Testing God - episode 2 - Darwin and the Divine

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[Music] ours is a special universe it is one where the laws which government are so tuned the from the random bumping of atoms have come creatures who think and love but why have we turned out the way we are once we believed we were unique blessed with a soul and lovingly created by God in His image and likeness today evolution says we are just the product of natural selection the descendants of primitive bacteria not the children of God we are certainly special I mean we are the only species that has true language with a grammar we're the only species that links philosophical thoughts with only species that has music and explicit mathematics so certainly we're unique in all kinds of ways other species the unique in other ways but it's very easy to agree that we are very very unique but that doesn't in any way dispose me to think that we need a supernatural explanation the theory which has laid claim to God's job as our Creator his Darwin's blind and meaningless mechanism of evolution in its footsteps the human genome project has produced the master blueprint of our tiny chemical creators our genes what the machines are doing downstairs is separating out pieces of DNA we call this process sequencing it's reading out the string of letters from the DNA into the computer it allows us to do a great range of things in terms of discovering more about how we work because this string of letters is the basic set of instructions to make a human being this thread of DNA it'sit's actually my own DNA not that we've been using this for sequencing it's just for fun I've cut some of it of my own here you can see this little thread floating around inside that that thread our molecules of DNA which contain all the instructions to make my particular body we could do exactly the same for you and we'd have something that looked just the same but it would have minutely different instructions and it would make if it were applied it would make a u rather than a me it has been claimed that this will explain everything we need to know about ourselves reducing the mystery of our being to a solace struggle of DNA to reproduce itself my mother was a musician she was a violinist I had a tiny cello my mother could put it under her chin my son is a musician two of my grandsons are musicians one grandson is a cellist and also plays the piano and it's very interested in singing and the other grandson is a composer and he also plays the piano very well and conduct science now has the means to understand this musical family inside every one of us other genes which made us and define us the same genes which made our ancestors and will make our children an unbroken line of genes but what does this mean for our image of ourselves and of God I think that not just reading out this code but the whole business of molecular biology of learning and the most microscopic the ultimate atomic detail of how our bodies work completely changes one's conception not only of the universe but of our place in it and some degree of what we are you come to realize that you have the power of understanding where before there was the darkness of ignorance the more scientists have studied us the more evidence they have found that we are built by DNA not by God according to science we exist as the gladiators about selfish genes and only the fittest survive the notion of evolution is enormous important it's the the key concept of biology that's moved us from thinking that we had to have an active thinking creator at every step guiding it to the saying no it could happen by itself something that people used to love to invoke was the eye they would always say how can that I have evolved by chance and people would write long treatises proving how it couldn't happen by chance well of course the point is it didn't happen by chance Oh at least not for a single chance [Music] although it seems almost inconceivable to anyone that you could get something as complicated as a human from a bacterial starting point it's not inconceivable that you could get something as complicated as a human from something slightly less complicated and it's not inconceivable that you could get that from something slightly less complicated still as if you break the whole problem down into an whole series of tiny steps then it ceases to be unbelievable and it becomes perfectly credible so for many scientists evolution has killed the God who fashioned us from clay the new gospel is that we are evolved we are built by genes Darwin was right biology is the field where God really did his best work and so in in a way Darwin pulled a much bigger rug out from under God's feet than physics has ever done before long the evolution was no longer seriously challenged as the basic explanation of our existence the motor of this process was seen as the genes simple and selfish determination to survive but there was a problem how could a selfish motor produce beauty unselfishness and the sheer complexity of human behavior there's something that I remember it's a very trivial story but I was in a tramp and Jews weren't allowed to sit down they had to stand up outside etc and I saw the mother of her school mate of mine I'm going now back to the school where we're still mixed Aryans and Jews and she sold me and got up she was hitting she got up and stood next to me it never said anything but it was a silent gesture of I don't agree with this I mean with all the things that I have lived through and seen this is something stuck in my mind so it must have been an important message to me at the time that not everybody is is on the side of the Nazis [Music] this was the real dilemma at the heart of evolution if the problem with God was the existence of evil the problem with The Selfish Gene was the existence of good in the Bronx District of New York this paradox is clear amid poverty