The Infinite Monkey Cage - Christmas Special 2014

Episode Date: December 25, 2014

Brian Cox and Robin Ince present a very special festive edition. They'll be taking their own unique look at the Christmas story and the history of the bible and asking whether the christmas story and your view of humanity changes once you've looked back at earth from the heavens themselves.With: Actor, Brian Blessed Astronaut, Chris Hadfield Bible scholar Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou Presenter, Reverend Richard ColesProducer: Alexandra FeachemFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014.

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. So an astronaut, a vicar, a Bible scholar and Voltan, king of the Birdman, go into a pub. And the landlord says, what are you doing here? Aren't you going to be doing the recording of the Infinite Monkey Cage Christmas special? And Voltan says, dive! Dive! Dive! And the barber says, well, I know the carpet's not up to much, but I don't really think it's a dive. He goes, well, I'll have a gin then! I'm afraid we're out.

But Gordon's alive! Told you we'd say it, Brian! Do you want me to say it again? Gordon's alive! I can't hear you. Welcome. Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage Christmas special.

Radio 4 have allowed us this broadcast just in case the Queen's take on quantum cosmology is cut out of her speech again this year. Happens every year. I believe the central issue in quantum cosmology is the meaning of the wave function of the cosmos. Philip and I are firmly of the view that the many world interpretation of quantum theory provides the only viable

framework to understand wave function collapse in this context. My government will double the science budget of the next parliament and then we will understand more of physical reality. We also went to Trinidad and Tobago and saw some men do a dance and Philip said, actually I better not say. I think my impression of you, Brian, is slightly more convincing, but only just.

We wanted to do a Christmas special, so we said we'd do something about the Bible. And to our surprise, Radio 4 said yes. And so now we have the awkward task of having to deliver. Yeah, so we thought obviously what we needed was a vicar and a Bible scholar, but how do you balance a vicar and a Bible scholar, of course, with an astronaut and Brian Blessed? That's science for you. We haven't really thought this through, have we? We haven't thought this through.

Looking forward to a record number of complaints. Happy Christmas. So, please welcome Francesca Stavrokopoulou, the Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religions at the University of Exeter. Chorister, keyboardist, and Robin wrote this, podium dancer, and now the Reverend, Richard Coles.

It's all his autobiography. I'm not revealing anything there. Astronaut and David Bowie impersonator, Commander Chris Hadfield. And actor Brian Blessed, and this is our panel. Thank you. to Commander Chris Hadfield and actor Brian Blessed, and this is our panel. Now, Chris, you're the only person on this panel, and I suspect in this room, and I suspect in our audience, to have spent Christmas in space on the space station.

What's Christmas like on the space station? It's different. Of course, you have to choose when Christmas begins, right? Because you go around the world every 92 minutes. So you can pick and choose. You can have Christmas in Guam or Christmas in Auckland, or you can work your way around. So the crew celebrates for more than a day because of all the time zones.

And everyone's sort of off talking to their family when their family is waking up and celebrating all the different religions that are on board. But we have our own. We have a Christmas tree. It's about maybe, I don't know, 10 inches tall. And it hangs from the ceiling because there's no up or down. It's used every year, so it's looking a little worse for wear. But we have a Christmas tree, and we hung up stockings with care above Node 3, the traditional spot for stockings on the space station,

with everybody's name on, hoping that Santa would in fact soon be there and wouldn't suffocate on the way. Then we have gifts, and had gotten a card from each one of the family members, so we opened gifts together, and we did a thing for Mission Control, and we wore Santa hats. And then we had Christmas on our own, which was actually nice. I think we had irradiated turkey and a little tin of cranberry sauce and then dehydrated plum pudding, I think. And it was nice, actually. And then we brought out the guitar and and sang christmas

carols in all the different languages so we had kind of a family christmas individually with each of our families we had a public christmas on television so that mission control could celebrate with us and then we had a private christmas amongst the crew it was really nice but was it true that the russians have a big stash of vodka on the space station, can't you say? Vodka? No alcohol's allowed on the space station. But is it true that the Russians... This conversation could go on for a long time. I like the fact you went, and then we got the guitar out. Is that really what happened?

You went, Chris, yes, you can play the guitar if you want. Yes. That is, what if Father Christmas did turn up? That's what I'd be worried just about, that after all this incredible moment of science, and then it turns out, Father Houston, we have a problem. We've got a satsuma. Yeah, with no chimney to come in.

I was going to say, why don't you put out space sachets of carrots for the reindeer? Tiny hoofs on the aluminum hull. Yes. Francesca, we get on to the main subject of the programme, which is looking at the Bible historically. Now, obviously, we think about this is Christmas Day, the Nativity. How much of the Nativity. Now, obviously, we think about this is Christmas Day, the Nativity. How much of the Nativity from your research, how much of it could we consider to be historical?

