The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… The Gods

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Robin Ince and Brian Cox tackle the thorny debate over whether science and religion can co-exist. But forget the tension between the church and the researchers – Eric Idle wants an answer to the important question of whether God is in gluten free communion bread? Katy Brand launches the inaugural theologian’s corner with a pair of Reverends, who explain that comedians and the clergy have a lot in common, including a tendency to like the sound of their own voices. As we learn more about how our universe works, will there even be a need for religious belief? Since some research suggests fundamentalists and zealots tend to be less intelligent, perhaps there’s a case to be made for some healthy scepticism.New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the full series on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemEpisodes featured: Series 1: Science and Religion Series 4: Is There Room for Mysticism in a Rational World? The Infinite Monkey Cage 100 Series 21: Quantum Worlds Series 10: Irrationality

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and welcome to another episode of the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2. Now, when we were both young, one of us still is annoyingly young, always trapped in being 36 years old, it was actually God that drew us to science. Well, when I say God, it was

actually those highly misinformative books of the 1970s about how aliens had come down to Earth and built the pyramids, the Sphinx and a few runways near Mayan temples who were then seen as, are these actually the gods? Were the aliens gods? Extraterrestrials were viewed as a sort of intergalactic roving team from grand designs. There was a boom in books that explained remarkable moments in civilization and angel visitations as close encounters of a third kind. And I've told Brian this before and he does not listen, but it really will make him even more money. I said you'll be better off writing books like these rather than these rigorous books on black holes

and quantum theory, as those books will go out of date, whereas utter nonsense never goes out of date, as it remains as wrong today as it's always been. And you wrote that as a joke, didn't you? But it's actually true. It's kind of a joke, but it's horribly true. The fact that all of those books are still published. They were refuted, what was it, the day after they came out. Yeah. Do you remember? Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods. I loved that book and

I was gutted when I found out that the Nazca lines were like three centimetres long. Yeah, that's the thing is when you look at the photographs, you presume they are images of something vast, not images of something the same size as the photograph you're looking at. Yeah. And then there's, now I've got one which has got pictures of various different things that prove that aliens existed and one is an old carving that could only be considered to be a bikini and therefore suggests that it must have come from a future alien civilization. The existence of bikinis in ancient carvings. Yeah, absolutely.

And so write more books on that. It was the discovery of the drivel in these books that helped put us both on the path of reason and evidence-based thinking. It's the sort of thing that made Carl Sagan very angry, wasn't it, in the demon-haunted world? Yeah, I remember Rusty Schweikart, Apollo 9 astronaut, amongst many other things. And he said that he had turned up to do an event where he literally just saw Carl Sagan speeding off in a car, furious apparently, because he'd gone to this event hoping to

talk about lots of different cosmological ideas and all he got was various... So do you think that the pyramids were built? It was like, no, I do not. I think this... Oh, and he just eventually was absolutely furious. Curiosity is the key. Yeah. Going back to God, I suppose, really, is the God particle, or the God damn particle. There is much history of the... What's your theory of the God particle?

Well, it was introduced by Leon Laderman, famous Nobel Prize winner's publisher, to sell more books. Wasn't even him, I think. That's the story, anyway. Maybe apocryphal, but the story is... You can't call it the Higgs boson, this book. No, but you'll buy it. Let's call it the God particle. Oh, that's great. So physics and marketing don't always go hand in hand. And that was where we had one of our first discussions with our brilliant friend Victor Stock. He's wonderful. The Dean of Guildford Cathedral. He's a remarkable man. Here is Victor Stock with Brian back in the first ever series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.

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 act. At your invitation. That was fantastic and I remember you taking me around it and we went around that underground bit the size of a circle line And I was supposed to respond and you know, like all kind of people don't anything about science. I just went oh goodness It's huge isn't it? Wow. Oh my said it's ever so long 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 it or not? No Anyway, it was great wasn't it? I hugely enjoyed it. Well, yeah, you know, it's obvious 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 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 Christian burial to Darwin and honor him with a place in the abbey. In your country, I think we're from 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. 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 Habgud was an ordained scientist, we could do with a few more. I think we probably agree, I hope we do, sometimes we do anyway, that the problem for science is not religion per se but fundamentalism in the same way that Stalinism led to mass famine due to promotion of science that fit an agenda but which repeatedly failed the test. What's the punchline? There's no punchline. That's it.