and deprivation goodness clearly survives people were willing to acknowledge evolution but not its apparent corollary that unselfishness was just a distortion of our true selfish nature the Gospel of John says can anything good come out of Nazareth Nazareth is very much like the South Bronx they're both poor communities full of outcasts people who aren't treated very well by society and and the rest of society looks at the South Bronx and says can anything good come out of the South Bronx well yes a heck of a lot of good can come out of the South Bronx every day experience tells me that basically human beings are good at the outset and and children when they're dropped from heaven are good it's just the sophistry of the world that messes them up that makes people feel that it's totally acceptable to step on other people in order to get themselves ahead so the good side of human nature became a problem for evolutionists if they wanted people to understand that they were not the product of God's design they had to explain how a species driven only by the need to survive could create notions of morality I think a way in which human nature got oversimplified was this phrase survival of the fittest was viewed as the only legitimate explanation for human nature so everything that was of interest you had to find a quote survival value for it for many of the most interesting aspects of human nature like consciousness or poetic language or sense of humor or the moral virtues it's very hard to find survival payoffs for those things I don't think we can possibly afford to ignore the good side of people because that's basically what the truth is and we get carried away with theories based on incidents and and a few statistics and they're a very superficial factual analysis the real truth is the goodness in the hearts of people especially the hearts of these children of mothers who will go out and and save somebody who's homeless and drunk and addicted who's in trouble out on the street simply because in their words I'm a mother to that kind of relationship to another human being on the basis of nothing more than their humanity and their basic goodness one to another is far more truthful than a bunch of numbers and the more we unraveled the constituent elements of our genetic makeup the more puzzling became the very things we valued about ourselves with God it was simple the nature we'd been given had goodness and altruism within it but selfish genes what could they give us but selfishness it was fashionable to take a sort of evolutionary reductionist view that said there really isn't any such thing as genuine altruism what that was reflecting was the relatively simple state of evolutionary theory at the time at the time basically the way that you explain kindness was either people are kind to their genetic relatives with whom they shared genes so they're really promoting copies of the same genes so that's why parents are kind to kids and why you're kind to your nieces and nephews as well or you have sort of short-term trading relationships reciprocity relationships and you can explain those and everything else tended to be pigeonholed into one of those two categories either it's nepotism or it's short-term reciprocity there was a tendency to say everything sort of kind and gentle and spiritual about human nature is a sort of facade is a sort of gloss on selfish genes that are ticking away underneath I think it's the exact opposite I think selfie nasty and brutish has learned behavior this is the impasse that is held for the last thirty years as long as evolution failed to offer a full explanation of human nature the good as well as the bad then it did seem we had to be more than evolved creatures and there was a need for something beyond the genes some people think that there must be something in religion because they look inside themselves and they see themselves as being good or altruistic or loving and they think that evolution can't explain that and so they see this as a deficiency in science and then they say well if science is wrong therefore God must explain it you don't immediately say Oh science can't explain it therefore God is completely illogical it could be that if science can't explain it nothing can explain it or it could be this what actually believed if science can't explain it then we got to do better science we've got to improve our science until it can explain it in part the battle between religion and evolution has been over whose explanation of human nature is more realistic evolution in its simplest form struggle to accommodate anything but the most one-sided view of human nature so more recently some evolutionary theorists have been adapting the theory to explain how a gentler side I think it's actually more scientific to say altruism is real kindness is real romantic love is real how do we explain it rather than to sort of sweep it under the carpet and say oh that's just culture Geoffrey Miller is one of a new breed of evolutionary psychologists who are trying to show that evolution need not view the good side of us as something outside biology Miller's argument is that the survival of the fittest is only part of our evolutionary story our ultimate res on debt is to reproduce so it's not just natural selection between predator and its prey that shapes us but sexual selection as well we think survival of the fittest couldn't go the whole distance and accounting for human nature and we think there must have been something else to fill that gap and I'm saying sexual selection is what fills the gap because it's capable of noticing anything that we can even talk about if I if I notice that somebody else has a rich consciousness and I sort of wonder why do they have that my capacity for noticing that contains the answer it says I noticed that that might influence the sexual choice I make with regard to that person it might make them more attractive to me