How much of it may be mythical? And how much, perhaps, in between? Of hardly anything in between, it's pretty much mythical. We've got two accounts of the Nativity in the New Testament, one in the Gospel of Matthew, one in the Gospel of Luke. They share certain commonalities, but, you know, so the wise men are in one, the shepherds are in the gospel of Luke they share certain commonalities but but you know so the the wise men are in one the shepherds are in the other herods in one etc etc but most scholars would agree that this is basically backstory for Jesus Jesus of Nazareth

was he actually from Bethlehem probably not who are these kind of exotic styled visitors from the east and they aren't the three wise men in the bible they're just known as a group of magi which is a derived from a greek term that means that they're astronomers or um sort of diviners of some sort was there a star no it was probably an angel uh so all of this is backstory really because people only get interested in jesus and once he's dead and then you know you need to kind of fill in the gaps so basically it's drawn from a range of different sorts of religious and mythical traditions that were very common part of the cultural landscape at the time and then they're kind of put together to create this fantastic tale of this this great divine

figure very much in keeping with other sorts of divine figures in other traditions i mean the, the first account we have of the life of Jesus in the New Testament is actually the Gospel of Mark. And of course, the Gospel of Mark begins with the baptism. There's none of the birth narratives at all. And it's only when people begin to get a sense of the significance of Jesus that they try to understand more of who he is in the light of Jewish prophecy and expectation. So much of the stuff in the birth narratives that we love about the Star of Bethlehem and all that is really just aimed to show it's the fulfilment of prophecy in what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew scriptures,

and that's really where that story comes from. Just don't say that at primary school, OK? There is a Father Christmas, by the way. So you can trace each of those elements, so the three wise men, for example, these astronomers, so what is that doing? Why do they appear? Well, they probably appear because it's partly in fulfillment, as Richard said, of certain sorts of prophecies that are in the Hebrew Bible.

So in other words, the Jewish scriptures, the first Christians were obviously Jewish, as was Jesus. So it's in fulfillment of these sorts of prophecies that talk about foreign nations coming to worship at the feet of Yahweh or God's chosen one Messiah the son of God um it's also setting up a kind of a contest between the religious specialists from Mesopotamia the Babylonians far east you know from Persia who were like you know they were the bomb when it came to prophecy and divination um so now they're kind of coming along saying, oh, yeah, now we're going to bow down at the feet of this little child. So it's kind of doing all sorts of things.

I think it's also about what audience you have in mind. I mean, Matthew is written very much for a Jewish audience, but the Gospel of Luke, which is particularly rich in those sort of stories, is aimed at a Gentile audience. So they're thinking about where their readers are coming from, what their expectations are. What are the dates of the three, approximately? So the earliest traditions that we have in the whole New Testament

aren't the Gospels, it's probably the writings of Paul. So things like the letter to the Romans and Corinthians, where he basically just shouts at all sorts of different communities. That's a rather pithy prece of the... LAUGHTER Whatever. And then you have the Gosp are probably much much later so the very earliest the gospels would have been written is probably second generation even third generation christianity so you know they're a long way removed from from jesus of nazareth the interesting is why

were they written i mean just because i think thessalonians is the earliest writing and it's paul writing to these early communities of people who were trying to understand this new reality. But, of course, most of the first Christians, if we can call them that, thought that Jesus Christ would come back to rule in triumph in their lifetimes. And it's only when they think, actually, we're dying out and it's not happened yet, that there's a need to preserve those stories. So that's where the Gospels get written, probably around AD 70, 75,

going up to around AD 100, although scholars inevitably disagree about absolutely everything. And that's why Mary and the Magic Baby become so important because where is this man who supposedly, you know, he died, he was buried, supposedly he's resurrected and he's meant to be coming back to put the world in order, and where's he gone? So you need to have all these different sorts of stories that both add to the mystique, if you like, of this particular figure.

And which translation of the Bible is Mary and the magic baby now? Because I know we've gone from the King James version and the language has gone downhill a bit, but which one is the new, new, new revised version? It was always fascinating about the virgin birth. When I met Christians, they always had trouble with the virgin birth. I put this to the Dalai Lama when I was going to Everest that time, I had five days with the Dalai Lama.

I said, people find difficulty with the virgin birth. He said, no, no, we don't have trouble. After all, a being that can create the universe can easily impregnate a cell and we have no problem with that i found that uh with the delilah that he had a profound belief in jesus which was quite stunning i want to ask you guys what happened to j Jesus between the age of about 13 and 31, 32, 33? Where did he go? Because some of it sounds, you know, I bring not what you call peace. It's kind of a sword.

It almost sounds Buddhist. I mean, where did he go? A gap year. Went travelling. Well, we don't know. I mean, there are huge gaps in the CV. The problem, of course, with Jesus, the significance of Jesus, as the

Gospel writers want to show, is not the kind of significance that we would want as biographers, although the Gospels are, in a way, biography. And they do, just to complicate matters, they do contain, they come from a variety of sources. There are a couple of sources that we think once existed and we don't have any more, but there's evidence of them in the Gospels.

And also there's quite powerful evidence of being eyewitness material that had been circulated in communities, but not the sort of detailed CV that we would expect in a modern biography. And so he's always tantalisingly enigmatic, out of focus, out of reach. But that sort of serves our purposes, I think. Yeah, that serves the church's purposes, definitely. But as a historian i say you've got one of two options for what happens to jesus in between him being a kid

and then getting arrested and then crucified choice one is that he marries has a family like any good jewish man would have done it'd be very unusual for a man of his age not to have been married and to have lots of children in the family. Option two, which some scholars prefer, is that he was probably a follower of John the Baptist, who was one of a number of pseudo-Messianic figures walking around at the time. Do you think he was a Nassim? No.