That's a serious point. Yeah, that is, you know. I can give you another punchline though, one of my favourite things. There's a beautiful story that Carlos Frank, another regular on our show, who is someone who believes in a god, and I was like, oh wow, so I never realised, Carlos, that you believed in a kind of a Christian god. And he said yes, but I never allow him into the laboratory. Having an omnipotent, omniscient deity being told to wait outside is I think one of the things that

science is about. Because you get in the way of my equations. Yeah, you wait there, I've got work to do. It reminds me of Georges Lemaître as well very famously who was one of the great physicists in the early 20th century looking at relativity. one of the first physicists to show that Einstein's equations of general relativity suggest that there may be an origin to the universe. And then he was asked once, you know, how can it be that you're a priest? He was a Catholic priest and a scientist and a mathematician, a physicist at the same time, and he said there were two roads to the truth and I choose to take them both.

Well that brings us perfectly I think to another moment from one of our shows. Yeah to that great theologian Billy Bragg telling an audience of thousands about an astronomer monk. First person to ever notice that the moon affected the tide was a monk called the Venerable Bead. He was working at Monk G, at Monk at Venerable bead fans in the audience Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's playing at the vortex stage on Sunday night Get down there you say venerable. I say be venerable venerable

Love this show Anyway, he was a monk and he was trying to work out the proper date for Easter, which you may or may not know is based on the phases of the moon. And while he was doing it, Monk Williamov, he also noticed that when the moon was full, the tide was right up. And when the moon was gone, the tide was right out. And the more he did it, the more he noticed. And eventually, he worked out that actually the, somehow, he didn't know how, but the moon was having an effect on the tide. So here's a piece of really primal, you know,

this is the seventh, eighth century science, based, but coming from religious observance. You know, there is that overlap. There are few greater joys, I think, than doing the Glastonbury Festival when we do a science show there, because especially when we've been on the second or third day, and it's Saturday morning, people haven't been sleeping that well, they've had quite a lot of hot cider, but they had fascinatingly open minds that we could actually hear kind of at times cracking, couldn't they? Yeah, it's wonderful.

Quantum cosmology, didn't we once, I think. I think that was probably the most... Too ambitious. Well, not only was it... I think we could almost use the word inscrutable in that particular episode. In the 100th episode, we look back over 10 years of the Infinite Monkey Age with some of science's most famous names, and we also introduced theologians' Corner to deal with some of the thorny questions that kept coming up. We had the Reverend Richard Coles, Victor Stock and Katie Brand, a vicar,

a dean and a theology student. Yeah and also a star of musical theatre and musical cinema as well. Yeah well you do love a star of musical theatre and musical cinema. I didn't know Neil deGrasse Tyson was a star of musical theatre. Oh he's got didn't know Neil deGrasse Tyson was a star of musical theatre. Oh, he's got all the moves. Anyway, let's have a listen to them. To ensure that liturgical matters are not sidestepped, we will also be assisted by Theology Corner, in which we have two of our favourite clerics, the Reverend Richard Coles and the former Dean of Guildford Cathedral, the very Reverend Victor Stock, and they will be hosted by our regular religious correspondent, Katie Brand.

Now, Katie, I know that... I have a question. In their churches, do they have a physics corner during... I just want to know the symmetry of this or not. Oh, yes. The Anglican Church, you don't even need to believe in God. We're very soft on that It's about the rest of his first and the belief second in Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton Who is just next to Charles Darwin and all were buried with great honor by the Church of England say there

Quickly the show changes. I like it when Anglican's angry. It's on. So, I was going to ask you, Katie, you went to a conference school and you did end up in a point, didn't you, as a young person where you went, I don't know whether to be a nun or an astronaut. Yes, it was difficult. I had NASA on the phone and the Archbishop of Canterbury beating down my door and in the end I thought, no no I need something that will satisfy my massive ego, but also allow me to be really lazy So I became a panel show comedian

So become a vicar actually on the basis of that Actually, there's a lot of crossover apparently Psychologically between being a comedian and a vicar We have a lot of crossover in the Church of England, but the bishops don't like it. If you want a voice of God, then Brian Blessed... Oh, you're doing quiet, Brian. I see what you're playing at! ...is a pretty good choice for the job. We talked about this a lot when we'd done live shows.

I don't think we ever talked about it on the radio, the time where Chris Hadfield, the wonderful Canadian astronaut, had not met Brian Blessed before and he sat next to him for the whole show and then afterwards we were in a tiny little room, we're all drinking sherry I think because it was Christmas or whatever, bottles of sherry, and Brian Blessed just turned to Chris Hadfield and went, have I ever told you about the time I was going to play about Jesus? Have I ever told you about the time I was in a play about Jesus? And Chris went, no, having then never met before, and then told the most fantastic story which ended with Brian blessed in this tiny, tiny room just going, why have you forsaken me?