and just by admitting that you're saying that subject to sexual selection we have this amazing window into the the minds and souls of other people that other animals don't because we have language because we have rich social lives and that means sexual selection has the power to reach into these moral virtues and these spiritual interests and to shape them in a way that it couldn't do in any other species according to Miller this is the crucible of human evolution the sexual tension between men and women is what has driven our evolution and shaped our natures when I think about how sexual attraction might have worked among our our ancestors as they were sort of going through the final spurt on the way to becoming modern Homo sapiens I tend to think of them as conspicuously displaying their capacities for sympathy and kindness so anything that would have been sexually attractive would have been subject to sexual choice sexual choice could have amplified these traits made them more elaborate more conspicuous more easily displayed it is an argument for runaway kindness in the same way that runaway sexual selection can explain the size of the Peacocks tail in our species that explains the size of our hearts and our capacity for romantic commitment and and I think the sort of intricacy and depth of our consciousness as well if this version of evolutionary theory is right the implication seems to be that you can explain morality and goodness in our midst not to mention beauty and justice without invoking God [Music] and for many scientists once there was no longer a mysterious part of our nature that only God could explain then God had to go evolution undermines the necessity for God it undermines the positive reason why one might have wanted to believe in him so it makes God superfluous it makes it an unnecessary hypothesis many people accepted that line that evolutionary theory and religion must be completely incompatible but other leading scientists have utterly rejected it Denis Alexander is a scientist at the very heart of current work in genetics and evolution his work as one of Britain's most respected immunologists stems directly from the human genome project and yet for him there is nothing in what he knows that is incompatible with the belief in God well I think Dawkins is absolutely right if one's looking at the origins of biological diversity then the theory of evolution is by far the best theory that we've got and I mean all biologists including myself obviously operate within the framework of natural selection and understanding of the current theory of evolution but I think Dawkins some people like him take an unnecessary next step of trying to imply that it tells us something about the ultimate meaning of life for him that's a life really without meaning because it's a life of atheism so I don't think that next step is really necessary I just think that's a bad way of doing philosophy a bad way of doing science so for Alexander at the end of scientific explanation there is still something else we're still left with the ultimate questions of whether it has an overall meaning whether there is a god or not whether we're going anywhere and I think those questions are simply not the kind of questions that sounds can answer [Music] it not always harmful to believe in Supernatural or indeed in anything false one can make a case for believing falsehoods if they are comforting if they're consoling but it is rather harmful if it lulls one into thinking that one has explained things that one hasn't one side does not have more knowledge than the other the differences begin when the facts run out I don't bring God into the equation because I think we have to have something that makes it all work I mean I bring God into the equation because I'm interested in what is the ultimate purpose and meaning of our existence here on earth and I think that Christian theism actually is a much more consistent starting point than atheism because it's consistent with the idea of a personal God who's actually interested in ethics and morality and human responses and his Broadus into being with that very thought in mind and so happens the way he's chosen to bring us into being is by a very long process of evolution the possibility of really understanding the world and life and the universe is such an immensely exciting one that to be fobbed off with a cheap falsehood a supernatural explanation that really doesn't explain anything maybe it's harmless maybe it gives you solace but I think it actually is mentally degrading in that it teaches you to be satisfied with a non explanation when a real explanation is within our grasp neither side disputes evolution what separates them is the question of whether or not there can be a God who intended evolution and who stands behind it so here we have two models we have the model of Christian theism we have the other model which says well the whole thing really means nothing ultimately so according to Alexander God simply chose to use evolution but if this is the case it raises a serious problem why would an all-powerful and loving God use a process that is based on the death and suffering of the weakest understanding this would be the key to understanding why there is suffering at all in the creation of the so-called God of love there's always been a problem for the Christian Church you know we believe in a loving God and an all-powerful God a God who's in control of the world if that's the case how can there be suffering Jocelyn Bell Burnell is one of the world's leading astronomers and a Quaker for her the question of suffering lies at the heart of religious belief suffering has come quite close to me I come from Northern Ireland originally as you may recognize from the accent there's a situation there that is not going to heal rapidly I have a child only child with an incurable disease that's not going to heal there are many many situations I