |
Its supporters claim there are things evolution can't explain, | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
that the theory is riddled with gaps. | 0:16:37 | 0:16:41 | |
They say these gaps can only be filled by the work of an intelligent designer. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:49 | |
One of the theorists behind the idea is the biochemist Michael Behe. | 0:16:56 | 0:17:02 | |
In the 1990s he decided to take up a challenge set by Darwin. | 0:17:02 | 0:17:07 | |
He wrote at one point that if it could be | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
demonstrated that any complex organ existed | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
which could not be put together by numerous | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
successive slight modifications, | 0:17:18 | 0:17:21 | |
he said, "My theory would absolutely break down." | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
Darwin's theory relied on the step by step evolution of complex organisms from simpler ones. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:34 | |
Behe went in search of an organism that didn't fit the theory. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:41 | |
He became intrigued by a mechanism found amongst a family of microscopic bacteria... | 0:17:44 | 0:17:49 | |
..the flagellum. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:52 | |
Bacterial flagellum is literally an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:58 | |
Although on the surface the flagellum appeared to be simple, | 0:18:02 | 0:18:06 | |
when Behe looked inside he saw a mechanism made of 50 different interacting parts. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:13 | |
You can see from the way the parts are situated that this is a machine. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:24 | |
If just one part was missing, the flagellum appeared to be useless. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:29 | |
Anything less than whole simply wouldn't work. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:33 | |
It pointed to one thing, | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
that this machine had not evolved from a simpler organism. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:40 | |
It's really, really difficult to see how it could be put together | 0:18:40 | 0:18:43 | |
gradually with the thing working and getting better each step of the way. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:48 | |
I thought to myself, "That's it, that's the problem, | 0:18:49 | 0:18:54 | |
"that's what Darwin's theory has problems with." | 0:18:54 | 0:18:59 | |
Behe was certain he had the evidence to challenge Darwin's theory. | 0:18:59 | 0:19:04 | |
If the flagellum could not have come about through gradual stages, | 0:19:04 | 0:19:08 | |
it must have been created in its complete form, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
and for that to happen, Behe concluded that there must have been some form of creator. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:17 | |
In Behe's argument, gaps within evolutionary theory left room for a supreme being, | 0:19:20 | 0:19:27 | |
an intelligent designer. But there was a problem with this approach. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:33 | |
Few agreed the gaps proposed in the theory of evolution actually existed. | 0:19:33 | 0:19:39 | |
And some were willing to go to court to prove it. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:43 | |
In 2006, Horizon covered a legal challenge to the teaching of Intelligent Design. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:52 | |
Evolution has been put on trial... | 0:19:52 | 0:19:54 | |
Once again, the argument was over what was taught in American classrooms. | 0:19:55 | 0:20:02 | |
11 parents of Dover students are now in court suing the Dover school district | 0:20:02 | 0:20:09 | |
over exposing their children to a controversial concept called Intelligent Design, | 0:20:09 | 0:20:15 | |
a theory that they say promotes religion and creates false doubts about evolution. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:21 | |
The case was brought by the parents of some high school children in Dover, Pennsylvania, | 0:20:28 | 0:20:33 | |
who were being told about Intelligent Design as part of their science lessons. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:37 | |
Like the Scopes case 80 years earlier, this was another battle over how knowledge is controlled. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:46 | |
This time, the argument went right to the heart of the American legal system. | 0:20:48 | 0:20:53 | |
The constitution of America deliberately separates church and state. | 0:20:55 | 0:21:00 | |
This separation effectively bans the teaching of religious theories in public schools. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:07 | |
Supporters of Intelligent Design thought they'd found a way to get round the constitution, | 0:21:11 | 0:21:17 | |
by making their opposition to evolution scientific, not religious. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:23 | |
Their tactic was to claim that children have the right to hear both sides of the argument. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:34 | |
They have developed a very successful PR slogan, it's called Teach The Controversy. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:38 | |
That's a good little sound bite they use, | 0:21:38 | 0:21:40 | |
and it appeals to the basic sense of fairness | 0:21:40 | 0:21:42 | |
that's characteristic of the American public. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:44 | |
And it's the idea that schoolchildren should hear both sides of a genuine controversy, as they tell it, | 0:21:44 | 0:21:52 | |
