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