think in all our lives actually where there are things that won't heal and the church comes up with some pretty convoluted answers to be honest which as far as I'm concerned just don't make sense and Bell Burnell is not alone the church itself has wrestled with this problem for centuries professor John Polkinghorne is both a theologian and a physicist at Cambridge Christian theology anyway he has to steer a course between two unacceptable pictures of God one is the God who does everything the world is just God's puppet theater everything dances the gods tune it's the whole thing it's the performance of a play that God wrote in eternity that can't be the creation of the God of love because there's no independence there's no freedom in it equally the god of love can't be just an indifferent spectator who set the world spinning sits back and sees what happens what thinking about suffering has actually led me to do and I'm a scientist through and through is to go back to those initial assumptions that God is loving God is all-powerful and in charge of the world and say can those actually all be true or is there something wrong with one of those assumptions now I haven't actually the guts to relax the picture of God being loving I actually need a loving God but I said what happens if we drop the assumption that God's running the world and the problem of suffering is perceived by the Christian Church then goes away so does this mean that God has simply abandoned us no say the theologians God's handover of power is in fact his greatest act of love because it is the means by which he gives us free will and support for this view comes from a surprising quarter from scientists who are trying to create robots which can think for themselves traditional thinking that goes back for centuries about the problem of evil how can there be evil in a world that God created if God is good the answer to that many people have been given is that well God created us but gave us freedom for us to choose and if we choose evil than that's a necessary byproduct of us being free well I think the same point comes up with artificial intelligence is that if you really want the agent to be free and to be autonomous and not just a computer program that you've written then you have to let go in a way similar to how God let go so you have to let it either evolve for itself or learn for itself somehow acquire its own mental take on the world its own beliefs and desires through its own experience of the world it's only when a creator has kind of let go of their system that the system can count as having free will the line there would be you know God couldn't possibly have programmed us in detail God had to use something a bit like evolution because only that puts enough distance between God's intentions and my intentions for my acts to actually turn out to be free artificial evolution and will be a way of of puttin the same distance between us and the behavior of our machines artificial intelligence scientists have found that step one in opening up that gap between creator and created is to let life evolve its own solutions artificial evolution has found solutions to problems that are pretty weird from our point of view there's someone at Sussex Adrian Thompson who works on the evolving little chips and after a period of artificial evolution he looked at some of these chips and found that there were bits of the circuitry that as far as he could tell weren't doing anything he couldn't understand what they were doing but change those bits of the circuitry and the thing doesn't work anymore so when the problems are even modestly complex the solutions that artificial evolution throws up can turn out to be very different to the solutions that you would come up with if you sat down to solve the problem and when one of these weird solutions involves learning for itself then evolution is on its way to delivering the kind of freewill we have what you want to do really is use artificial evolution to get to something like the infant state so you want to evolve systems that are ready to learn by moving around and interacting with the real world so you evolve it first you set it off you give it ten or fifteen years back it comes and then you can say you know how are you doing are you intelligent yet probably say yep I'm doing fine just taking my oh levels a lot of people see evolution and believing in God as somehow in tension or incompatible whereas my thinking has been coming around to the idea that God has to use evolution in order to create intelligent life evolution has killed the all controlling God but in his place a new and more subtle God is emerging god I think interacts with the world but doesn't overrule it God has if you like is conducting the improvised performance of the universe so I think what is settled is much less determinative and there is much more flexibility and freedom and surprise and openness in what's going on I find I'm still somewhat surprised that I will so cheerfully say God is not in control of the world and wait for Thunderbolts or the sky to fall in and it doesn't happen so far from being Anatomy to God evolution it turns out is the perfect tool for God to create thinking learning free wield creatures evolution is the mechanism that can let go of its creations because just as music is more than the notes so we are more than our genes the individual is something much more than the than the genes that are in this DNA it's our consciousness the way our brains work that really makes us what we are makes us human what this DNA knows how to do is to make the fetus the baby the baby then grows and looks around and talks and understands and discusses and argues and thinks and does all the things that human beings do and that process comes on top of the genes and so I think it's quite right to think of the mind as being something above and beyond the genes [Music] [Music] once evolution was