The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… The Gods

22m

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/3K3JzyF

Producer: Marijke Peters
Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

Episodes 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

Press play and read along

Runtime: 22m

Transcript

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Speaker 9 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 I'm Robin Ince, and welcome to another episode of the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Were the aliens gods? Extraterrestrials were viewed as a sort of intergalactic roving team from Grand Designs.

Speaker 1 There was a boom in books that explained remarkable moments in civilization and angel visitations as close encounters of a third kind.

Speaker 1 And I've told Brian this before, and he does not listen, but it really will make him even more money.

Speaker 1 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off writing books like these rather than these rigorous books on black holes and quantum theory, as those books will go out of date, whereas utter nonsense never goes out of date, as it remains as wrong today as it's always been.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and you wrote that as a joke, didn't you? But it's actually.

Speaker 1 It's actually, 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.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Do you remember Eric von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods?

Speaker 12 I loved that book, and I was gutted when I found out that the Nazca lines were like three centimeters long.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the thing: when you look at the photographs, you presume they are images of something fast, not images of something the same size as the photograph you're looking at.

Speaker 1 And then there's I've got one which has got pictures of various different things that prove that aliens existed.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 And so write more books on that.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 In the demon-haunted world.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember Rusty Schweikart, Apollo 9 astronaut, amongst many other things.

Speaker 1 And he said that he had turned up to do an event where he literally just saw Carl Sagan Sagan speeding off in a car, furious apparently, because he'd gone to this event hoping to talk about lots of different cosmological ideas.

Speaker 1 And all he got was various people going, so do you think that the pyramids were built? He was like, no, I do not.

Speaker 9 I think that's, oh,

Speaker 1 and he just eventually was absolutely furious.

Speaker 12 Curiosity is the key.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Going back to God, I suppose, really, is the God particle or the goddamn particle.
There is much history of the... What's your theory of the God particle?

Speaker 12 Well, it was introduced by Leon Lademan, the famous Nobel Prize winner's publisher, to sell more books.

Speaker 18 It wasn't even him, I think. That's the story, anyway.

Speaker 12 Maybe apocryphal, but the story is this publisher.

Speaker 12 You can't call it the Higgs boson, this book. Nobody will buy it.
Let's call it the God particle. Oh, that's great.

Speaker 1 So physics and marketing don't always go hand in hand.

Speaker 1 And that was where we had one of our first discussions with our brilliant friend, Victor Stock.

Speaker 12 He's wonderful. The Dean of Guildford Cathedral.
He's a remarkable man.

Speaker 1 Here is Victor Stock with Brian back in the first ever series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 20 I met you at your cathedral. I was the token atheist.

Speaker 19 You were the token atheist.

Speaker 20 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 what you're doing.

Speaker 15 I did, at your invitation.

Speaker 21 It was fantastic. And I remember you taking me around it, and we went round that underground bit, the size of a circle line.
And I was supposed to respond.

Speaker 21 And, you know, like all kinds of people 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.

Speaker 21 And that's a 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,

Speaker 9 because it actually was.

Speaker 21 And I have a theory that that's a bit that fell off and stopped the whole experiment from working.

Speaker 22 Am I right about that or not?

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 10 Not surprising. It's really fun.

Speaker 15 Anyway, it was great, wasn't it?

Speaker 21 I hugely enjoyed it.

Speaker 11 Well, yeah, and you know, it's often mysterious.

Speaker 20 Well, it is, and it's often reported there should be some tension between the scientific worldview and the religious worldview. I mean, there's obviously Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens.

Speaker 20 So, did you find that there was anything there about exploring the very early universe, about the scientific project in general, that caused you to think there must be a tension, there's something inherent there?

Speaker 21 Absolutely not.

Speaker 21 And just after I had that experience with you, I was preaching in Westminster Abbey, and there were a lot of American students.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 honour him with a place in the Abbey.

Speaker 15 In your country, I think

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 You know, we're going to tell people in Arkansas we heard this in Westminster Abbey.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 1 I think we probably agree, I hope we do, or 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.

Speaker 9 What's the punchline?

Speaker 1 There's no punchline.

Speaker 9 That's a serious point.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that is, you know.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, wow. So I'd 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.

Speaker 1 Having an omnipotent, omniscient deity being told to wait outside is, I think, one of the things that science is about.

Speaker 12 Because you get in the way of my equations.

Speaker 22 You wait there.

Speaker 9 I've got work to do.

Speaker 12 It reminds me of George La Mettre as well, very, very famously, who was one of the great physicists in the early 20th century looking at relativity.

Speaker 12 One of the first physicists to show that Einstein's equations of general relativity suggest that there may have been an origin to the universe.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And he said, there are two roads to the truth, and I choose to take them both.

