The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science and Religion

Episode Date: December 21, 2009

Physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince take a witty, irreverent and unashamedly rational look at the world according to science. Robin and Brian are joined by Victor Stock, Dean of Guildford Cathedral, and science journalist Adam Rutherford for a special Christmas edition of the programme. Adam explains why religion really could be good for your health, and can Victor convert Robin and Brian in time for the festive season?

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are travelling 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. Thank you for downloading this programme from BBC Radio 4. For more information, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. Welcome to the last infinite monkey cage in the series. The title is infinite, but Radio 4's requirements of us are finite. I'm Robin Ince, and over the course of the last four weeks, I've been more surprised than I imagined about how little I know. It turns out the universe is really

big. And I'm Brian Cox, and I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, by which I mean I used to work on an STFC science funding committee. And as it's Christmas week today, we'll be discussing science and religion. And do remember, you get a prize if you got the STFC funding committee Oppenheimer gag there. So that's the last of the science funding jokes out the way. And I think they went down tremendously well. Radio Times, a rave review.

Thank you, Robin. Anyway, to help finally solve this eternal quandary in under 28 minutes, science versus religion, science and religion, we are joined in the monkey cage by Chris Addison, actor, writer, and best known perhaps as Ollie in the BBC hit comedy The Thick of It. And he's on the side of possibly the recently fallen. And we're also delighted to have the Right Reverend Victor Stock,

Dean of Guildford. Hello. What an excellent... We haven't had a hello like that in the series at all. That's what Dean should sound like. Hello. Chris, you have done various shows specifically about science One about evolution

And then, I think possibly what to me would be the trickiest one You did a solo stand-up show about the periodic table I did, yes Did people laugh? They did, yes, yes See, you can do it It's possible But there was one point in the show where

About ten minutes in I didn't like to do it straight away Because people, you know, you have to warm them into this kind of thing. I pulled on a string which revealed the periodic table and every single night you could hear, oh. As people saw this thing, you know, this wall of

impenetrable nonsense that had tortured them as children. Do you have a gag for every element? I mean, I was thinking, is it Thulium that might be a tough one? They're all quite tough. I don't think I had a gag for every element. I did try, the very, is it Thulium that might be a tough one? They're all quite tough. I don't think I had a gag for every element. I did try, the very first preview I did of the show, which was in York, I had no structure, and so I went through

the periodic table, doing the jokes about the elements I'd written in order, and that turned out to be no way to do a show. The show itself was called Atomicity, and it was about how we are with science, and what our response to the universe is, which is that we attempt to control it and that we've used it to understand and investigate further

and further control what we're doing. But any shows that I've written about science or history or what have you that are comedy shows, the rule has always been the jokes come first. So what actually happens in the writing process is I end up with the best jokes I've got and then I find a way of stringing them together. Victor, we met in this grey area between science and religion, didn't we? Because I met you at your cathedral.

I was the token atheist on the panel, and I think we found more common ground than either of us had imagined. And then you came to CERN to see my... I did, at your invitation. That was fantastic. And I remember you taking me round it, and we went round that underground bit, the size of a circle line, and I was supposed to respond, and, you know, like all kind of people who don't know anything about science,

I just went, oh, goodness, it's huge, isn't it? Wow. Oh, I said, it's ever so long. And that sort of really kind of informed, you know, highly educated response. And then, mercifully, I found a bit... I said, look, is that held together with baking foil? And everybody went... Because it actually was.

And I have a theory that that's a bit that fell off and stopped the whole experiment from working. Am I right about that or not? No. Good. Not surprising. That's a relief. Anyway, it was great, wasn't it?

I hugely enjoyed it. Well, yeah, and, you know, it's often... So mysterious. Well, it is. It's often reported there should be some tension between the scientific worldview and the religious worldview. I mean, there's obviously Richard Dawkins, there's Christopher Hitchens. So did you find that there was anything there

about exploring, you know, the very early universe, about the scientific projects in general, that caused you to think there must be a tension, there's something inherent there? Absolutely not. And just after I had that experience with you, I was preaching in Westminster Abbey and there were a lot of American students and I noticed them

and we were having some public conversation about Darwin at that stage last year and I said, over there, just beneath where you're sitting, Darwin is buried. And I said, when Darwin was buried, there was absolutely no difficulty for the dean and chapter of Westminster to give a Christian burial to Darwin and honour him with a place in the abbey. In your country, I think the United States, there are people called creationists.