seen as an attack on God now people can accept that man in all his subtlety has evolved from beasts and still believe in God but one unanswered question is this was there some time when human beings acquired qualities that set them apart from other creatures was there a decisive moment when man first felt the need for God [Music] unexpectedly it is archaeology that may offer a clue evidence of a specific moment when human creativity exploded and interestingly that explosion occurred not at the moment when the modern human brain evolved but 50,000 years later this distinction between the emergence of our species Homo sapiens at about a hundred thirty thousand years ago and the major growth in our cultural aberration that doesn't really occur until after seventy thousand years ago has worried archeologists for for quite sometime of how do you bring those two together what was the spark that finally set the human mind and imagination alight was that when God gave us a soul [Music] archaeologist Stephen Mikan is an atheist but what fascinates him is that all the physical evidence shows that a sense of God was central to this extraordinary moment the artistic activity of some of the first modern humans is is the best example for instance of our best evidence of our early religious beliefs and when they come they come with a immense impact the first reputation art is in Southwest Europe and these are all of animals and sometimes humans and sometimes half animal or half human beings now the exact meaning of those paintings are lost to us but I think it's no doubt these paintings are about a mythical world and particularly these half-human half-animal beings are spiritual beings entities that don't live in the real world but are as real in those people's minds as the animals the rain during the bison that they hunt we don't know what exactly is going on but clearly there is something that we'd described as ritual and as belief and as ideology and something that is quite separate from if you like the real material world in those people's lives this doesn't seem to be something that emerges when people have time on their hands it's during the last ice ages when people were living really difficult lives in Europe that they invested the greatest amount of time in their artistic activity and their religious activity the archaeological record suggests that asking these questions about the ultimate meaning of life was an essential ingredient in our journey over the threshold from animal to human I think it is really about this questioning this asking this desire for meaning this desperate urge to find meaning it's it's an almost every single domain of human existence a big cultural explosion it's like a whole wash in human culture like a moment to take off [Music] was that moment of takeoff just another evolutionary step or a moment of god-given inspiration either way the evidence shows it was an exceptional turning point in our existence we've got the first explosions of Arts happening the first religious exploration is happening then and the first scientific explorations appearing all at the same time and I think it is really about this questioning this asking this desire for meaning this desperate urge to find meaning maybe with things that don't respect have any meaning you know they just happen you know storms happen people died I think if you're an atheist there isn't fundamental meaning of those they're just things that happen in the world but sometime after seventy thousand years ago this needs to explain them pervades every single aspect of you know existence and this is a transformation we all still go through in our own lives as we grow and realize how little we understand as we're growing up we go through an immense computer questioning those questions we ask us when we're children or young adolescents are some of the most intense the most important and it's nice to think of that as a mirror of the human experience as a species as we become questioning beings the sense of wonder our ancestors must have felt is drowned these days in the noise of our material advancement but it hasn't disappeared this man was a German schoolboy brought up on science heedless of religion when his life suddenly changed Rena was 16 years old I wanted to study mathematics and physics then I was drafted together with the whole class to the anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg we were the last generation who had to die so they murder us in the concentration camps could go on with their terrible work it was with a year 43 at 16 Jurgen Moltmann was a confirmed atheist from a long line of atheists today he is considered one of the greatest living theologians that came the last week of July in 43 and I think the Royal Air Force came with more than 1,000 bumpers every night for one week all living beings were burned and all houses destroyed as were firestorm and the aircraft battery was just in the middle of it it's a storm going through the streets which takes everything down you cannot stand the storm it's also intensive and these flames are taking everything in you can keep to a tree but as it is you obey from the tree into the fire [Music] the bomb pool - a friend of mine standing next to me and to pieces spared me it was a kind of a miracle I don't know why at least this was a night when I first my life cried out where is God I was missing some body or something this must have been one of the great transformation periods of her past when it's the first time that human communities in a in a big way were asking these questions about the universe effectively which had simply never been asked before I was crying out god where are you that God was not there and there was nothing and if you will feel the absence of God or the absent presence of God you are so fear the dark night of your soul because all of a sudden you have no orientation anymore and you don't know why you are alive