Original subtitles

'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.'

'And God said, "Let there be light."'

'The gathering together of the waters called He seas.'

'God created man in his own image.'

For more than 1,500 years, Christians saw the Bible

as the primary source of knowledge.

But in the 17th century, a new movement emerged

that challenged the Christian view of the world.

The scientific revolution.

It was a time when people were looking towards a new way of thinking about the world.

During the Renaissance, the rising power of science

forced the Catholic Church to silence rebellious scientists.

The sentence says the reason that you're burning is because you denied

the divinity of Jesus and because you questioned our authority.

By the 19th century, the Enlightenment had given rise to

a new generation of scientists who pushed Christianity into retreat.

Darwin removed the main argument for God's existence.

If science continues to make discoveries that conflict with Christian doctrine,

I wonder will the scientific revolution ultimately

make Christianity redundant?

What we now call science emerged

about 400 years ago through the work of a group

of European thinkers who discovered new ways of interpreting the world.

They no longer relied on the delivered word of God.

The scientific revolution put

individual curiosity, enquiry, reason and experiment above religious dogma.

To my mind, science is quite simply

the biggest challenge that Christianity will ever have to face.

I don't believe in God.

Some scientists manage to retain their faith

but I think science is our only route to knowledge,

an idea some people still find threatening.

Nowadays we all recognise the power of science, we look to science

to explain the world, to solve our problems.

But science also has its enemies.

I myself was subjected for 15 years to a campaign of hatred and terror

from animal rights activists because of the research that I did.

Perhaps it's because science necessarily challenges

the orthodox view of the day in order to make progress.

And often that orthodoxy is fundamentally religious.

Today, I'm professor of neuroscience

here at Oxford.

When the first colleges were founded in the 12th century,

the Christian Church was planting the seeds of science.

Oxford's been a seat of learning for more than 900 years.

Just 30 years after the Norman invasion in 1066 scholars were teaching here.

Oxford Became a centre for discussion, for debate, for investigation,

all of it sponsored and encouraged by the Christian Church.

The motto of the university says it all, really -

Dominus illuminatio mea, 'God is my light'.

Believing that God had given humans the power of reason,

the Church championed the beginnings of science,

assuming it would confirm their faith.

This is the Old Schools Quadrangle.

It was built in the early 17th century and it was the focus of all the teaching at the university.

It's dominated by the Divinity School.

There's logic, metaphysics, grammar and history.

There's mathematics,

there's astronomy, and here, the School of Natural Philosophy.

Natural philosophy was the 17th century word for science,

science being nurtured in an ecclesiastical environment

as part of a religious and classical education.

For hundreds of years Christians had looked to the leading experts on the natural world,

the Ancient Greeks, to explain God's creation.

In Christianity there is a central notion that God created the world.

Aristotle however, probably the most important of the Greek natural philosophers,

argued that the cosmos was eternal,

so they thought that many Christian ideas were rather silly.

Right from the start, rational thinkers forced Christians

to consider the possibility that the Biblical explanation of the world was wrong.

In the fifth century, the Christian theologian St Augustine came up with a solution.

He says, the message we find in the Bible is accommodated to

human capacities, which is to say that the Bible speaks in

language that we can understand and this then will account for

some of the discrepancies between what we find in Genesis

and what we find in the current or contemporary science.

St Augustine laid down the rules for the relationship between science and Christianity.

The Church would accommodate science's findings,

as long as they didn't threaten its authority.

For the next thousand years, Christianity remained firmly in control

of all knowledge and helped generate the first glorious period

of the scientific revolution -

the Renaissance.

Hard to believe but in about 1510, one of the most significant

developments of the Renaissance took place not in glorious Rome,

or in Venice, or in Florence, but here, in this sleepy little town

on the Baltic coast, in Poland.

While Italy was the centre of Renaissance art

and literature, a local priest made Poland the focal point for science.

Nicolaus Copernicus came here in the mid-16th century,

after studying in Italy, and took services at Frombork cathedral.

But he spent most of his time watching the sky and studying the movement of planets.

In this tower in the cathedral grounds, Copernicus made an extraordinary discovery

that led to science's first major challenge to Christian belief.

So, Margaret, what was the standard dogma in astronomy

at the time that Copernicus began to study astronomy?