But he might have been. But, I mean, I don't think he was Nassim. This is the community that some scholars think are responsible for the production or the maintenance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, because they remove themselves from mainstream society. But he was probably a follower of John the Baptist, as I said, who was one of a number of religious specialists, like Hony the Circle Drawer is my favourite. He just used to draw circles and people used to stand in them.

Seems to me quite a nice thing to do. On what basis? in them um seems to me quite a nice thing to do on what basis that they were magical um basically not magic in a derogatory sense magic in the sense of having this divine ritual power so if he was a follower of john the baptist then he probably was a part of this kind of probably mostly male dominated movement that would go around um shouting at people from community community in you know good old biblical prophet fashion. There's an interesting thing that opens up between us, which is that as a historian,

you're looking at things like probabilities, and you've used the word probably quite a lot, whereas from a faith perspective, we don't look for probabilities because there's nothing probable about this at all. It is a quite unique person doing something quite unique. And it's interesting, isn't it, sometimes where our two accounts come close together and then diverge because i would

fill in the gaps perhaps differently from her you would exactly and i think one of the in a way one of the biggest pr problems that christianity um had when it sort of first became popular was that it needed to um the things that it presents the idea about the resurrection about the magic baby um these are all things that were actually not the idea about the resurrection, about the magic baby, these are all things that were actually not exclusive to Christianity. These weren't new ideas. This is very much a recycling of much older mythological religious ideas. He's not the first god to die and then on the third day rise up again, for example.

So in a way, we tend to think in the west that christianity was this very unique exclusive you know this is suddenly there's this new thing in the world and it makes sense of everything in the most extraordinary way but actually there's nothing particularly unique about christianity we should perhaps go go back to the to the beginning if you go back to genesis what to eden no to genesis to genesis can i just, every time you say magic baby, I know that's woken up the old man who's in charge of the complaint's life. So he's drunk a bottle of sherry, thought nothing's going to happen after 11. Oh, that'll be magic baby again.

I don't know what to say, because, Chris, one of my favourite Apollo mission is Apollo 8, which was my first Christmas Eve, actually, 1968. Very famous moment, when it goes around the back of the moon and Borman, Lovell and Anders read from Genesis, King James Version, not this magic baby new version. So I thought we could play that, play that broadcast. We've got a clip from it.

Now approaching lunar sunrise and for all the people back on Earth the crew of apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light. See, Chris, before we get into the detail of that...

See, I want to do that, though, the Maida Vale Studios thing. Because it was where John Peel did all his sessions. I was like, there we go, there was Apollo 8 there, with another interesting take on Genesis chapter 1. I think we're hopefully going to get a session from Apollo 9 very soon. Anyway... Sorry, you had a serious question. I've rather spoilt it. Well, I was going to say, Chris, I always find that very powerful,

that moment of... Obviously, the first human beings to lose sight of the Earth in history, around the dark side of the moon. So I wondered what your memories were of Apollo, and also to ask the question of what it feels like to be in that kind of isolation in space and what they may have been thinking when they made that Christmas broadcast.

The first people to go to the moon, even that decision to take Apollo 8 around the moon was so quickly taken. The crews had just barely enough time to get technically ready for what was going to happen. Just barely. It was such a hurry, the space race, and trying to fulfill the destiny that Kennedy had left them before he was killed. So there was this immense urgency urgency and they could just barely keep up technically it was about was it about 12 weeks after the first test flight something like that so fast and the psychological preparation was basically nil they didn't think about what this

would mean to the human beings on board to get to a position where you could cover up the earth with your thumb or where um inevitably you were going to be on the other side of the moon, and all you could see was the blasted darkness of that side, and the endlessness of the universe, and what Earthrise was going to mean to those guys. I don't think they'd considered it. And it had a really profound effect on a lot of the people that saw it as a result. The fact, some crews, just because of the randomness of choosing, have sort of an agreement on religion, just because of however they were raised. Some, there are very different beliefs on board. The Columbia crew that were all killed on reentry back in 2003 was a very,

as it turned out, very religious crew. The commander was Rick Husband, a very strong believer, Southern U.S. kind of religion. And it had given them a great strength amongst their crew, a real sense of identity. And I think the Apollo 8 crew was the same. And 68 was a tough time for the world with what was happening in Vietnam, with the riots in universities. universities and I think that particular combination of not being ready of

sort of setting the crews adrift psychologically depending how they would deal with it but the strength that their common belief gave those three men I think was good for the whole world. I think it really shone kind of a light for everybody that nobody was expecting. There's a famous quote wasn't it? Someone sent a message

saying you saved 1968 didn't they? But is that now? So the implication is now you're psychologically much better prepared before you go for spaceflight. And of course, six months on the space station is very different. But the six months comes after many years of contemplation in advance, of getting ready. It's not sprung upon us.