that it's not fair to deny them this opportunity to hear about an alternative scientific theory. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:57 | |
If Intelligent Design was valid science, | 0:22:00 | 0:22:03 | |
it could be taught alongside evolution in science lessons. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:07 | |
But if it was a religious theory, it should be banned. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:14 | |
In essence, the lawyers were arguing about whether or not Intelligent Design is scientific. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:24 | |
Should the ninth grade biology students be made aware of the fact | 0:22:24 | 0:22:29 | |
that there is a controversy in the scientific community about Darwin's theory of evolution? | 0:22:29 | 0:22:35 | |
Intelligent design is not science, | 0:22:36 | 0:22:38 | |
it injects a conflict between science and religion where none need exist. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:45 | |
The positive proposition that life could have been created by an intelligent designer is not science. | 0:22:45 | 0:22:51 | |
One of the scientists leading the defence of Darwin's theory was biologist Kenneth Miller. | 0:22:56 | 0:23:01 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:23:03 | 0:23:05 | |
Miller is a Roman Catholic, and, like many Christians past and present, | 0:23:06 | 0:23:12 | |
sees no conflict between his faith and evolution. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:16 | |
In fact, he's spent years campaigning against Intelligent Design. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:20 | |
These guys have had a field day, and they've captured the popular imagination. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:25 | |
Miller had drawn together the scientific evidence to respond to intelligent design claims. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:31 | |
Many bacterium have little flagella, whiplike structures that propel them | 0:23:31 | 0:23:35 | |
through the cell and you can see them in this electron-micrograph. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:39 | |
Miller targeted the pillar of intelligent design - | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
Michael Behe's argument of irreducible complexity, and it's most vivid example, the flagellum. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:50 | |
The notion of intelligent design or irreducible complexity makes a prediction | 0:23:50 | 0:23:55 | |
that if intelligent design is the proper explanation, | 0:23:55 | 0:23:58 | |
then the parts of these complex machines should be useless on their own | 0:23:58 | 0:24:01 | |
because all the parts have to be there to have any function whatsoever. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:05 | |
Miller quickly discovered, amongst the scientific literature, evidence that challenged Behe. | 0:24:07 | 0:24:13 | |
Within other bacteria, there was a simpler, fully-functioning mechanism. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:19 | |
This system is missing 40 of its 50 parts, 80% and it is perfectly functioning. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:28 | |
So the kindest thing one can say about this claim, | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
which is the essential claim of irreducible complexity and intelligent design | 0:24:31 | 0:24:35 | |
is that it's wrong - it is simply wrong on the basis of the science. | 0:24:35 | 0:24:39 | |
Miller had shown that the flagellum was not too complex to have evolved. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:45 | |
It did not need an intelligent designer. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:50 | |
In two days of testimony, Miller addressed the arguments for intelligent design one by one. | 0:24:53 | 0:25:00 | |
In Miller's view, and the view of the vast majority of the scientific community, | 0:25:00 | 0:25:05 | |
the gaps that the intelligent design theorists saw just did not exist. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:10 | |
And in December 2005, the judgment was handed down. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:17 | |
A US court has banned a school in Pennsylvania from teaching intelligent design, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:23 | |
as an alternative to evolution in biology classes. The federal judge said... | 0:25:23 | 0:25:28 | |
The judge ruled there was a clear religious purpose behind intelligent design. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:35 | |
Its supporters hadn't exposed gaps within evolution. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:40 | |
It was a religious view, not a scientific one, | 0:25:40 | 0:25:45 | |
and had no place in the classroom. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
Intelligent design has received some support by its claim to stand for intellectual freedom. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:56 | |
But that's about the only support it has received. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:59 | |
Virtually no scientists think it's a credible alternative to evolution. | 0:25:59 | 0:26:03 | |
Even most theologians are against it. | 0:26:03 | 0:26:06 | |
Placing God in gaps in scientific understanding is not a good strategy. | 0:26:06 | 0:26:12 | |
The history of science shows that those gaps have a tendency to be filled. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:18 | |
Society is sceptical nowadays. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
Ideas of death and catastrophe from the sky | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
belong to ancient times, before the age of science | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
when superstition made people petrified of the heavens. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
The heavens were seen as a source of wonder and potential global disaster. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:48 | |
Then came the Age of Enlightenment and all was to change. | 0:26:51 | 0:26:55 | |
As scientific knowledge has expanded, | 0:26:58 | 0:27:00 | |
events that used to be seen as acts of God, have been explained by natural causes. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:07 | |
Volcanoes, named after the Roman God of fire, are the result of immense heat inside the Earth. | 0:27:10 | 0:27:18 | |
Floods, the ultimate sign of God's wrath in the Old Testament, are caused by fluctuations in climate. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:31 | |
And biblical plagues of locusts may have been the natural result of a sudden growth in numbers. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:42 | |
So is there any room left for God in unexpected events? | 0:27:44 | 0:27:49 | |
The most personal of all acts of God are miracles of healing. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
In 1988, the neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, visited the shrine of Lourdes on behalf of BBC Science. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:17 | |
A famous Roman Catholic pilgrimage site, Lourdes is the focal point | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
of millions of people hoping for their own miracle. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:29 | |
Sylvia had been told by doctor eight years ago she was terminally ill. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:34 | |
You accepted that you had six months to live. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
Nothing I could do about it. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:39 | |
There was something you did about it. | 0:28:39 | 0:28:42 | |
Yes, I came to Lourdes and whilst I was in Lourdes I was in St Bernadette's hospital. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:48 | |
It had only opened the week before. or the fortnight before. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
I used to always go into the little chapel, | 0:28:51 | 0:28:56 | |
and this particular day, well, it was evening it was the night before we came away | 0:28:56 | 0:29:01 | |
and I went in and I just sat | 0:29:01 | 0:29:03 | |
and there's a little grotto of Our Lady and I just sat and I cried and cried. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:09 | |
I don't know how many people was in and I never said a prayer or anything, | 0:29:09 | 0:29:13 | |
but something at that moment said, "Don't worry, you're going to be all right' | 0:29:13 | 0:29:17 | |
"and I've been smashing ever since. " | 0:29:17 | 0:29:20 | |
When is a cure a miracle? | 0:29:20 | 0:29:23 | |
That's a question that the authorities at Lourdes have taken very seriously. | 0:29:23 | 0:29:27 | |
In 1882, a panel of medical experts now called the Bureau Medicale de Lourdes | 0:29:27 | 0:29:32 | |
was set up to investigate claims of miraculous cures. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:37 | |
In the 130 years since Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary, | 0:29:37 | 0:29:41 | |
thousands of cures have been claimed and 64 have been declared miracles. | 0:29:41 | 0:29:47 | |
The list of diseases for which claims of miracles has been accepted has changed over the years, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:53 | |
as medical science discovered its own cures for such illnesses as tuberculosis and polio. | 0:29:53 | 0:30:00 | |
For many years, the authorities here have applied every sceptical test they can to the numerous claims. | 0:30:00 | 0:30:06 | |
Only if no conventional treatment has been given can a miracle be declared. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:10 | |
The church itself uses science to identify where God may be at work. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:20 | |
What's more, science has begun to suggest other means | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
by which apparently extraordinary healing might take place. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:33 | |
The Mind Machine programme looked at research into what's known as the "placebo effect" - | 0:30:38 | 0:30:44 | |
a phenomenon in which people can feel the effects of medical treatment | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
just by believing in its power. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
How are you doing? | 0:30:50 | 0:30:53 | |
OK. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:54 | |
It's been suspected for a long time that the effectiveness | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
of medical treatment depends partly on the patient's faith in it. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
This power of belief, the placebo effect, | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
offers hope that the mind can heal the body, or at least reduce pain. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:10 | |
John Levine has been studying just how the placebo effect works | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
and today he's going to assess its effectiveness. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:16 | |
John and his colleagues took young, healthy volunteers who were having their wisdom teeth removed. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:24 | |
After the operation, these volunteers were given | 0:31:25 | 0:31:29 | |
a completely inert saline solution instead of pain relief. | 0:31:29 | 0:31:33 | |
The only difference between these two men is that one of them | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