(SPEAKS POLISH)

TRANSLATION: The earth was thought to be surrounded by unchanging stars

and Christians believed it was the centre of the universe.

They thought the sun and the planets circled round

a supposedly stationary earth.

But in his study, Copernicus wrote a book that argued against this Christian view.

He claimed that the earth was actually one of the planets orbiting the sun.

TRANSLATION: Copernicus finished his masterpiece in 1533

and he knew his ideas were revolutionary.

The Vatican realised that Copernicus's speculations contradicted the Biblical view

that the earth is stationary, at the centre of the universe.

But it was willing to tolerate his ideas, for now.

The Catholic Church was a powerful institution,

how could it be threatened by one person, even if his ideas were revolutionary?

The Pope was hoping that despite all his research, Copernicus's conclusions would be proved wrong.

There's no doubt that, here in Frombork, in the heart of the Church, Copernicus planted a seed,

a seed of tension between religious authority and human enquiry

which has grown over the following 500 years.

It was others who followed Copernicus, who invented science to test his views,

who suffered for championing his dangerous idea.

Copernicus's new theory soon pitted science and Christianity against each other

in the scientific revolution's darkest hour.

This was a true tragedy because the Church is made of human beings who don't want to admit they're wrong.

As a scientist today, I'm free to put forward any idea, as long as

I can back it up with evidence.

But in Italy 400 years ago,

I would also have needed the approval of the Vatican.

Until the 16th century,

the papacy tolerated scientific ideas that contradicted the Bible.

But by the late 1500s, the Protestant Reformation had emerged

and was accusing the Catholics of forsaking the true word of God.

In response, the Vatican ruled that anyone who contradicted

Catholic doctrine was a heretic.

And so began science's darkest hour.

Just a stone's throw from St Peter's, this forbidding building

is the papal police station.

It's the notorious Inquisition

set up in the 16th century to defend against heresy.

Scholars who speculated about the nature of the world

could find themselves branded heretics.

In the late 1500s, one of the most original thinkers

was a man named Giordano Bruno.

While studying for the priesthood, Bruno became captivated

by Copernicus's theory that the Earth orbits the sun.

Is it fair to say that reading Copernicus's book set the stage,

as it were, for Bruno's own ideas? It must have, because Copernicus,

in a way, opens up a new world for knowledge.

And Bruno says Copernicus stopped at the sphere of the fixed stars,

and Bruno goes past the eighth, ninth, tenth

and however many spheres you'd like to name.

He thought there were other earths.

He thought there might be creatures on these other earths.

And that's one of the issues that gets him in trouble with the Church,

because if there are multiple earths, how many earths is the Pope Pope of?

In 1600, the Inquisition had Bruno burnt at the stake.

He wasn't a real scientist,

but his death was a huge blow to the emerging scientific movement.

Would it be fair to say that what happened in this square,

the execution of Bruno, had a very serious impact on Italian science?

It's devastating, I think, for both science and for the Church.

One, it makes controversial ideas dangerous.

Secondly, it makes publication of controversial ideas dangerous.

I think Bruno's execution marked the beginning of a battle

between faith and reason.

The dangers I faced for my science came from a small group of fanatics.

But during the Renaissance, most threats to scientists

had the backing of the mighty Catholic Church.

This is the Inquisition handbook of torture, 1643.

Oh, it's volume one, actually.

You know, the Inquisition might not have invented these kinds of

horrendous techniques but they certainly adopted them with relish.

Not only to force confessions from those who were accused

but, quite frankly, to put the fear of God into everyone else.

Questioning Catholic dogma could have fatal consequences.

In Italy, fear of the Inquisition forced scientists underground.

Those brave enough to speak out were quickly silenced.

It seems very likely that poor Bruno had a contraption like this

clamped on his head just before he was burnt at the stake.

It's an interesting device, really.

It clamps around the neck,

like that, and this thing pushes down on the tongue to stop

the victim proclaiming against the Church at the moment of death.

And what it's resting on is a papal whipping block.

Knowledge of things like this must surely have terrified people.

The worst that a scientist can expect these days is to get their paper rejected from the journal

they sent it to or maybe their grant application gets turned down.