And we have a long time getting to know the people that we're going to go with in advance of getting ready. It's not sprung upon us. And we have a long time getting to know the people that we're going to go with in advance. Since the start of the shuttle era, I don't know of one astronaut that's had basically an epiphany due to spaceflight, that has had a fundamental change of their belief or a significant change to themselves. Some of the guys came back from the moon alcoholic. They couldn't stand both what they'd seen

but combined with their loss of privacy when they came back. I just want, did you have a tire of the view? No, no. I mean, an hour before we were going to go get, on my third flight in space, an hour before we were going to get into our Soyuz and thunder back to Earth, we were all by the window.

Just floating, looking looking outside just trying to soak up something that that is endless and is that because you're looking at i mean i've loved your book i've seen your book your photographs taken of earth from i think 400 kilometers up i can't look at that without feeling this real pathos that i felt when i first saw that wonderful picture of the earth all blue and vulnerable and tiny in space. To me, the biggest indicator of that is there's this huge bulging window that we took those pictures from. And when you go, it's the cupola. Name, basically, a church kind of architectural feature.

But when you pull yourself down into the cupola towards the world, if another astronaut joins you in there, you speak in hushed tones because it feels like that. It feels like there's a great awe-inspiring presence to be there, just the omnipresence of the world, the rareness of it. There's just a hushed respect for what's happening. And you will float silent next to somebody else and occasionally just murmur something about what a spectacular sight our world is. And I think it reassures each of us. Whatever we're all believing up there,

it's immensely reassuring and reaffirming to see the world up. Brian, you've been, I mean, I know you did cosmonaut training, which we talked about, I think, last time. What has driven your desire to explore, to see different elements of the earth, I mean you've never made it into space I believe but you have the mountains that you've climbed I wonder in terms of whether you've had any sense of an epiphany

in these moments to see I find this inspirational wonderful what you're saying I embrace it it's kind of my religion but since the age of six I I've always been brokenhearted. Ever since I was told in Yorkshire by Mrs. Gummersall that there were other worlds besides the Earth,

that there was Mars, and I painted it at the age of six. Red. And I wanted to go there, and I was heartbroken. I still am. If you want the furthest place you can get out into space, it's Shimbarazo. The Scotiapaxi Shimbarazo in Ecuador. Shimbarazo is just over 20,000 feet high.

It's on the equatorial bulge. And if you put your hand out, if you're on the top of Shimbarazo, because it's not the top of Everest, because that's more northerly, on the sphere of the Earth, you put your hand out from Shimbarazo, and I think, now I'm getting close to Mars. And I want to go out there. Richard, this perspective of this tiny Earth, possibly infinite universe,

how would you feel if you got up there and with your faith you came around the dark side of the moon, saw Earth rise? What perspective would your faith place that in? Space travel did not have a large place in the syllabus at Theological College, I have to say. It was more of an elective, probably. I wish it had. Well, I mean, I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated.

I want to talk to you a lot about the physics of that, about how it should be that something as fragile and vulnerable as unexpected as our planet could exist at all and the onic conditions could prevail that could lead to life that could lead to people like us having this conversation thinking and talking and reflecting about it now that may be more than a five minute conversation there's a tendency always to separate religion from science and so forth so there's religion of course we mustn't touch that that's religion and this is science and and car. So there's religion, of course, we mustn't touch that. That's religion. And this is science. And Carl Sagan had the privilege many, many years ago

in the early 20s to meet him and talk to him. And he always maintained that the Hindu religion... This is not attacking Christianity. He always maintained that the Hindu religion, that science was completely in simpatico with the Hindu religion. The Hindu religion was completely cosmic. How do you feel that with Christianity? I mean, how do you feel with Christianity and science? I'm not a scientist, as is plainly evident to anyone listening to this conversation, but I would just observe that there are plenty of people who have been unshakable in Christian faith,

who have made extraordinary contributions to science, and some who still do. And I think the tension between the two is fascinating. But as a person of faith, I'm only too happy. I only want to understand better. And if science has got a better way of explaining the origin of the species than a literal reading of Genesis, well, then I'm with science, because, you know, it's about the truth, isn't it?

Well, probably the place where that clash is made most vivid is, as you said, in Genesis. And we heard the reading there, the words, everybody knows it, and it moved on the face, the spirit of God moved on the water. Francesca, that imagery is odd when you think about it, when you read Genesis. It's quite odd, and yet it makes complete sense. Actually, you'll like this. It's about chaos, but perhaps not the scientific idea of chaos,

but the idea that you can't have order from nothing. The idea that order has to have its other half, which is chaos. And so the idea about the creation of the world in six days, it's a very ritualistic text, but it's about the way in which God separates order from chaos in order to create the world. So the idea of the breath of God, it's the ruach, the breath or the wind of God moving over the face of these cosmic chaotic waters. It's about god imposing order on those waters and calming them um the six-day schema is really interesting because i was thinking about

it it's seven is a really again magic baby magic number this time seven write that down but the seven-day schema is really interesting because seven um was the number of of heavenly bodies that the ancient people could see so including the sun the moon and then the five planets i guess closest to earth and these were believed to be the gods they had an idea that the gods and they were more than one of them and the the people that wrote the hebrew scriptures you know didn't believe in just one god they believed in many gods and so they believed that god could be present in his cult statue in the temple and interestingly the language that we've got about god creating man and woman and in the image of man and woman he created them. It's very much the idea that it's the language that's used to create a cult statue in a temple

with the metal work and the special ritual to open the mouth and to breathe into the statue so that these statues of the gods became alive basically in the temples. So that whole idea is very much about the way that the divine realm impacts the earthly realm in such a way that the two are inextricably connected. So I suppose that idea about perspective when you're up in space. I was just falling very heavily in love with you as you were talking, Chris. I'm so sorry. I'm a bit giddy. But I thought I need to have a conversation with him about religion and the Bible.