At the end, I was fascinated by the number of Americans who came up, in a rather sweet way, you know, they do, and said, thank you very much, you know, we're going to tell people in Arkansas we heard this in Westminster Abbey. So I think for the Anglican Church, which has struggled to keep up with what's going on in the world, there hasn't been any innate difficulty about working alongside scientists. After all, lots of scientists have been ordained and priests.

I mean, two archbishops of York ago, Lord Habgood was an ordained scientist. We could do with a few more. Why do you think people just at certain parts around the world and in education now as well, there is such a problem to believe both in the theory of evolution and believe in a deity? Well, I think it's to do with education, isn't it?

To do with anxiety. And that huge tension there is when people want control. And some people want to have a controlling religion and some people want to have a controlling science and then the two leviathans lock their horns. And it seems to me to be rather foolish because both people are dealing with making maps, trying to understand things, exploring things, looking at things, what's this about kind of questions, and I can't

see what the tension really is unless you flip over into that I've got the answer to everything, which religion tends to do. It's always wrong, of course, because religion hasn't got the answer to everything. Chris, you describe yourself as a lapsed Anglican. Why did you lapse? It seems to me if your vicar had been like Victor, you may have... Possibly not. I can't really agree with Victor about there's no tension. I think there's an incredible tension, and that's the thing that eventually led me away from the church.

If it could be proved to me that God existed, and preferably the God of the Anglican church, I'm not really interested in the others, I would be there in a heartbeat. I would love that. That would be the greatest gift that you could give to me. So it was doubt about the whole premise? Yeah, in the end, it finished me off. I mean, it took years, and I think I'd probably stopped believing

long before I admitted it to myself. And I've never really talked about this. And it was a hard and emotional thing to do. There's a wonderful passage in one of the Captain Alatrice novels where the narrator says, a man's true home is his childhood. My childhood's in church. I brought myself up religious. My parents, my father's an atheist Jew and my mother was nominally Anglican but never really went to church and I made the decision to go myself. But I sang a lot in choirs and things like that when I was a kid, anthems.

I was married in my childhood church and there was a huge choir there singing these anthems that I'd sung as a kid, and it was incredibly important to me, very moving. And to lose that, to lose the thing, the light at the centre of that, has been actually quite heartbreaking. But I find that I can't accept it

because what's led me to this is just an examination of what I think is likely, what I think can happen. And one of the reasons that people don't want to let go of their religion is there's a sense of being special, of humankind and life in itself and the world being special because it's been placed there. It's been carefully created and placed there by this caring figure. And it means that we somehow transcend any idea of, you know, animal nature. But actually, within science, there is enough. Within what you're doing at CERN, I mean, this is why the LHC makes me incredibly excited, because within all of that, there is enough wonder, I think, to get us through. Yeah, but I think that's, I agree with all you're saying.

And I can't see why that should bring you to the conclusion that there is no God. It's about what we mean by the word, isn't it? Yeah, possibly. And how we approach all that stuff. And what I've just said about the trouble with religion is it sets itself up all the time to have the answers to everything, particularly in areas about which it knows nothing or very little at all.

We're also joined by the biologist Adam Rutherford, who has fortunately... You've actually investigated this to some extent because you've been off on an alpha course, which asked the question, is there a God, yes, no or probably? And I think their current advertising campaign, having been on an alpha course, where did you end up?

Which box did you tick? Well, the course doesn't really ask that question. What it does is it pretends to ask that question and then says, there is a God, and here is why there is a God, and then attempts to provide a load of evidence to assert that there is a God. So on that checklist where it asks, yes, no, probably, they're very much in the yes camp,

whereas everyone else is almost certainly in the probably camp. I came out of it very clearly not a Christian. But did you go there just to see where this journey would take you? Did you do it as an investigative journalist? Did you have a preconceived view before you went on the course? I'm an orthodox atheist, but I'm not of the ilk that says that people who do believe in God or whatever God you choose are a bit deluded.