Well, I thought, you know, we've got God, so why don't we sit him next to one of the writers of that great celebration of religion, life of Brian. thought, you know, we've got God, so why don't we sit him next to one of the writers of that great celebration of religion, the life of Brian. Yeah, so Eric Idle and Brian Blessed moved over to Theologians Corner to join in a debate with Katie Brand and the Reverend Richard Coles about where God actually is at this moment. And that discussion took a bit of an unusual turn. Eric, I know your name is now on Mars, on the Curiosity rover,

but what would you like to see? We've looked back at the last ten years, but as Brian said, there are things you'd like to see in the next ten. I think the most important thing from a layman's point of view is the popularity of science has grown enormously over the last 10 years, thanks to programs like this. And bringing comedy into science has been very important. And I think that's because it's ongoing, it's happening at the moment.

And we actually haven't heard anything from God for the last 2,000 years. LAUGHTER With the single exception of the controversy in the Vatican about whether or not God is present in gluten-free bread for communion, which is actually a controversy that's been going on. So that's what you'd like to have resolved. I think we should, yes, I think we should know. I think he should, is he going to be in diet-free Coke or is he, you know what what relationship does God possess? We should say we've actually we should just pop over to theology corner to say where is God?

I Refer to myself satirically some years ago on the show as the resident Theologian to try and cover up the fact that I don't know anything about science and very little about theology So I'm quite amazed to now have a whole corner With actual vickers, but I was going to to now have a whole corner with actual vickers. But I was going to ask the two of you just briefly because we've said on this show before about religion being like the sort of origins and the history of human curiosity in a way and that doesn't need to be so divided that

humans in the early stages looked up at the sky and said what's that and because they didn't have a lot of scientific instruments or knowledge at their disposal there was sort of some way to try and describe the universe. But if you looked up at the sky and said, what's that? And because they didn't have a lot of scientific instruments or knowledge at their disposal, there was sort of some way to try and describe the universe. But have you, Richard, for example, in your career, have you seen science and religion try and come together more recently and not be so divided? Well, for me, it's never been a problem at all.

I've never had the slightest feeling that kind of being a faithful Christian is in any way interfered with being genuinely curious and fascinated by By science and that's not to say we don't have form we do have form and of course you don't have to go very far Sorry Galileo, you don't have to go, but you don't have to go very very far away. I'm sure that's done the trick that apology Seriously, I mean what's much more interesting to me is rather than that very polemical idea of science and religion as being kind of competitors for truth and the loyalty of people, it's much more about how they are related in fact.

If you look at the history of the development of science, if you look at the Royal Society, for example, and the numbers of people in the Royal Society who were there because of a certain way in which the church and the enlightenment had worked together, in a way Calvinism had opened up the book of nature. It's a much more interesting story to see in terms of continuities. That's not to diminish the sharpness of the conflict, and I would just like to say on the record, and I'm sure I speak for many church people here, that have absolutely no difficulty at all with accepting that Darwin's account of how we got to where we got to is

absolutely sound and completely consistent with my understanding too. I also want to say just very quickly Eric, at St Mary's Findon we offer both gluten and gluten-free bread. Fix that, fix that. If it's a question as to whether or not God is in gluten-free bread, does that mean God may be in the gluten? Well that is possible, yeah. That might be what people react to. Anyway, personally, I think it all went wrong when we narrowed down the number of gods from many to one. Well, actually, that's something that we've looked at when we were out in Singapore, and we went to the Museum of Asian Cultures, and there's that fantastic first floor where all the religions are there,

including the Abrahamic faiths, but you go into some of the rooms and you go, oh, I want that many gods. I want an impish god, I want an angry god, I want a cheeky god, I want a god of love, I want a god of curiosity. That bit of just having one grumpy man go, you've really let me down, is just not as good as going... I'm a little limp! Yeah, I want Odin and Thor and Aphrodite and Apollo and... What you're hearing in this show is we are going to start a super group, basically, which is all your favourite gods in one religion! Sort of like a travelling Wilburism. Yeah, the travelling Wilburism, yeah!