Because actually that idea about perspective, it's very much an ancient idea the idea that we're it's not just about us uh that there is something beyond what we can see that somehow that relationship between the heavenly realm and the earthly realm and even the underworld the place where all the dead go are all inextricably connected can i just say well done francesca for what if anyone's thought this show has a bit of a split personality, one moment it's about space next to the Bible back and forth. Basically what happened was Chris turned out to be in the UK when we were recording this, long after we pitched the show about the Bible. I imagine we can incorporate space somehow.

Some of the rings of Saturn. Tell us about the magi. Anyway, back to you. Sorry, anyway, I don't want to break up this beautiful Doris Day Rock Hudson moment. So religion, science, please continue. Well, I don't want to break up this beautiful Doris Day Rock Hudson moment. So religion, science, please continue. Well, I just want... The other thing I find interesting about that imagery in the first few verses of Genesis, there's a lot of water involved in the face of the deep and all that.

And I read, so maybe you can enlighten me or correct me on this, that was a reference back to perhaps taken from Egyptian religion, that there's an idea about, you know, the Nile is the important thing there. So you find there are echoes of earlier traditions in that narrative would that be there are certainly echoes of earlier traditions and but it's not so much that some people thought is it the idea of kind of controlling this watery chaos is that an allusion to the idea about the Nile rising and falling and that kind of thing but it's probably not what it's probably a reference to is the big creation myth in the bible that everyone misses so it doesn't occur in the in

the first few chapters of genesis it's the what scholars call the chaos camp the the battle or the struggle with the chaos monster and so we read in texts like uh isaiah 51 and psalm 72 various in the book of Job in particular. The earlier creation myth that we have, sort of that the biblical writers knew and shared, was a myth that was shared with lots of other societies and cultures at the same time. The idea that the creator god, who isn't necessarily the top god, he's just like the kind of buff one,

he basically has to fight the chaos monster. The chaos monster is this seven-headed, writhing, dragon-like, chaotic water being. Sometimes it's a male divine being, sometimes female. The Babylonians knew of this tradition, the Canaanites. And it has, I mean, a lot of scholars have argued it's got something very similar to do with a lot of Eastern religious traditions as well. And that basically God, or whichever God it is, defe defeats the chaos monster splits the body of this chaos monster in the babylonian tradition it's the god marduk that splits tiamat this chaos monster from vagina to mouth and with half of her watery corpse he roofs the heavens makes the heavenly realm so the chaos waters are controlled and then with the other half he makes the underworld and separates it from the earthly realm. So that little tiny verse at the beginning of Genesis that talks about the spirit or the breath or the wind of God hovering above the face of the water, it's about suppression and order.

And some people think this is almost like a demythologized account of this battle of God's fighting the water dragon. Well, the other bit is in when in um when it talks about god planting a garden so it's like the second creation account in genesis two and three um it talks about the great sea monsters and the word is tanin which is kind of dragon chaos monster and it says oh he created those no no he didn't fight him he created this sermon for you there richard on the chaos monster huge potential for my crib scene this year for you there, Richard. Why have you dropped this bit? Huge potential for my crib scene this year. I have to say,

I used to be in a church where we had an Easter garden and one year I went to the Easter garden to bless it on Easter morning and one of the boys had put a velociraptor in there. Does anyone want a sherry, by the way? But a really interesting thing, when you're talking...

Oh, yeah, thank you. We'll see you there. Can I just say, no-one is as vicarish as the Reverend Richard Coles. Even when he was in the communards, I used to watch him on Top of the Pops go, he should be a vicar. You are... The way that you said, oh, thank you, when the sherry was offered, that was a delight. It's an interesting thing when you're talking to Francesca, thinking that there's two things happening on there.

There's the narratives that float around in different cultures, in different traditions, communities, transmissions, and then there's the context in which they happen. And the significance is when context appropriates the narrative. In a certain way, I was thinking, Chris, when we were hearing the Apollo astronaut read Genesis, from the most exalted place of all, looking from the heavens back onto the earth.

And, of course, that's an enormous stage on which to stand and proclaim and declaim from. But, actually, originally, that was a kind of local riff, Francesca, wasn't it? Genesis 1 was written not with that sense of exaltation in mind, but as a sort of poem to a people to try to understand something about the origins of their particular tribe or nation or even village.