So I'm really interested in why people have faith. And so I went on this course, which is sort of three hours every Tuesday night for ten weeks. My goodness. Which was some commitment. Like Chris, I spent a lot of my youth growing up in church being in choirs and stuff like that, so this was really my first return to church as a 33-year-old.

And every Tuesday evening we'd discuss the nature of Christianity, but from a very, very shallow perspective. Well, Adam, we've actually sent out our reporter, Tracy Logan, who's looking into how scientific researchers have started to examine whether religion gives its believers benefits in difficult situations. So this is what she found out. Heads immersed in a giant magnet, deafened and alarmed by scary sounds from the scanner,

this experiment wasn't for the faint-hearted. Before it started, volunteers were told only that pain and the perception of pain while looking at different pictures was to be studied. But researchers, led by the psychologist and neuroscientist Katja Wich, had carefully chosen one of those pictures to put half of their subjects into a religious mood. Well, the experiment was actually pretty simple. We applied electrical stimuli to the back of the participant's hand,

and the stimuli were painful but absolutely tolerable, so it wasn't torture. And while we inflicted the pain, participants were looking at two different types of images. One was an image of the Virgin Mary, and the other image was also an image of a young lady, but without a religious connotation. It was the Lady with the Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci and we actually tested two different groups. One group devoted Catholics, Roman Catholics, and the other group was devoted atheists and agnostics and we showed the pictures to both of these groups and looked at the brain responses while they were experiencing the pain. On the day I visited, it was researcher Wiebke Tida

with her hands on the electric dial, Roman Catholic volunteer George at her mercy. Hi, George, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm fine. OK, I would like to go up a little bit higher. Could you please tell me as soon as the pain reaches an 8 out of 10? Yes. Now?

OK, that's your new maximum. I won't go higher than that. The brain scanner was focused on a region inside George's right temple which our brains use to attach meaning to painful stimuli. Childbirth versus cancer, for instance. So what did that scanner see? And did any of the pictures dull the pain? The Roman Catholics were much better in dealing with the pain when they were looking at the Virgin Mary,

whereas the atheists found the secular image more interesting than the Virgin Mary, but didn't show reduction of pain. And of course, we were very interested in what was the brain doing when the Roman Catholics managed to decrease the pain or dampen the pain. And what we saw was there was a tiny little area in the right frontal part of the brain coming up while they were looking at the image. And that was specific for the Roman Catholics when they were looking at the Virgin Mary. What do you know about that particular area of the brain? Well, it's an area we've seen before, and so we knew already that it had something to do with the feeling of being safe.

The idea that feelings of safety had helped Roman Catholic George to withstand moderately high electric currents of 2.6 milliamps compared with my 0.6 milliamps was backed up in this interview with psychologist Miguel Farias at the end of the experiment. I wanted to think back on the picture of the Virgin Mary. Did you find that when you looked at the picture it affected your state of mind? Did it make you feel calmer, aroused or just indifferent? Calmer, yes. If you feel if you are in the church, in silence and relaxed. And it's quite familiar because we go to church at home every Sunday, so it's a familiar feeling.

Researchers believe something similar could happen to people of many different faiths, or even none at all, if in each case a picture could be found that triggered those same feelings of safety in the brain, so soothing the pain. Adam Rutherford, obviously you've investigated this more. What's your reaction to what those researchers found out? It's a fascinating and important study, I think, but this is how I'd qualify it. The area of the brain that she mentioned is called the right ventral prefrontal cortex. Now, the reason we know about this already

is because it's exactly the same area of the brain which fires up during the same studies when you're looking at how the placebo effect works. And so effectively, I think my interpretation is what it's saying is that not that Catholics are experiencing less pain, but subconsciously the brain is doing the thing that it does in the placebo, which is how they deal with that pain. It's effectively saying, I'm experiencing this pain, and this is how I'm going to deal with it. Victor, so that would perhaps suggest that religion works,

but is essentially a placebo. It's whatever makes you feel comfortable. I'm comfortable with the idea of placebo and I'm not anxious about the real basis. This needs a bit of unpacking, but I don't think I ever, as a religious person, have worried about certainty, about real basis. I'm much more interested in the Dalai Lama's approach.

For example, when he says, practice your religion, he doesn't say, practice my religion, and he doesn't make claims for his particular kind of Tibetan Buddhism. He simply says to people in the world, practice your religion. Now, it's in the practicing that I find comfort, there's a word, and encouragement to explore ideas. Well, of course, one of the,

if one goes to biblical text, one of the problems is that the tension between science and religion is because of knowledge. The tree of knowledge, and we do sometimes wonder, would we have been happier as naked zombies lying down with donkeys and lions? So we decided to discover a little bit more about what was going on in the Garden of Eden

and we tuned into the Pros from Dover Science News Channel. There's just time to bring you some breaking news from Eden, where the world's first woman has been created using genetic material harvested from the rib of a living male donor. The news has angered religious groups the world over for whom the moral implications are a source of grave concern. This monstrous experiment strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human.

It's yet another example of these gods thinking they can just play scientist. It's abominable. Although advocates argue that the procedure will help millions of womanless couples, the identity of the god in question is being kept secret as religious groups picket churches

and Sunday schools across the country. There's nothing divine about it. It's disgraceful. A woman should be created in a loving relationship by a man and a woman, or possibly a man and a pair of lesbians, or two gay men and a woman. Not by some megalomaniac from a piece of genetic material.

It's Frankenstein science. Though unavailable for comment, the deity has already revealed plans to create a human baby in utero, possibly in Bethlehem, where legislation is more liberal, without the need for a sperm donor, and in the presence of several sheep, which may or may not have been cloned. Weather now, and with a severe locust warning, here's Karen.

Victor, I think the kind of heart of that sketch is that people like to be in comfort zones, and change is a thing that disturbs people. I mean, you actually see it in science as well. I mean, the reaction to this show has been interesting. We discussed astrology last week, and the very mention of the word astrology, we'll get the same letters for mention in religion,

in a certain area of the scientific community, among science fans, is considered to be sacrilegious. I mean, we've got a tweet saying, disappointed by the show, promoting rubbish like astrology, you're supposed to be sacrilegious. I mean, we've got a tweet saying, disappointed by the show, promoting rubbish like astrology, you're supposed to be promoting science and reason. I mean, is there some element of that, or you see a large element of that in your congregation?

It's comfortable. You don't want any strange ideas coming in and shaking you up. Well, again, to be fair to Anglicanism, I think where Anglicanism as a form of Christianity is healthy, it does ask difficult questions and shake people up. I mean, I'm just thinking about the virgin birth in a new way just now. I'm thinking, isn't it interesting that everybody focuses on, as it were, the science of the virgin birth?

The ancient world didn't think that. The ancient world was saying Jesus was such an important person. Brackets, when we wrote the Gospels, we had to say later on, he had that sort of miraculous birth that everybody had, who was terribly important and the son of God and stuff. You know, not the only virgin birth in history. All gods and goddesses had virgin births. And so it's interesting that we have these arguments, and we've had them for a very long time since the Enlightenment, but they're scientific arguments about something which really isn't science.

Adam, this seems to be really where the big debate, again, which has risen up in the last ten years of science versus religion, which comes down to, which is, you know, creationism needs to be given or intelligent design equal time to evolution. We had a guest on the first week, Alice Roberts, said that she had some of her students once complain because she was teaching the theory of evolution as if it were a fact. Yeah, I get these kind of questions a lot when I do talks to schoolchildren.

One girl last week put up her hand and said, thank you for your talk, it was rubbish. And I said, well, which bit of it was rubbish? And she said, all of it. And I think this is exactly the problem because for several thousand years, religion has had the monopoly on truth, right? And in the last few hundred years, at an increasing rate,

science has been chipping away at that truth to give, depending on your viewpoint, either a truer truth or a better truth. I happen to think it's a better truth because it's evidence-based and it's something we can understand and it's constantly evolving. But the problem is that you reach this point where historically religion has said this is true and now science is saying, well, this isn't true. And also this truth keeps changing because that is the nature of the scientific method.

And that doesn't make it less true. It actually makes it stronger. That's hard to countenance. Chris. Chris. What? Come on, Chris. I haven't got the answers.

What? Save us, Chris. Chris, you... One letter short for that. Well, that's rather quick. Chris, you... We were talking about the fact you did a lot of research into your various science shows that you've done over the last ten years.

Was there any moment when you were doing that research, was it watching Jacob Ranofsky at some point, which was the final sledgehammer blow to your belief? I'm ashamed to say... Well, I'm not ashamed to say, actually. I will straightforwardly say that actually the final hammer blow was listening to a very brilliant American comedian called Julia Sweeney, who has written a number of very thoughtful shows. The first one was about her experience with cancer

and another one was about adopting a child. And the third one is called Letting Go of God. It's a description of her journey from true belief catholicism to atheism within within the space of a few years and uh and i recognized a lot of my own thoughts and experiences in it and there's a there's a section in which she she realizes she's cleaning the bath actually and she suddenly realizes it's just mulling over in her head, that maybe there is no God. And from that point onward, she describes what it practically means to lose your God, and what the process is,

the sort of tentative feeling of, well, maybe I could try this for a moment and see how it fits, to the actually horrendous consequences of losing, which include losing all the people you've loved and lost over again because there's no chance of seeing them. All of that, it was that being expressed for me, actually. Chris, does that mean, Chris, that you're going to have a miserable atheist Christmas?

Do you look back with a sad regret at your days singing carols? I genuinely cannot wait for the 1st of December to come around so that I can put carols on. The Harold Dark setting of In the Bleak Midwinter I still find one of the most moving pieces of music and that, what can I give him? That verse is, it would and does still move me to

I say pathetic, but moves me to tears. It isn't pathetic. Perhaps you ought to listen to it again. But I, no, no, no, I'm not... No, my own actions rather than... I won't have a miserable Christmas. The only aspect of it that's miserable is that I see my godchildren. And that's... They're the best family I know, actually.

They're the best family, the best parents, and they are the most religious people. I mean, not in any fundamentalist way. They're proper Anglican churchgoers. What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. What I can, I give him.

Give him my heart. And I think that religion and science can meet somewhere round this heart business. I don't know what that means. Well, that's all right. No, it isn't, Victor. It is, because you want too much. I think that's the trouble with science.

Science wants all the answers. It's not going to get them. We can accept that we won't get all the answers. I don't want all the answers. I want the process of looking for them. That's what I want out of science. I think if I understand you right i may agree with you in the sense for me what science is driven by is a sense of wonder so you look at the universe and you find it beautiful and then you you take a particular track which is to begin to try and do experiments to understand how it works it seems to me that that is a shared sense of wonder with religion and the fact that you move off in

different directions to me actually, actually, is secondary. The people I really find difficult to understand are the people who don't notice that the universe is beautiful and worth looking at and exploring. But that is a fundamental tenet of faith. You look at the universe, and instead of being fascinated by its incredible beauty, you just decide that the answer is,

it's like that because it is. And that's lame. That's the opposite of science. Victor, because this seems to me to be exactly what you're not saying in your previous statement, about the sense of wonder is the important thing for you. Yes. And not the specific. I think that's absolutely right.

And I was just thinking just now the difference between Chris and how we've come to things. I think when I was young, it was the mystery of it all, by which I don't mean the mumbo-jumbo, I mean the beauty of art and architecture and music and the strange ceremonials of the year. I'm very disappointed by the lack of... There's been no real anger in this show,

which will lead to complaints from both sides. Religious people are going to complain about this show. Why didn't they jump up and down on the table and curse them with some form of holy water and uh science people will go oh you didn't attack religion at all so to be honest this shows this show's been an absolute disaster so a sadly peaceable end to the series thank you very much chris addison adam rutherford and victor stock dean of guilford cathedral and yes, that's it, isn't it? Until we can take our Christmas break. Next week we will be taking

the Infinite Monkey Cage's inaugural annual Christmas break until June. Excellent. We don't want too much science. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, from Friday night comedy and daily drama from the archers to a range of news,

discussions and documentaries. For a full list of available podcasts, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. 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 podcast