Well, in poor Bruno's day, this is what might have happened to you.

In the 17th century, the Catholic Church still insisted that the Earth

was the centre of a universe that was only a few thousand years old.

But today, scientific evidence has forced it to change its views.

After a successful academic career,

Guy Consolmagno became a Jesuit brother

and is now one of theVatican's official astronomers.

So, this is the meteorite lab, and this is where the work...

You're not serious?Yeah.

We think these things were made 4.5 billion years ago

in a solar nebula of gas and dust.

But what turned the dust into a solid rock?

Nobody knows.

Can I just pick you up on one thing you said, just a throwaway remark?

About events that were happening 4.5 billion years ago?

To say that doesn't raise the slightest concerns in your mind,

the slightest doubts, you are totally aligned

with cosmological estimates of the age of the universe and so on.

The point of the Bible is not the science of it.

The Bible's not a science book. I've written science books.

You know that a science book goes out of date after about three years.

The Bible's been around for about 2,500 years.

For what it says, it's not out of date. So it's not a science book.

But isn'tit the word of God?

But isn'tit the word of God? It is not the dictated word of God,

God whispering this into some scribe's hand who's writing it down.

We're not Muslims, it's not the Qur'an.

It is a human interpretation of divine inspiration.

400 years ago, it was another astronomer

who'd caught the Vatican's attention.

Galileo Galilei was one of the most respected scientists in Europe.

He helped the Vatican set up its first observatory in Rome

and taught astronomy at the finest universities in the Catholic world.

In 1609, he even introduced the Church

to a new invention,the telescope.

Oh, that's wonderful.

The telescope, of course, is first really demonstrated to the world

by Galileo, as an astronomical telescope in January of 1609.

One of the first things he did was to bring it to the Jesuits

at the Roman College and Galileo was feted as a great conquering hero.

What the Vatican didn't realise

was that Galileo's new observations of the stars,

planets and their moons supported the heretical views of Copernicus.

They confirmed that the Earth was not at the centre of God's universe.

Galileo announced his controversial discoveries,

hoping that his friend the Pope would protect him.

Instead, he was tried for heresy.

By a vote of seven to three, Galileo was found guilty.

He was shown the instruments of torture.

He was a 69-year-old man with severe arthritis and he decided to confess.

He said, "I abjure, curse and detest my errors."

Galileo, arguably the first true scientist,

was condemned as a heretic.

It was a disaster for science.

The real tragedy of Galileo wasn't just that he was put on trial

for something that was not a religious issue,

but that the Church was so slow

in accommodating itself to the evidence as it piled up,

because the Church is made of human beings

who don't want to admit they're wrong.

This was a true tragedy.

The real problem was that Galileo had changed the rules of the game.

He was the first astronomer to base his theories on evidence,

and the Church didn't like that one bit.

The Catholic Church sponsored and encouraged philosophers

and thinkers, including Galileo, as long as what they delivered

was simply ideas.

But then Galileo, arguably the very first scientist, discovered a way,

through experiments, of testing ideas

and knowing whether they were wrong.

When science started to produce facts, not just ideas,

the Church just didn't know what to do. They fought against it.

While the Inquisition's iron grip was stifling

science in Catholic Italy, in Protestant Britain,

scholars were laying foundations for the next phase

of the scientific revolution,

the beginning of an explosion of knowledge.

In 1609, an Englishman made his way

to take up an appointment here at St Bartholemew's Hospital in London.

His name was William Harvey,

a physician who'd studied at Padua in Italy

where Galileo was a professor.

You can almost see Harvey carrying the baton of science

from Italy, the tradition of Galileo and so on, across to England.

Yes, and it was an extremely exciting time for science in this country.

We have the birth of the Royal Society in 1660s.

It was a time, really, when people

were looking towards a new way of thinking about the world.

And you can see Harvey

as a sort of a crucial figure at the beginning of this movement.

The church based its views of biology on the writings

of ancient philosophers and the biblical teaching

that man was made in God's image.

But Harvey's revolutionary observations suggested

that the body was made like a machine.

There was this concept that the parts of the body didn't necessarily have a function,

but they were simply there because that's the way

that God had designed them and that was it, the end of the argument.