Well, probably temple. It probably reflects this kind of rituals that were going on in the jerusalem temple when it was all a very exclusive urban elite privileged group that that you know nobody else knew much about really you know and once religion comes into it particularly if you've got a big universalist religion with ambitions on the world well that inflates all that stuff and it starts to be seen as normative for the whole of humanity when actually what it really is is a little local argument sometimes. Yeah, absolutely, and it's very local, the Bible, and so its success as probably, you know,

the best-known collection of texts in the world, it still makes me feel completely, you know, I feel the same way about that as I do when we were listening to Genesis 1, verses 1 to 3 being read from outer space. It's just, oh my God, it's amazing. So it's interesting relating the kind of the adventures to the metaphysical. Now it's Christmas. I am Father Christmas on television frequently, and I'm the voice of Father Christmas all the time. And I was on the World Service the other day, having to talk to all the children of the world as Father Christmas, and they were asking me questions like you can answer. And I come,

how do you deliver, Father Christmas, presents to everybody all over the world at the same time? Of course, the thing to do so you can think is laugh. Ha-ha-ha! It gives you time to think. I was talking to Rudolph about this the other day. Yes, indeed. You see, I freeze time.

Oh, acceptable. Then the religion came, which is a dangerous subject these days. What is your favorite religion? And then I dug in. And then I remembered St. Paul saying, One spirit, many paths. So there are many roads to God. And I found that kind of had a very big impact on me

and got me out of an awful lot of trouble. You know, Lemaître, the first physicist to use Einstein's equations of general relativity to predict that there was an origin of the universe, the Big Bang. He was the first physicist to do this, also a Belgian priest. And he said something similar. He said there are two roads to the truth, and I took both of them. You and I, you and I, I must hold you on this.

You and I have a slight disagreement. I'm being very metaphysical here about the Big Bang. Now, I've talked to Zubrin. I've talked to different geologists and microbiologists and top scientists. Of course I have. And you know, in the Bhagavad Gita, not the Bhagavad Gita, then God says to Brahma when he comes out of the lotus, create the universe as you have done many times before but have forgotten. And Brahma goes

and blows out on a breath the universe. And I feel, and Zubrin feels, Zubrin feels, I feel that it's not a big bang. I think that's, I always find it crude, but it's a big, creative, radioactive breath. And at the end of time, then Brahma sucks it in again. Now, how do you feel about that? The current view of our bit of the universe,

our piece of space time is it because it's accelerating in its expansion currently through a process that we don't understand so we call it dark energy but it seems to be accelerating then if nothing happens it will continue to accelerate and expand forever however the current i think almost still debatable but one of the current fashionable views about cosmology is that our Big Bang has an explanation. There was something before that. It's called inflationary cosmology.

So the time before the Big Bang, when the universe is accelerating exponentially fast, and some of those cosmologies suggest that the universe doesn't stop expanding exponentially fast all at once, but stops in patches. And therefore, almost as you say, there's more than one Big Bang. In fact, there can be an infinite number of Big Bangs in these cosmologies. And potentially, the universe could have been around for,

well, it could have been around for a very long time before our Big Bang happened. And it could possibly, or there's argument about this, have been around forever, which is actually an interesting... I mean, that's Richard, perhaps. If you have an eternal universe... This is what got Giordano Bruno into trouble in 1600, many historians say, isn't it? The fact that he was claiming the universe was eternal

was the thing that caused a bit of trouble. Not the Copernicus. It wasn't heretical at the time, I don't think, was it? But he got kind of burnt at the stake, in a Python-esque way, actually. You get his tongue nailed to his lower jaw, as far as I remember, in order to prevent him repeating his heresy and making it worse for himself while he was being burned at the stake. But this idea of an eternal universe,

which is now currently fashionable, perhaps, in cosmology. I wonder if it's not reconcilable with the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Because to creation out of nothing, you could interpret that as eternal too. I've got a question for you. Forgive me, I'm not very good at this, but... Oh, I was hoping it was just going to end with forgive me. This level of particle physics has reached that stage.

Forgive me with the wand of the LHC. How singular does a singularity have to be? Well, in these current theories, so the inflationary theories, where there's something before the Big Bang, you can avoid that singular behaviour. So you don't have to have this moment which it's interesting we talked about la metra earlier that pious the 12th i think it was it was the pope at the time i just after the 50s uh yeah i think when well la metra it was 1925 when la metra put this

forward but i think one of maybe it would have been Pius XI. The 11th then. Again, this is a conversation happening in all the drunk Christmas houses. Pius XI, shut your face! Oh, Granspunch George again. But he said this is tremendous because science has shown the creation event, actually. It's revealed the creator to us. And the Metro, I think, felt that very seriously.

And Einstein fought against what his theory tells you, which is that because you can't have a stable space-time, you can't have a stable cosmos in Einstein's theory. It's expanding or contracting. And that's what led Lemaître to say, I think... He said to Einstein, I think your theory suggests there was a day without a yesterday. Yeah.

And Einstein famously said, your mathematics is excellent, but your physics is lousy. Because he didn't like the idea there was a creation. He felt an eternal universe was more natural, and I suspect he wanted to avoid this idea of a singularity. Why do we want... Is it because the nature of the universe's expansion inevitably makes us want to think that there was a point where that began?