is being given the saline solution by a doctor in a white coat, the other by a computer they can't see. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:47 | |
Will the two patients experience different levels of pain? | 0:31:49 | 0:31:54 | |
ALARM RINGS | 0:31:54 | 0:31:55 | |
20 minutes later, time for the patients to report | 0:31:55 | 0:31:59 | |
on the amount of pain they feel. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:01 | |
-How much are you having now? -Let's take it here. It's getting close. | 0:32:01 | 0:32:05 | |
Since the last time, | 0:32:05 | 0:32:06 | |
-has it gone up or down or stayed the same? -It's gone up a bit. -OK. | 0:32:06 | 0:32:09 | |
No pain to worse pain ever, make one mark through that line as to how much pain you're having now. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:15 | |
OK. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
Since the last time, has the pain gone up, gone down or stayed the same? | 0:32:17 | 0:32:21 | |
The pain has gone down. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:23 | |
So why this dramatic difference between the two? | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
The white coat represents to the patient that same image | 0:32:27 | 0:32:33 | |
of an individual who has power to provide a healing effect on them. | 0:32:33 | 0:32:40 | |
In other words, the painkilling effect that this man felt | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
wasn't down to an anaesthetic, but to believing a caring doctor was relieving his pain. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:51 | |
Belief, it seems, can be very powerful. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:56 | |
For Colin Blakemore, this power of belief was key at Lourdes. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:03 | |
Despite its appearance, this isn't a hospital but is an "accueil" at Lourdes - | 0:33:06 | 0:33:11 | |
a kind of reception centre for pilgrims. | 0:33:11 | 0:33:13 | |
Most of the people wearing nurses' uniforms aren't nurses either, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
but it all adds up to an atmosphere of care and authority | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
which may really help people to deal with their suffering. | 0:33:19 | 0:33:23 | |
Science suggests that the comfort and healing many have found at Lourdes | 0:33:28 | 0:33:32 | |
may not come from God but from the power of the human mind. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:35 | |
So another place where many believe God operates has begun to be squeezed by science. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:43 | |
And new technology has allowed scientists to probe even deeper. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
As technology has improved, it has created new ways of looking at the world. | 0:33:57 | 0:34:05 | |
and allowed researchers access to a hidden realm... | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
..inside the human brain. | 0:34:11 | 0:34:13 | |
By visualising and measuring the workings of the brain, | 0:34:18 | 0:34:22 | |
scientists have begun to investigate our thoughts and feelings. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:26 | |
It's led some to raise questions about the religious feelings of the faithful. | 0:34:31 | 0:34:36 | |
And that's partly down to this... | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
CHOIR SINGS | 0:34:40 | 0:34:42 | |
..a device known as... | 0:34:43 | 0:34:45 | |
..the "God helmet". | 0:34:46 | 0:34:48 | |
The helmet was basically designed to generate weak magnetic fields | 0:34:48 | 0:34:53 | |
across the hemispheres, specifically the temporal lobe. | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
The way it's set up is that each pair | 0:34:56 | 0:34:58 | |
of the solenoids are connected so that at any given time | 0:34:58 | 0:35:01 | |
a magnetic field passes through the helmet | 0:35:01 | 0:35:03 | |
and hence through the brain. | 0:35:03 | 0:35:05 | |
Dr Michael Persinger claimed that, by stimulating the temporal lobes, | 0:35:08 | 0:35:13 | |
he could artificially induce | 0:35:13 | 0:35:15 | |
religious experience in almost anyone. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
Don Hill was one of Persinger's volunteers. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:27 | |
It's not so much I felt like there was somebody or something | 0:35:27 | 0:35:30 | |
in the chamber with me, | 0:35:30 | 0:35:32 | |
because my common sense told me that this could not be. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:35 | |
But I could not get rid of the feeling that there was something there. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:41 | |
Yet, how could this be? There's nothing there. | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
I'm in a space that's safe. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:46 | |
'My palms are sweating. I'm seeing visual dips and dots.' | 0:35:46 | 0:35:51 | |
Don had experienced one of the most common and bizarre effects | 0:35:52 | 0:35:55 | |
in the chamber, a feeling that someone else was in there with him. | 0:35:55 | 0:36:00 | |
Dr Persinger called this feeling "the sensed presence". | 0:36:00 | 0:36:03 | |
The fundamental experience is the sensed presence, | 0:36:03 | 0:36:07 | |
and our data indicate that the sensed presence, the feeling of another entity of something beyond yourself, | 0:36:07 | 0:36:13 | |
perhaps bigger than yourself, bigger in space and bigger in time, | 0:36:13 | 0:36:16 | |
can be stimulated by simply activating the right hemisphere, particularly the temporal lobe. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:21 | |
Horizon decided to set Persinger's theories and the God helmet the ultimate test - | 0:36:28 | 0:36:35 | |