But one of Harvey's genius moments was the discovery

and the demonstration that all the parts of the vascular system

played a very important mechanical role.

He was able to show that blood moved around in two closed loops

and, of course, this is the fundamental basis

of all cardiovascular physiology ever since.

William Harvey himself was still half a mystic.

He wrote about the heart as the sun of the microcosm,

as a household god that serves the rest of the body.

But the techniques that he brought back from Italy,

of making observations, drawing conclusions

and then testing those conclusions with further observations.

That was certainly the beginning of the scientific method,

and it helpedto fuel the explosion of science

that happened in this country in the 17th century,

giving those early scientists methods

to allow them to challenge the written word,

whether it was the words of Aristotle or the words of scripture.

In the 18th century, a new movement swept through the Western world.

Thinkers such as Isaac Newton and John Locke

realised that the laws of the universe

were there to be discovered, not read about in the Bible.

It was the age of enlightenment.

Democracy, freedom and science replaced religion

at the heart of society.

For me, the person who epitomised the enlightenment is an American,

Benjamin Franklin.

He was not only a statesman but also a celebrated scientist,

who found a rational explanation for the wrath of God.

Hello. Welcome to Benjamin Franklin House.

Thank you very much.

In 1750, Franklin suggested

that lightning was just a form of electricity.

In the Georgian period, churches were always the tallest building around

and a lot of them had wood in them, so when they were struck by lightning

they would just burn down, and it would be awful for your community.

Not only because your largest civic building had burnt to the ground,

but also because it showed someone in your community had done something pretty bad.

Because God did it.

Exactly.

So Franklin decided that he would protect churches from this,

from the electrical fluid.

So he went on to develop the lightning rod.

So if I just slot this in...

I would ask you not to touch the table for reasons that will become apparent very quickly.

Churches weren't always keen to have

science mix with religion in quite this level.

They did see that it was Franklin trying to circumvent God and God's will.

Franklin did say that if you don't want to circumvent God's wishes,

you should actually not have a roof on your church,

because rain is also a natural phenomenon.

But obviously, now all churches have lightning rods on them, so it does work.

I imagine if God wishes to punish you, he could find other ways.

Franklin was also the first scientist

to help found a nation with a new form of government.

His championing of scientific rationality

inspired the first country built on enlightenment principles.

In many ways, Franklin was, really,

if not THE father of the United States,

certainly one of the principle thinkers

behind the secular state of the United States.

Absolutely. He was one of the founding fathers.

He did not want the organised church

to have anything to do with the running of a nation.

He thought it was a bad idea to have church and state combined

and, therefore, split it off, so creating a secular state in America.

Ben Franklin was the son of a puritan immigrant.

He intended to go into the church himself,

but, here in London at the age of 19,

he first wrote his views about conventional religion,

rejecting the ceremony, the pomp, the dogma.

For me, Ben Franklin really symbolises the enlightenment,

the age of reason, and the free thinking, the openness,

the rejection of authority during that period

continued the process of undermining the authority of the church.

It was scientists brought up on these enlightenment principles,

who pushed Christianity into a retreat,

which continues to this day.

Darwin removed the main argument for God's existence.

I think that science's biggest challenge to Christianity

was Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

In 1859, Darwin published On The Origin Of Species,

which suggested that life on Earth was not designed by God,

but had evolved through a process called natural selection.

My colleague Richard Dawkins has become the best-known critic

of religion, some would say the Archbishop of Atheism.

For him, evolution is the best reason for not believing in God.

Richard, I guess you could say that after Copernicus and Galileo,

evolutionary theory was the second great challenge

to conventional religious belief.

How did Darwin himself deal with it?

He was well aware that it was a great challenge,

and he was appropriately cautious before releasing it.

He delayed for something like 20 years after writing it out,

and some people think the main reason for his delay was caution

because of the effect it would have on the religious establishment.

'Christians had always believed

'that human beings were made in God's image,

'but Darwin's theory implied that we are in fact apes.'

Darwin removed the main argument for God's existence,

because before Darwin, it looked as though the evident,

apparent design of living things

could only be interpreted as actual design.

Some people seem to have come to terms with evolution,

as they did with Copernicanism,

by saying it's just an illumination of the wonders of God.

I find it remarkably unconvincing, because the suggestion is that God,

in deciding to create life, chose to do it in precisely the way

that made it look as though he wasn't there.

Well, you could say that the difficult bit was creating

the physics of the universe, with all its improbabilities,

in such a way that it would allow evolution to occur.

That's a much better way to look at it.

I mean, there's a certain amount of plausibility about that.

I find it ultimately implausible, because it suggests that...

an intelligent creator would need an even bigger explanation himself.

This wonderful university museum at Oxford

exudes Victorian confidence in the special power of human beings.

It was here in 1860 that Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford,

defended Christianity against the onslaught of Thomas Henry Huxley,

the great champion of Darwin.

There's no doubt that Darwin's discovery of a natural mechanism

that could explain the origin of all life on earth,

including human beings, without divine intervention,

was a serious challenge to conventional religious belief.

Christians are still uncertain and divided

about how to respond to evolution.

The overwhelming evidence for Darwin's theory

has led the mainstream churches to concede

that humans were not literally made by God.

But they cling to the idea that God made evolution possible.

This kind of accommodation has become a familiar pattern.

It's not a matter of overturning what we thought before,

it's more a matter of saying that

what we were taught when we were seven years old is still true,

but there's so much more going on

that we couldn't possibly have handled when we were seven years old.

Well, you seem to be talking about a kind of Plasticine God,

a God that can be stretched and deformed to fit any shape you want,

informed by science, but stretched, still,

to fit with the changing image of the reality of the world

that science is giving us.

It's no more Plasticine than the universe is Plasticine

as our understanding of it shifts.

The Plasticine is up here.

Yes...

As I'm older, my mind can stretch a little bit closer

to the dimensions of the God that was out there all the time.

Mainstream Christianity has been so influenced by the Enlightenment

that its views are now totally different

from those of 400 years ago.

But the beliefs of some Christians in the United States

have hardly changed at all.

A recent poll found that almost one third of Americans still believe

that the Biblical story of creation is literally true.

It's extraordinary to think that the word "fundamentalism",

which we nowadays associate with extreme governments,

Islamic regimes, actually originated here in the United States.

I want to find out how it could be that in this secular country,

built on the success of science and technology,

those kinds of fundamental views of Christianity could still survive.

This is Dayton, Tennessee, in the heart of the Bible Belt.

In 1925, a state law was passed

that made the teaching of human evolution illegal.

A local teacher, John Scopes, was tried for breaking this new law.

The Chicago defence lawyer Clarence Darrow was pitted against

William Jennings Bryan, a former presidential candidate.

The trial took place in this courtroom.

You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr Bryan?

Yes, sir, I have tried to.

And you claim that everything in the Bible

should be literally interpreted?

I believe everything in the Bible

should be accepted as it is given there.

Some is illustrative. For example, "Ye are the salt of the earth."

I would not insist that man was actually salt, or had flesh of salt,

but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

Scopes was found guilty. His trial marked the start of a battle

over the teaching of evolution that still continues

in some American states.

'I am simply trying to protect the word of God from the greatest

'atheist or agnostic in the United States...'

Professor Ron Numbers, who grew up near Dayton,

was born into a fundamentalist Christian family.

My father was a fundamentalist preacher here.

The Seventh Day Adventists were the people

who gave the world Young Earth creationism.

"Young Earth" means what, exactly?

Well, that you don't believe there is anything here

more than about 6,000 years.

Early fundamentalists were appalled by the diluted form of Christianity

that had emerged from the Enlightenment.

It was the influence of Germany,

German scholarship and some English scholarship especially,

that scared the bejesus out of evangelicals in America.

They would send over young scholars,

and they would come back tainted with this.

They didn't believe in the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection any more.

They didn't believe Moses had written the first five books of the Bible.

It was knowledge of science

that convinced Ron to abandon his beliefs.

He now lectures on every aspect of fundamentalism,

including the fundamentalist version of science.

Almost to a person,

these fundamentalists profess to love science. They love science.

Back in the 1920s at the time of the Scopes trial here,

the anti-evolutionist argued against evolution on the grounds

that it didn't deserve the good name of science. It was too speculative,

there wasn't enough evidence, and science was something wonderful.

In the 1970s, American fundamentalists

came up with their own version of science -

scientific creationism.

Creationists base their core principles

not on observation and experiment, but on the Bible.

The Creation Museum in Kentucky was set up in 2007

to give Christians a history of the natural world

that fits with a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Amazing to think, really, about one in 500 Americans

have already been to see this exhibition,even in its first year.

That could have a lot of influence on opinion.

The Bible states that God created the universe

and all life on Earth in six days.

So, dinosaurs in the garden of Eden.

That's scary!

'If you take the Old Testament literally, dinosaurs and humans

'must have lived at the same time.'

It's amazing, really.

We've got human beings fully clothed,

collecting carrots with the friendly dinosaurs in the background.

I mean, it's a nice kind of Disneyland scene,

but it totally contradicts the fossil record.

One of the museum's resident scientists,

Jason Lisle, agreed to talk to me.

I was curious to know how he reconciles his faith

in the Biblical account of creation

with contradictory scientific evidence.

This beautiful display

has lots of dinosaur figures in it,

and a lot of the implication of the creationist story is that dinosaurs

and human beings co-existed on the Earth.

That's right.

I don't know of any evidence for that,

and know of a great deal of evidence against it.

So why do you believe that?

Ultimately, it's because God has told us in his word

that God made all of the land animals.

Dinosaurs are land animals, they walk on their legs.

They were made on the sixth day,

the same day as Adam, so they definitely lived at the same time.

But you're a scientist.

Yes, I am.

You're an astrophysicist.

Yes.

And you say that's your position

because you believe it because you read it.

Um...what about experiments, what about evidence?

I would say that I believe in experimentation.

In fact, I would expect that to be possible because God

upholds the universe in a consistent, logical way,

so science would be possible because of my faith.

What if experimentation and observation yielded evidence

that appeared to contradict the statements in the scriptures?

Well, that can always happen, but since our mind isn't perfect

and since our observations aren't always perfect,

if we find some experiment that seems to, on the surface,

disagree with the word of God, we go with the word of God.

If you say that when science contradicts the scripture,

it's scripture you turn to - that's what's correct,

why bother with science?

The Bible tells us we need to care for the Earth.

God gave us responsibility for this Earth.

To do that, we have to know about it.

Therefore, I think the mandate for doing science is scriptural,

so I might challenge my non-Christian colleagues

and say "What is your basis for doing science?"

I have a reason to do it.

I have a reason to expect that it can yield reliable results...

I can tell you I do science because I want to find out how things work.

Yeah.

Yeah. I want to reveal the beauty of the natural world.

Fair enough. But as a Christian, I would say the reason

I can trust the methods of science are mostly reliable,

is because God has made my mind. God has made the universe.

I would expect those two things to go well together.

I have to say, it's a pretty weird place, really.

'What I found really weird, though, was that Jason,

'who's an established scientist, that's undeniable,

'can hold such extreme views.

'He seemed to be saying that science is fine as long as it generates

'results and findings that fit the views of the Church.'

And when it doesn't, they simply can't be right, can they,

because they contradict faith.

I really wonder whether that reveals a fundamental contradiction

between Christianity, religion and science.

It needn't necessarily be that way, but it is a real difficulty.

I mean, what is the point of doing science if it's only right

when it agrees with the Bible?

Today, only a minority of Christians

take everything in the Old Testament as the literal truth.

But for the New Testament, it's a different story.

When it comes to the life of Jesus Christ, all bets are off.

That was a unique moment in human history.

Thanks to the scientific revolution, most Christians now accept

that much of the Old Testament is metaphorical.

But science has had little impact on Christian attitudes

to the New Testament.

When it comes to the life of Jesus Christ, all bets are off.

That was a unique moment in human history where God is inserted

into his creation and we can't expect that to ever occur again.

But you are stating this as an assertion.

As a scientist, you have no evidence.

I have no evidence.

I have no evidence. And I suspect you have a good reason to believe

that there will never be evidence to disprove what you're saying.

Until we invent time machines...

It's easy to make those kind of assertions.

Until we invent time machines.

Until we invent time machines. So it's an assertion based on faith.

But it's also based on the evidence we have,

the recorded evidence of the people at the time...

Which you have dismissed as the evidence for all the other things

that the Church has changed its views on,

like creation in six days and...