No, it's there in the standard theory, in Einstein's theory just taken at the Big Bang cosmology. You collapse to a point where the equations break down. It looks like there's a point of infinite density, infinite curvature of space-time, if you like, and the theory stops working. So what happens beyond that is you need some kind of quantum theory of gravity and we don't have it so so

the basically einstein's theory stops working if you have a universe that collapses down to these very small distance in a funny sort of way though i think the biblical writers would quite like that idea and so even though you know they're're a bunch of bearded blokes, no offence, writing in sort of, you know, 7th, 6th centuries BCE at the earliest. I want to say, and ladies, I want to go into a Python sketch. But they very much... This idea about creation from nothing isn't in the Hebrew text. You can read that the Hebrew text is quite ambiguous.

So, you know, it's... So in the beginning, we tend to translate it, in the beginning, God created. But we tend to think that that means in the beginning of everything but it doesn't it just means on that day when he happened to start creating like you know he'd been doing something else the day before tuesday tea time yeah exactly and also very much the idea that it's not just one creation creation is always happening you're having to create and recreate and recreate and recreate so So it actually suits very much an ancient, Judahite, 8th century BCE perspective.

One of my academic interests is in New Testament textual transmission, which is looking at how the texts we have in the New Testament now, how they went through various permutations and redactions and additions and so on. When you start doing that, you think what you're trying to do is to get back to the original text. What did Paul write, sitting there with his secretary, whoever it was, when he was writing this letter to the Romans? And what I came to feel more and more powerfully was that there is no original text. There is no beginning.

How do you isolate that point to which you can genuinely say this is the beginning of something? And you can't, because you have a thought, you have an idea, you have a first draft, you have this, you have that, and so on and so on and so on. And those questions proliferate and make it harder and harder ever to get to that precise point beyond which there was not the text, if you see what I mean. And I'm wondering if there's a sort of...

This is what we do in sermons all the time, is make wildly unsupportable assertions from very flimsy data indeed. You heard it first. You've been at Monkey Cave. Happy Christmas everyone. But it just fascinates me that idea again of, I've always had this idea of the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang as being a cone

with a pointy end. But then it occurred to me that you could have a cone like a shuttlecock with a semi spherical end. And then where's the point of origin on that? Stephen Hawking and his collaborators talk about these kind of cosmologies. I suppose that fundamental physics at the moment, part of it is addressing this question,

which is that Einstein's theory breaks down formally at the beginning of the universe universe if you want to call it at this time 13.8 billion years ago when we measure that the universe was hot and dense although with modern inflationary cosmologies as i said that there's very strong evidence there was a time before that the universe was cold actually but accelerating exponentially fast so that's textbook now and how long that was going on for is absolutely unknown. We don't measure that. We measure the point to when it became hot and dense

and expanded more sedately from that point. So when you can start to take a reading, as it were. Yeah. This Bible study is not going very well at all, is it? We still seem to be on sentence one of Genesis. Chris, I was going to ask you, there's been some talk of the Bible in between inflationary theories and the Dalai Lama,

but in terms of the poetry, I mean, Brian before was reading, he found Brian Cox was reading a modern version of the Bible, which he felt had all the poetry removed. Now, one of the things that has kept this as a book, why it is so enormously read, is the poetry. that has kept this as a book, why it is so enormously read, is the poetry. Where do you see the great poetry of talking about ideas of space,

ideas of the science, of Jupiter, of Mars, of the stars? It's really important to me to try and express the uniqueness of what we're seeing properly so that someone else can understand it, and to try and put it into a context of time. When is this going to happen? How are we going to understand it? What's it going to mean to us?

But I don't know that anybody expresses it very well yet. You know, the first people, who has properly brought back the experience of standing on the top of Everest? Has it really, truly been? It's a huge personal experience for the people that have done it, especially if you do it right at the limit of what oxygen is supporting. It's an immense personal experience,

but how well have they shared that unique geometric position as well as that unique psychological position back to the rest of us? Because there's only a very small select few that have had a chance to do that. And spaceflight is even more esoteric and harder to get to. And it's so technically hard that only a very small subset of us are allowed to even go to this point. Do you think that's part of the reason why there's waning and changing public support for spaceflight,

that we haven't been able to verbalise or explain how important and how meaningful it is. When our son Evan insisted to me that I record Space Oddity on the space station, my first reaction was a typical previous generation father of, why would I do that? And besides, the astronaut dies at the end, so it's a depressing song. Comes back in ashes to ashes, though, doesn't it?

True, yeah. As a memory, as a heroin addict, though, it's not good. But he convinced me to do it. And I did it because, partially just because my son asked, but partially because I there was sort of a I could sense as an undercurrent that maybe this was partial answer to Robin's question in that how do I I mean I'm taking pictures and I'm making videos and I'm explaining this uniquely rare human experience to the best of my ability but how do I truly express it how do I truly try

and let people on board to see what's happening? And so Evan said, you should really do this iconic song. I did it, and just listening to the way it had sort of seeped into the way I sang it surprised me. And that spurned us even further to try and make it into something that everybody else could see. Made the video and released it. further to try and make it into something that everybody else could see, made the video and released it. And looking now at the huge, way disproportionate reaction that there should be to just some guy singing a song floating around. I mean, hundreds of millions of people have looked at that. And I've asked myself why? I mean, there are, I'm not the best singer in the world. I'm

just a singer. I'm definitely not the best guitarist in the world. I'm just a guitar player. I'm not the best singer in the world. I'm just a singer. I'm definitely not the best guitarist in the world. I'm just a guitar player. Why did that become so compelling for so many people? And I think it's because it starts to answer that question of what does this really mean? And how can we start to understand it?

And trying to artistically express it is the best that we can do. Scientifically, we've got it nailed. I can tell you everything about the space station and the speed and the pressure and the aluminum-lithium hull and all of that, but what does it mean to us fundamentally? And when we talk about Genesis, to me, when I look at the pictures that the Hubble telescope sends us, to me, that is the illustration of the start of the Bible, to me. Those pictures should be the illustrations, those ethereal, where you can't figure out the scale or the age, and yet there's an inherent, undeniable beauty to them

that attracts us all. I think it's all tied together, and we have to understand it fundamentally and artistically in order to really get a feel for what it means to us as a people but also there's when you were saying about the YouTube well that was where most people saw it

that clip where well the whole song there's a point where you float past and you said that there's the window and there's the planet Earth now we've seen lots of CGI versions and there's nothing you could do about it there's nothing

nothing you could do but there is CGI image of the planet Earth. Now, we've seen lots of CGI versions of the planet Earth. There's nothing you could do about it. But there is. CGI image of the planet Earth is not the same. It's for some reason, even on a tiny little computer screen, going, that's real. It doesn't matter how many times. And again, trying to replicate that feeling. Things like the image where you're just in space

and you're just wringing out a cloth. You're wringing out a damp cloth. You're showing how you wash in space. All of those things, they could be done by CGI. But you watch you doing it, and there's something going, this is happening, this is real. The crossover between fantasy, science fiction, which is just fantasy, and science reality is immensely compelling. And it doesn't happen all that often.

And you can listen to this great discussion of cosmology, but we've got a lot of it fundamentally wrong. We can't get to the right core of the answer, right? Cosmology. Yeah. I mean, we don't know what we call it, dark energy and dark matter. And it all breaks down when you get back to the very beginning. And so then how do you explain it? And you can call it faith, or you can call it art, or you can just call it ignorance. But somehow

in amongst all that, each of us needs to come to terms with the meaning of it. We owe you a debt of gratitude. I mean, because you're an explorer, you're pointing the way. And everyone, we're all explorers. We all should be given the chance. I feel that space, what you're pointing the way is for everybody. That's what you're saying. And so that it becomes

kind of flesh and blood. I mean, explorers are our flesh and blood become reality. And so we, it's not just looking through windows and it's not just so-and-so. You have actually added a spiritual and inspirational. You encourage people to be adventurous to go out there. You point

a finger. You point to space. You point to adventure. And people say to me, is it not point a finger, you point to space, you point to adventure. And people say to me, is it not dangerous, Brian, you're going to the North Pole? Is it not dangerous at your age going to Mount Everest, etc., etc.? I think the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure. We're almost out of time. Just a suggested answer to your question, Robin,

which is why does the world through the window of the International Space Station look more compelling than that which can be imagined by Hollywood? The answer is that we see through a glass darkly because we don't see the whole thing. We see the corner of it that flies past as you go by every 92 minutes, and there's something authentic about that, the glimpse of it, the incompleteness of it.

That's what captivates us, I think, rather than just the product of an imagination and a big computer producing a simulacrum of it. It's theeness of it, that's what captivates us, I think, rather than just the product of an imagination and a big computer producing a simulacrum of it. It's the reality of it. What do you think about Seti? We can't deal with that. We're going to deal with that in the next show that you're going to be on. Will you be on the next series?

No-one goes from Seti to the Dalai Lama back again and via Princess Margaret without the ability that you have. Fantastic. He didn't do Princess Margaret, did he? That's not going to make the air, is it? I'm so sorry, listeners at home. It was rather a saucy anecdote.

So we asked the audience what message they would have read out from space if they had been that Christmas Eve 1968 Apollo crew, and here are some of the answers we have had. What did one snowman say to the other? Do you smell carrots? That would of course have been an entirely inspiring message

from Apollo 8. This one says something in Klingon just to really confuse Seti. Brian! Seti! No! No! Can things only get better? Hopefully, yes. Lots of love, Apollo 8. We're being prescient. This may well not come to you until 1993.

From here, the Earth looks like an undercooked Brussels sprout. You didn't say the second bit. From here, the Earth looks like an undercooked Brussels sprout. People of Earth, pull my finger. And you understand why I didn't say it. So, thank you very much to our guests who've obviously joined us here

on Christmas evening and they haven't, obviously we recorded this on the 12th of June we have no idea whether Christmas is even going to occur on Earth this year, it may well have been destroyed because Brian said that his astrologer told him something terrible may well happen on the 23rd of December

and he's not sure if it's going to be a meteorite hit or just a new wig. I presume you knew it was a wig. Did you not know it was a wig? Anyway, so very wiggy. So thank you to Francesca Strava-Coppolo, Chris Hadfield, Brian Blessed and the Reverend Richard Coles. Thank you very much for listening. Have a very happy Christmas and goodbye.

Thank you. thank you very much for listening have a very happy Christmas and goodbye in the infinite monkey cage without you traveling in the infinite monkey cage turn that nice again in our new podcast nature answers rural stories from a changing planet we are traveling with you to

Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.