to give a religious experience to one of the world's most strident atheists. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:41 | |
Professor Richard Dawkins. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:44 | |
Can Dr Persinger succeed where the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama have failed? | 0:36:47 | 0:36:53 | |
If I became a religious believer, my wife would threaten to leave me. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:58 | |
Feeling slightly dizzy. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
Quite strange. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:17 | |
To increase the chances of feeling a sensed presence, Dr Persinger started to apply the magnetic field | 0:37:18 | 0:37:25 | |
to both sides of the head. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:29 | |
A twitchiness in my breathing, I don't know what that is. | 0:37:30 | 0:37:34 | |
My left leg is sort of moving. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
Right leg is twitching. | 0:37:45 | 0:37:48 | |
So, after 40 minutes, had Richard Dawkins been brought closer to God? | 0:37:55 | 0:38:02 | |
Unfortunately, I didn't get the sensation of the presence. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:09 | |
It pretty much felt as though I was in total darkness, | 0:38:09 | 0:38:14 | |
erm, with a helmet on my head, | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
and, er, pleasantly relaxed. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:22 | |
And occasionally feeling the sensations | 0:38:22 | 0:38:24 | |
which I described as they occurred. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:27 | |
But I would be hard put to it to swear that those were not things that could happen to me any time | 0:38:27 | 0:38:34 | |
on a dark night. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:35 | |
Richard Dawkins may not have had a religious experience, | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
but 80% of Persinger's volunteers did feel a presence of some kind whilst wearing the God helmet. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:49 | |
The findings of this study are controversial, | 0:38:53 | 0:38:57 | |
but Horizon went on to look at research into people | 0:38:57 | 0:39:01 | |
who have religious experiences without the help of technology. | 0:39:01 | 0:39:06 | |
Dr Andrew Newberg injected Buddhists with a radioactive tracer, | 0:39:06 | 0:39:10 | |
as they reached the height of their meditation. | 0:39:10 | 0:39:14 | |
The tracer was then carried into the bloodstream and up to the brain, allowing an image to be captured. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:22 | |
The scans measured blood flow, with red showing the areas | 0:39:36 | 0:39:40 | |
with highest blood flow and yellow the areas with lowest. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
As meditation reached its peak... | 0:39:45 | 0:39:47 | |
..an area of the brain called the parietal lobes had less and less blood flowing into them. | 0:39:53 | 0:39:59 | |
They seemed almost to be shutting down. | 0:39:59 | 0:40:01 | |
This was significant new information. | 0:40:03 | 0:40:06 | |
The parietal lobes help give us our sense of time and place. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:11 | |
This part of the brain typically takes all of our sensory information | 0:40:11 | 0:40:16 | |
and uses that sensory information to create a sense of ourselves. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:20 | |
When people meditate they frequently describe a loss of that sense of self | 0:40:20 | 0:40:25 | |
and that's exactly what we saw in the meditation subjects, | 0:40:25 | 0:40:27 | |
that they actually decreased the activity in this parietal or this orientation part of the brain. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:33 | |
This strange sensation of a loss of self | 0:40:37 | 0:40:41 | |
is central to religious feelings in all the world's faiths. | 0:40:41 | 0:40:47 | |
Buddhists seek a feeling of oneness with the universe, Hindus strive for the soul and God to become one | 0:40:50 | 0:40:57 | |
and the Catholics search for the unio mystica. | 0:40:57 | 0:41:01 | |
Dr Newberg wondered if these very different religions might actually be describing the same thing. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:17 | |
To test this theory, he took scans of Franciscan nuns at prayer, | 0:41:17 | 0:41:22 | |
to see if there was any similarity between what was going on in their brains and those of Buddhists. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:27 | |
Interestingly, when we look at the Franciscan nuns, we see a similar decrease | 0:41:29 | 0:41:33 | |
in the orientation part of the brain as we saw with the Tibetan Buddhists. | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
Even though Buddhists and Catholics may come from very different | 0:41:43 | 0:41:46 | |
religious traditions, how their minds react | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
to deep meditation or prayer seems, in terms of brain chemistry, to be exactly the same process. | 0:41:49 | 0:41:56 | |
PRAYERS RECITED | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
Research like this has started to demystify religious experiences. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:07 | |
For some, it suggests these experiences are not produced by God, but simply by the brain. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:14 | |
And thanks to the God helmet, it seems you may not even need God to sense his presence. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:19 | |
That feeling can be artificially created. | 0:42:19 | 0:42:22 | |
So, there's no need for God at all. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
As science has filled in gaps in our knowledge, the mysterious has become more understandable, | 0:42:29 | 0:42:36 | |
and God seems to have been pushed into smaller and smaller crevices. | 0:42:36 | 0:42:41 | |
But there is another way of thinking about God's role. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:46 | |
Perhaps He doesn't act on the small individual scale. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:50 | |
He's not the God of the meager flagellum, tinkering with the mechanics of each organism. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:59 | |
He didn't create every single species on this planet individually. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:04 | |
Maybe instead, He's a grand inventor, a God of the big picture, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:18 | |
who drew the blueprints of creation. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
Maybe he's behind the laws of the universe. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:24 | |
The author of the whole of nature. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:29 | |
This was the God Darwin wrote of in The Origin Of Species - a creator laying down the laws. | 0:43:31 | 0:43:40 | |
And even today, some scientists look at the world and see it as God's work. | 0:43:40 | 0:43:47 | |
So is it here that there's room for God? | 0:43:47 | 0:43:49 | |
Not in the gaps of our understanding, but within the very laws of nature? | 0:43:49 | 0:43:53 | |
There are no more extraordinary laws than the ones that govern the universe. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:05 | |
The laws of creation. | 0:44:05 | 0:44:07 | |
Our most famous scientists have dedicated their lives to trying to reveal them. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:15 | |
One of Newton's great insights was into gravity. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
In a single equation, he explained not just why apples fall, but why the planets stay in orbit. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:31 | |
The equation was majestic in its scope. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
What applied on Earth, he said, also applied in the heavens. | 0:44:36 | 0:44:40 | |
And it all worked like clockwork. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:44 | |
For Einstein, the equation was smaller, but the claims were just as big. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:53 | |
E = mc2. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:56 | |
Energy is mass. | 0:44:56 | 0:45:01 | |
It was simple, elegant and profound. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:06 | |
Both Newton and Einstein saw a divine beauty in the clarity and order | 0:45:07 | 0:45:13 | |
of these mathematical laws. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
Understanding the workings of the universe, they believed, | 0:45:16 | 0:45:20 | |
was like looking into the mind of God. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:24 | |
But in the last 100 years, this beautiful simplicity has been shattered. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:35 | |
By an explosion of scientific discovery. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:42 | |
And now the divine beauty of the Newtonian clockwork universe, | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
and even the classical physics of Einstein have been obscured by bewildering complexity. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:54 | |
The up quark, the down quark, | 0:46:00 | 0:46:01 | |
the electron, the electron neutrino, the W plus and the W minus. | 0:46:01 | 0:46:07 | |
Physicists speak of strange, outlandish particles. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:11 | |
The basic building blocks of matter. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:14 | |
The charm quark, the strange quark, the muon, the mu-neutrino. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:18 | |
And they show these building blocks can, at the same time, be both waves and particles. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:24 | |
Top quark, bottom quark, the tao | 0:46:24 | 0:46:28 | |
and the tao-neutrino. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:30 | |
The Z particle and the photon. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
The new physics talks of uncertainty, of things being in two places at once. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:40 | |
Oh, no! | 0:46:40 | 0:46:42 | |
The gluon. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:44 | |
I forget the gluon. | 0:46:44 | 0:46:46 | |
The universe is so strange that even cosmologists don't claim to understand what's going on. | 0:46:54 | 0:47:01 | |
Especially when it comes to exotic substances like dark matter, and dark energy. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:08 | |
We have no idea what dark energy is. | 0:47:10 | 0:47:13 | |
Dark energy is basically a fancy word | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
for our ignorance of what makes up 75% of our universe. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:21 | |
Well, I know but I'm not going to tell you. | 0:47:21 | 0:47:24 | |
Actually no, I've no idea what it is. I hope it goes away. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:30 | |
I don't like it. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
Well, it's dark and it's expanding. I guess a pictorial way to describe Dark Energy like any other, as good | 0:47:35 | 0:47:41 | |
as any other, we don't know what it is, we might as well say it's this. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:45 | |
They say God works in mysterious ways. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
These ways are really mysterious. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
With so much still unknown, the drive to understand the laws of the universe is greater than ever. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:06 | |
In 2007, Horizon visited the Large Hadron Collider, | 0:48:08 | 0:48:13 | |
the machine charged with finding what physicists believe is a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:19 | |
They call it the Higgs particle, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:24 | |
but it's so key to understanding our universe it's been nicknamed | 0:48:24 | 0:48:30 | |
the God particle. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:32 | |
The best theory we have at the moment for the origin of mass | 0:48:35 | 0:48:40 | |
or what makes stuff "stuff" is called the Higgs mechanism. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:44 | |
And the Higgs mechanism works by filling the universe with... | 0:48:47 | 0:48:51 | |
with a thing. It's almost like treacle. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:53 | |
So far, the Higgs has eluded physicists, | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
but they hope the Large Hadron Collider will reveal it. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:06 | |
By going back to a moment that has been hidden from view. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:11 | |
The time just after the Big Bang. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:13 | |
What it does, it recreates the conditions that were presen | 0:49:13 | 0:49:18 | |
t less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
but in a controlled environment, inside giant detectors. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:26 | |
You can repeat that over and over again, and study it in exquisite detail. | 0:49:27 | 0:49:31 | |
In some ways, it's almost better than going back to the start of the universe and watching, | 0:49:31 | 0:49:36 | |
because you only get one chance to watch it. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:38 | |
Perhaps what's most striking about the search for the Higgs is where it may take us. | 0:49:40 | 0:49:46 | |
Some scientists believe its discovery could lead | 0:49:46 | 0:49:49 | |
to an extraordinary level of insight about the universe. | 0:49:49 | 0:49:53 | |
If, in fact, | 0:49:54 | 0:49:56 | |
we can get over the Higgs Particle, it may be that we can go a long way | 0:49:56 | 0:50:01 | |
towards the horizon of a total understanding. | 0:50:01 | 0:50:04 | |
Total understanding. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
These scientists have set their sights high. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:16 | |
It's not surprising some think cosmology is straying into the realm of God. | 0:50:16 | 0:50:23 | |
Modern science has developed ever more ingenious ways | 0:50:26 | 0:50:30 | |
to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
But, no matter how many questions it answers, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:36 | |
there are always more to ask. | 0:50:36 | 0:50:38 | |
And perhaps the biggest of all is why? | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
Why is our universe the way it is? | 0:50:41 | 0:50:44 | |
The fact that our world exists as it is | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
is extraordinarily improbable. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:53 | |
Right from the beginning, | 0:50:54 | 0:50:56 | |
the conditions for us to develop had to be just right. | 0:50:56 | 0:51:00 | |
Take gravity, for example. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:11 | |
If the force of gravity had been just slightly stronger, | 0:51:13 | 0:51:18 | |
the universe could have collapsed before planets and stars | 0:51:18 | 0:51:21 | |
had a chance to form. | 0:51:21 | 0:51:23 | |
If gravity had been only fractionally weaker, | 0:51:23 | 0:51:27 | |
gas may never have formed into stars at all. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:30 | |
Only because gravity is just as it is | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
are we here on Earth. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:37 | |
In 1987, Horizon looked at the apparently extraordinary coincidence | 0:51:41 | 0:51:46 | |
that the universe enables life, us, to exist. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
The existence of life on earth is | 0:51:54 | 0:51:56 | |
very delicately balanced in the scales of chance. | 0:51:56 | 0:51:59 | |
The list of things that had to come out just right is enormous. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:03 | |
It turns out that if you change just a little bit, the laws of nature, | 0:52:03 | 0:52:08 | |
then the way the universe develops is so changed that it's very likely that | 0:52:08 | 0:52:14 | |
intelligent life would not be able to develop. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
If we nudge one of these constants just a few percent in one direction, | 0:52:16 | 0:52:23 | |
then stars burn out within a million years of their formation, | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
-no time for evolution. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:28 | |
And if we nudge it just a few percent in the other direction, | 0:52:28 | 0:52:32 | |
then no elements heavier than helium form, | 0:52:32 | 0:52:34 | |
so no carbon, no life, not even any chemistry. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:39 | |
No complexity at all. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:41 | |
The really amazing thing is not that life on earth is balanced on a knife edge, | 0:52:41 | 0:52:45 | |
but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife edge, | 0:52:45 | 0:52:48 | |
the entire universe seems unreasonably suited | 0:52:48 | 0:52:51 | |
to the existence of life. Almost contrived. | 0:52:51 | 0:52:54 | |
We might say "a put up job". | 0:52:54 | 0:52:56 | |
Some have seen the sheer improbability of our existence | 0:53:01 | 0:53:05 | |
as evidence of a higher being. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:08 | |
But eminent physicists, most notably Stephen Hawking, have come out firmly against the idea. | 0:53:08 | 0:53:16 | |
And some physicists have an extraordinary explanation | 0:53:19 | 0:53:23 | |
for why our universe is so suited to humankind - | 0:53:23 | 0:53:28 | |
our universe is not alone. | 0:53:28 | 0:53:31 | |
There may, in fact, be multiple universes. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:39 | |
Perhaps, even, an infinite number, each different to its neighbour. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:45 | |
In these other universes, the gravitational constant might be different. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:51 | |
Or the heavier elements might not have formed. | 0:53:51 | 0:53:55 | |
And so, there may be no-one there to observe these other universes, | 0:53:57 | 0:54:02 | |
because the conditions haven't created life. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:05 | |
Brain-stretching as it is, there are theoretical reasons why some believe this is the case. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:20 | |
In fact, in a 2010 Horizon programme about infinitely, | 0:54:20 | 0:54:25 | |
one cosmologist claimed it was the most likely answer. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
What isn't appreciated by many, even in the physics community, | 0:54:36 | 0:54:41 | |
is this model, these infinitely many, infinite universes | 0:54:41 | 0:54:44 | |
is probably our current best bet | 0:54:44 | 0:54:48 | |
as to what the real universe looks like. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
It's baffling and mind bending, but that's where our road of cosmology has taken us. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:58 | |
It's easy to be sceptical about multiple universes. | 0:55:08 | 0:55:12 | |
After all, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:14 | |
even if they do exist, they are impossible to see | 0:55:14 | 0:55:16 | |
and even many physicists think they're impossible to test. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
For me, this is a point where science and religion | 0:55:19 | 0:55:23 | |
begin to look like they're not so different after all. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:27 | |
In this programme we've journeyed through science | 0:55:30 | 0:55:33 | |
asking if, in this modern age, there is room for God. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:38 | |
We've looked for God in the gaps of scientific understanding. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
And seen how new discoveries can close those gaps. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:51 | |
We've looked for God in the grandest laws of nature, | 0:55:54 | 0:55:56 | |
and in the mind-bending strangeness of the universe. | 0:55:56 | 0:56:00 | |
Science can describe so much about our world... | 0:56:01 | 0:56:05 | |
and constantly pushes the boundaries of our knowledge. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
But many still wonder why? | 0:56:10 | 0:56:13 | |
Why does anything exist at all? | 0:56:14 | 0:56:16 | |
Why do we humans find ourselves here? | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
And what's it all for? | 0:56:22 | 0:56:24 | |
As science has developed, the idea of a God who works wonders, | 0:56:26 | 0:56:30 | |
who acts in the gaps of scientific understanding | 0:56:30 | 0:56:32 | |
has been called into question. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:35 | |
And suppose that science continues to progress... | 0:56:37 | 0:56:40 | |
imagine a day when scientists have a total understanding of our universe. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:47 | |
Would the idea of God then go away? | 0:56:47 | 0:56:50 | |
I don't think so. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:53 | |
Because belief gives something that science doesn't claim to offer - | 0:56:53 | 0:56:58 | |
meaning and purpose. | 0:56:58 | 0:57:01 | |
What's more, | 0:57:05 | 0:57:07 | |
even the findings of science hint that religion is unlikely to disappear. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:12 | |
For some, research insto the human brain suggests it's biology that predisposes us to believe in God. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:21 | |
Others may say God hard-wired us to be able to communicate with Him. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:27 | |
Whatever the reality, even the most hardened critics | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
agree our brains mean God is here to stay. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:39 | |
The human religious impulse does seem very difficult to wipe out, | 0:57:39 | 0:57:44 | |
which causes me a certain amount of grief. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:47 | |
Clearly, religion has extreme tenacity. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:52 | |
Whether or not God exists, it seems we find it very easy to believe in Him. | 0:57:57 | 0:58:03 | |
Because the brain seems to be designed the way it is, | 0:58:03 | 0:58:07 | |
and because religion and spirituality seem to be built so well into that kind of function, | 0:58:07 | 0:58:13 | |
the concepts of God and religion | 0:58:13 | 0:58:15 | |
are going to be around for a very, very long time. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:18 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:26 | 0:58:29 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:29 | 0:58:32 |