Speaker 1 Well, that brings us perfectly, I think, to another moment from one of our shows.

Speaker 12 That's a great theologian Billy Bragg telling an audience of thousands about an astronomer monk.

Speaker 26 First person to ever notice that the moon affected the tide was a monk called the Venerable Bede. He was working at Monk G uh at Monk.

Speaker 11 Venerable Bed fans in the audience.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 24 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 26 Yeah, he's playing at the vortex stage on Sunday night.

Speaker 24 He didn't get down there.

Speaker 26 You say venerable, I say be.

Speaker 6 Venerable.

Speaker 10 Venerable.

Speaker 15 I love this show.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 And while he was doing it at Monk Weemouth, He also noticed that when the moon was full, the tide was right up.

Speaker 26 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 moon 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?

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's wonderful.

Speaker 12 Quantum cosmology, didn't we, once, I think.

Speaker 1 I think that was probably the most

Speaker 14 ambitious.

Speaker 1 Well, not only was it, I think we could almost use the word inscrutable

Speaker 22 in that particular episode.

Speaker 12 In the hundredth episode, we look back over 10 years of the Infinite Monkey Cage with some of science's most famous names.

Speaker 12 And we also introduced Theologian's Corner to deal with some of the thorny questions that kept coming up.

Speaker 12 We had the Reverend Richard Coles, Victor Stock, and Katie Brand, a vicar, a dean, and a theology student.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and also a star of musical theatre and musical cinema as well.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, another star of musical theatre and musical cinema.

Speaker 12 I didn't know Neil deGrasse Tyson was a star of musical theatre.

Speaker 14 Oh, he's got all the moves.

Speaker 1 Anyway, let's have a listen to them.

Speaker 28 To ensure 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.

Speaker 28 And they will be hosted by our regular religious correspondent, Katie Brand. Now, Katie, I know that.

Speaker 17 In their churches, do they have a physics corner?

Speaker 15 I just want to know

Speaker 17 the symmetry of this or not.

Speaker 15 Oh, yes.

Speaker 28 The Anglican church, you don't even need to believe in God.

Speaker 16 We're very soft on that kind of thing.

Speaker 11 It's about the recipes first and the beliefs.

Speaker 29 All were buried with great honour by the Church of England.

Speaker 22 So there.

Speaker 22 Oh!

Speaker 25 How quickly the show changes. I like it when Anglicans are angry.

Speaker 25 It's on.

Speaker 28 So I was going to ask you, Katie, you went to a convent 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.

Speaker 8 Yes, it was difficult.

Speaker 8 I had NASA on the phone and the Archbishop of Canterbury beating down my door and in the end I thought, no, I need something that will satisfy my massive ego but also allow me to be really lazy.

Speaker 8 So I became a panel show comedian instead.

Speaker 22 So become a vicar actually on the basis of that. That's true.

Speaker 8 Actually there's a lot of crossover apparently psychologically between being a comedian and a vicar.

Speaker 30 Well, do you know that?

Speaker 29 We have a lot of crossover in the Church of England, but

Speaker 19 the bishops don't like it.

Speaker 12 If you want the voice of God, then Brian Blessed.

Speaker 24 Oh, you're doing quiet, Brian.

Speaker 10 I see what you're playing at.

Speaker 12 It's a pretty good choice for the job.

Speaker 1 We've talked about this a lot when we've done live shows. I don't think we ever talked about it on the radio.

Speaker 1 The time where Chris Hadfield, the wonderful Canadian astronaut, who'd not met Brian Blessed before, and he sat next to him for the whole show. And then, afterwards, we are in a tiny little room.

Speaker 1 We're all drinking sherry, I think, because it was Christmas or whatever, the bottles of sherry. And Brian Blessed just turned to Chris Hadfield and went,

Speaker 31 Have I ever told you about the time I was in a play about Jesus?

Speaker 14 And Chris went, No, having them 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that discussion took a bit of an unusual turn.

Speaker 23 Eric, I know your name is now on Mars on the Curiosity Rover, but what would you like to see?

Speaker 23 You're looking, we've looked back at the last 10 years, but as Brian said, there are things you'd like to see in the next 10.

Speaker 33 What would you like to see?

Speaker 34 Well, 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.

Speaker 34 And bringing comedy into science has been very important.

Speaker 34 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,

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 32 So that's what you'd like to have resolved?

Speaker 15 I think we should,

Speaker 34 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 relationship does God possess with Fleming and the Speaker?

Speaker 23 We should say we've actually, we should just pop over to Theology Corner to say, where is God?

Speaker 6 I am

Speaker 8 I I I referred 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.

Speaker 8 So I'm quite amazed to now have a whole corner with actual vicars.

Speaker 8 But I was going to ask the two of you just briefly, because I th we've said on the 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?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 33 For me, it's never been a problem at all.

Speaker 35 I've never had the slightest feeling that kind of being a faithful Christian has in any way interfered with being genuinely curious and fascinated by science.

Speaker 33 That's not to say we don't have form, we do have form.

Speaker 35 And of course you don't have to go very far.

Speaker 30 Sorry Galileo.

Speaker 22 But you don't have to go very far away.

Speaker 8 I'm sure that's done the trick, that apology.

Speaker 35 But 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 That's not to diminish the sharpness of the conflict.

Speaker 35 And I would just like to say on the record, and I'm sure I speak for many church people here, that I 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.

Speaker 35 I also want to say, just very quickly, at Finden's

Speaker 35 St. Mary's Finden, we offer both gluten and gluten-free bread.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 1 Well, that is possible, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And there's that fantastic first floor where all the religions are there in 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 really let me down is just not as good as going

Speaker 1 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 favorite gods in one religion sort of like a travelling wheelbridge yeah the travelling wheelbridge of here

Speaker 1 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 whole but some people do feel the need to fill that gap with other things as well so do we still need religion physicists sean carol and katie brand again discussed its role in a science-driven world.

Speaker 27 It's certainly not the case that some scientific advance is going to convince everyone to disbelieve in God.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 27 And everyone has a tipping point where they go, well, okay, then I don't need it at all.

Speaker 8 And mine was just outside the value.

Speaker 15 You're right, very close.

Speaker 9 You need a lot of tipping.

Speaker 27 But that leaves all this work that God had done for us in giving meaning and morality and purpose to our lives.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 1 Some of the godless do like to see themselves as much cleverer than the believers, but I use myself as evidence against them.

Speaker 10 I was going to show

Speaker 10 you that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So we think, oh, you know, this relationship will be great and we ignore the 50% divorce rate.

Speaker 36 Otherwise, we just think the world is a dreadful place and we are dreadful people, which is the truth of the matter.

Speaker 6 So,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So, yeah, I do think it's part of being human is to have these positive illusions.

Speaker 36 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 you know, ghosts and homeopathy and other silly things like that.

Speaker 19 Girl, let's go some letters.

Speaker 12 Let's list them all.

Speaker 9 Astrology, homeopathy, the supernatural.

Speaker 32 Carry on, what are they?

Speaker 6 Religion.

Speaker 7 That's an interesting.

Speaker 5 Well, are we allowed to leave in the show with the fact that some of my research has shown that religion is negatively correlated with intelligence as well? Is that possible? I don't know if that's.

Speaker 9 Well, this is

Speaker 11 interesting.

Speaker 28 Could you bring that up?

Speaker 16 And there have been. So when you say for it, 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.

Speaker 28 Then you have, are you at that point saying fundamentally religious? Are you saying dogmatically religious?

Speaker 5 Specifically, fundamentalist religion is most negatively.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 Those sorts of questions, if you ask them, they will correlate, not strongly negatively, but they will correlate negatively with score or an intelligence test.

Speaker 36 Which is slightly odd because if I met a fundamentalist, I'd expect them to have quite a strong handshake.

Speaker 25 There may be exceptions. There may be exceptions to the exceptions to the matrix of correlations that we're talking about here.

Speaker 12 But is that just true of any dogmatic belief in anything? So, are we unfair singling out religion?

Speaker 32 We are just not being able to see many different sides of arguments.

Speaker 9 Yeah, no, I think we absolutely are.

Speaker 5 There's evidence showing that people with higher intelligence test scores will be, for instance, more socially liberal, so less racist, for instance.

Speaker 5 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 marry each other and things like that.

Speaker 5 And apparently that's still controversial in some areas. But intelligence will correlate negatively with people being more racist on those scales.

Speaker 5 It'll correlate positively with people believing in gender equality and people should be paid equal money for equal work, et cetera, et cetera. These are not massive correlations.

Speaker 5 We're not talking that every racist is really stupid or whatever. Sorry, if there's any races in the audience, I don't want to be

Speaker 25 offending you at all. But

Speaker 25 the general point is,

Speaker 5 so one explanation is that there's an 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.

Speaker 5 One thing I should say, it's all very nice,

Speaker 5 less racist, more equal, etc. More intelligent people are also more economically liberal as well as socially liberal.
So essentially, more intelligent people tend to be libertarians.

Speaker 5 And I know that they believe that they are the most intelligent people, so it is quite annoying that it's also true.

Speaker 1 In the next episode, we talk about beating the odds in the infinite monkeys guide to gambling.

Speaker 12 Now, all the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds, and you can find all the details of those in the programme description for this show.

Speaker 6 In the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 34 Till now, nice again.

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