and then your senses are closing you listen to nothing you see nothing you taste nothing you just close yourself in the activity of religion really exploded pretty rapidly in human society and is interesting to speculate about that sudden fear they think it's a fear of realizing your lack of understanding it's terrifying that you suddenly think I don't actually understand any of that and we need to know that at this moment of take off the human mind was liberated from the mute preoccupations of survival instead of a brain which registered warmth pain or hunger there was a mind able to imagine and enquire consciousness in a sense of merely being alive had developed into something capable of wonder was this just an accident of evolution or design it seems to me that the most astonishing thing that we know about that's happened in the whole history of the universe is the coming to be of self consciousness here on earth you know human beings the universe became aware of itself which is a very unexpected I think and I think significant development our own existence here on planet Earth is intimately connected with all the events that have been going on in the cosmos from the very very early microseconds after the Big Bang in a sense sort of already was setting the stage for the emergence of life at so many billions of years later there's something very odd going on here there's something very special about this universe that can bring conscious beings into existence and to simply say in an ultimate sense that is a chance or a random process it doesn't look like it it doesn't look like it it looks rather organized actually it looks like something is going on here the universe immediately following the Big Bang was pregnant with life had all the right circumstances for life from the beginning it isn't an accident it's come about there are many of course accidental things about the particular way images it's gone about I'm not saying what the universe was pregnant with human beings with five-fingered animals and things of that of that nature but that's some form of highly complex highly developed consciousness sustaining life was to be a possibility in its unfolding history was there in my view from the start [Music] at its most basic level our universe is simple and deterministic but scientists realize they still have to explain how through evolution the mere bumping of molecules has created a spiritual dimension the answer they think is that the universe has built itself level by level and that each one where the atoms or consciousness is more than the sum of its parts in all sorts of areas of science today we recognize that there are emergent phenomena so to talk of the great elaboration of culture at the moment to take off an emergent it's perfectly scientific way to approach this what's very encouraging is that this is clearly now a theme that scientists be able to have a better stab at explaining of how you can get more out of individual components than those would simply add up to be that seems to fit very well on to what happened in the evolution the human mind and understanding how we end up as being at being which is more than the small individual parts of the evolutionary past so at the beginning of the 21st century a clearer picture is emerging of creation and the human condition no longer slave either to an omnipotent God or remorseless gene but pregnant with possibility and free to create its own open future do believers then have to cling to a watered-down version of the old God or do they have a better understanding of their maker God is no Lana omnipotent and he is no longer on the siient but he is full of expectation waiting for us so it's better to speak about awaiting God then to speak about an all-powerful King from in heaven and a good example for this is the parable of the prodigal son which is in reality is a parable of the waiting father because this is a miracle he the son had quitted everything took his heritage away and so the father was no longer the father son move along of the son but the father was still waiting for the SAP and I think this is a powerful image of God I think we see the presence of God in the universe and also a human life more as a presence of his patients notice intervening power because if I have patients with another person I'm giving that person time we can feel this if we have children and they are just born we do everything for them we are omnipotent that they are completely dependent on us but then when they grow up you must take back your influence on them to give them freedom [Music] the gift of science to religion has been to offer an answer to the problem of suffering instead of an all controlling and willful God it offers a God of patience hope and freedom and the gift of religion to science is they have provided the wellspring of inquiry I don't think for a moment you could have the exploration of science in the world without either those same people or other people exploring wealth through religious ideas I think they've got to go hand in hand with each other we would be an error today to say science should have priority over religious experience or the other way around because I think the fact that they all start together tells us that they have a common roots we can't ever lose one they come as a package if you like and it's the packages this peculiar human mind we've got and this need to explain and find meaning [Music]

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Channel: Gnosys Thought

Views: 21,137

Rating: 4.3846154 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Dawkins, david malone, John Sulston, Geoffrey Miller, Denis Alexander, steven mithen, jurgen moltmann, evolution, charles darwin

Id: 47pPkePJ0do

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 49min 8sec (2948 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016

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