But the Church never taught this as central to its faith.

This is not a core belief of the Church, this is not

something that's in the creed.

That's different from the life and death

and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But science has led a few Christians to question even these fundamental

tenets of Christianity.

I was brought up an Anglican and there's a lot I still like

about churches -

the hymns, the contemplation, the sense of community.

I'm here to meet an Anglican priest, David Paterson,

who belongs to a group of Christians called the Sea of Faith.

Many of them doubt the divinity of Jesus Christ

and even whether God really exists.

So let's just be clear.

You mean God didn't make, literally make, the Universe.

No.

And God didn't engineer the virgin birth of Jesus.

No.

And Jesus perhaps didn't really exist as... as a person at all.

Mmm, I think he probably did actually, yes. Yes, I think he did.

Then, can I just explore that a bit more?

I mean, what then is God to you?

What I fell in love with...

What I wanted to give my life to.

And its ingredients were, well, were a lot about the natural world

and a lot about making relationships with people.

I mean, I empathise with all of those things,

but I haven't found a necessity to see God reflected in those things.

The existence of life is extraordinary, but why any more?

And is there any more, really?

No, there isn't any more.

There is actually no difference between the theist and the atheist,

it's only the terminology that's different. Some people have this

deep understanding of the spiritual nature of reality, of everything,

and they want to personify it and call it God or a god

or a particular name of God or something.

Some don't want to do that.

David thinks that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally.

All the religious stories are mythological stories

where asking, "Did it happen?"

or "Where did it happen?"

or "What date did it happen?"

is all completely irrelevant.

It's actually all about

this being a story that helps you to understand what life is all about.

So according to David, all those fundamental tenets of Christianity,

Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, life after death,

didn't happen at all.

Seems to me that that David's version of

Christianity is virtually atheism.

Science provides the facts about the world, religion gives us the music

and the pictures and tells us stories about human nature.

For me, it's science, not religion, that provides our

best hope of understanding the workings of our universe.

Professor Albert de Rocq has

dedicated his life to exploring the scientific equivalent of Genesis -

the Big Bang.

Albert practices in this nondescript, early 21st century

cathedral to science.

Beneath its foundations lies a crypt containing the most

elaborate scientific instrument ever constructed.

The project cost over $8 billion

and uses enough electricity to power a small city.

So we are actually now a 100 metres underground,

and in the main hall of the experiment.

And this is it, this is CMS.

Amazing. How extraordinary.

Inside this particle accelerator,

particles race through a circular tunnel 27 kilometres long,

close to the speed of light, and smash together, simulating

conditions a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

One goal is to find evidence

for the Higgs Boson, which some call the God particle,

because it is thought to have triggered the birth of the universe.

In a world where there wouldn't have been the Higgs field,

we wouldn't exist.

That is why it's like a God particle, it's like God giving...

You know, not everything is equal any more,

but you have diversity and you can create diverse things.

Albert has faith in this machine's ability to find the Higgs Boson,

but if it doesn't, another theory will emerge.

Unlike religion, science can change its view if the evidence demands it.

That's the power of science.

Do we see anything in the process

that suggests the intervention by an intelligent being, by a God?

Certainly, from the scientific point of view, we don't know.

Personally, I don't believe

that there has to be such an agent at work, but as a scientist, as I said,

I work only on data, and so far, that hypothesis, for me, is not excluded,

so I keep it open, but it's not a working hypothesis for me.

Over the last 400 years, Christianity has been transformed

by the power of science.

During the Renaissance, the first scientists showed

that the evidence of nature often contradicts the word of the Bible.

In the 18th century, it was

scientists who were at the forefront of the Enlightenment, making reason,

not religious authority, the driving force in human affairs.

And Darwin's theory of evolution has divided Christians on how to

reconcile science with their faith.

I believe that science will

increasingly make religion redundant and will eventually provide us with

an understanding not only of creation, but also, of ourselves.

I think that the historical record shows that the power of science

to explain what was previously mysterious is enormous.

Personally,

I think that science will one day give us not just a very satisfactory

description of our physical world, of how we came to be here, but even

of how it is that our brains give us this need for religious belief.

If that happens,

when that happens,

what will be left for Christianity?

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