Of eternity, of creation. Even though I personally don't have any traditional religious faith, I've never really felt a kind of God-shaped hole. But some people do feel the need to fill that gap with other things as well. Toby Hickman So do we still need religion? Physicist Sean Carroll and Katie Brand again discussed its role in a science-driven world. Sean Carroll It's certainly not the case that some scientific advance is going to convince everyone to disbelieve in God, but as science moves forward, like

for the last 500 years, the role, the set of jobs for God to have has sort of gotten smaller, and everyone has a tipping point where they go, well okay, then I don't need it at all. And mine was just outside the Vatican. Right, very close. You need a lot of tipping. But that leaves all this work that God had done for us in giving meaning and morality and purpose to our lives. Physics doesn't help with that, and it's not going to help with that. And so suddenly you're thrown into this situation where you sink or swim, and I think that the swimming is realizing that purpose and meaning in our lives is something

that is up to us to invent, up to us to give to life. It's not handed from outside in any way. I think this is the sensible conclusion to draw from progress in science over the last 500 years and again it's a matter of facing up to those consequences. Some of the godless do like to see themselves as much cleverer than the believers, but I use myself as evidence against that. I'm sure Rob would agree on that. In an episode all about irrationality, psychologists Richard Wiseman and Stuart Ritchie discuss whether believing in something bigger than ourselves is actually fundamental to being human.

I think we are all irrational and it's that irrationality which keeps us happy because we end up believing things about ourselves that aren't true so we think oh you know this relationship will be great and we ignore the 50% divorce rate otherwise we just think the world is a dreadful place and we're dreadful people which is the truth of the matter so and so there is some evidence that people who suffer from depression actually have a very realistic worldview that's why they feel so down a lot of the time. So it's a slight irony. So yeah, I do think it's part of being human,

is to have these positive illusions. But the problem is sometimes we can take it too far and we start to believe in things that really aren't true, like sort of ghosts and homeopathy and other silly things like that. Go let's get some letters. Let's list them all. Astrology, homeopathy, the supernatural.

Carry on. What are they? Religion. That's an interesting... Well, I would like to leave in the show the fact that some of my research has shown that religion is negatively correlated with intelligence as well. Is that... I don't know if that's... Well, this is...

Well, you see... That's interesting, because you bring that up and there have been... So, when you say... Again, we? And there have been, so when you say, again, we get caught up in definitions, don't you? When you say religion, well, that covers an enormous array of kind of very liberal beliefs. Then you have, are you at that point saying fundamentally religious?

Are you saying dogmatically religious? Specifically, fundamentalist religion is most negatively. So if you ask people questions, you know, rate out of five, how strongly you believe the Bible is the word of God, you should only marry people within your own religion, I hear God talking to me every day, you know, how much do you agree, one to five. Those sorts of questions, if you ask them, they will correlate, not strongly negatively, but they will correlate negatively with score and intelligence tests.

Which is slightly odd, because if I met a fundamentalist, I'd expect them to have quite a strong handshake. There may be exceptions to the matrix of correlations that we're talking about here. But is that just true of any dogmatic belief in anything? So are we unfair singling out religion? I think we are. Is it just not being able to see many different sides of arguments? I think we absolutely are. There's evidence showing that people with higher intelligence test scores will be, for instance, more socially liberal, so less racist, for instance. So

if you ask them, you know, you ask people a questionnaire about, you know, I think people from different races should be allowed to, you know, marry each other and things like that. And apparently that's still controversial in some areas. But intelligence will correlate negatively with people being more racist on those scales. It will correlate positively with people believing in gender, equality, and people should be paid equal money for equal work, etc. etc. These are not massive correlations. We're not talking that every racist is really stupid or whatever. Sorry, if there's any racists in the audience, I don't want to be offending you at all. But the general point is... So one explanation is that intelligence allows you more abstract

thinking skills that allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes and allow you to think from their perspective. One thing I should say, it's all very nice, less racist, more equal, et cetera. More intelligent people are also more economically liberal as well as socially liberal. So essentially, more intelligent people tend to be libertarians. and I know that they believe that they are the most intelligent people so it's quite annoying that it's also true. In the next episode we talk about beating the odds in The Infinite Monkey's Guide to gambling.

Now all the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds and you can find all the details of those in the program description for this show. In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. Why do so many business ideas that capture the imagination or actually become bestsellers end up toast? I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which examines exactly that. We'll hear from those who come up with the ideas.

This concept was in some ways a kind of busy parents dream. Helped build them, battled against their demise. There's this fallacy that internet kill toys for us and that really is not true. From Toys R Us to Sunny Delight via Jamie's Italian and Club 18 to 30, Toast will be available in the slice bread feed on BBC Sounds. From Toys R Us to Sunny Delight via Jamie's Italian and Club 18 to 30, toast will be available in the slice bread feed on BBC Sounds. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart

disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca.