Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
I have no idea why the algorithm chose this frame from the film. Don’t be put off thinking this film is a church sermon. It isn’t. Film Two of Testing God is about good and evil, altruism and selfishness, about genes and culture and about AI, belief and the take-off of culture.
I knew from the start that this would be, for me, the least rewarding of the three. Not because it’s dull stuff, but because the arguments about selfish genes and culture already felt tired, worn out and destined to get bogged down with people talking past each other. More than the other two films in the series it is where the two world views of traditional religion and modern science, have come into the bitterest and most implacable opposition. As Richard Dawkins says early in the film, in his usual provocative way, ‘Biology is where god did his best work and so Darwin pulled out a far larger rug from under God than physics ever has’. I suspect this is the film, being so directly about us as human animals, which so annoyed both Richard Dawkins and the Christian organisation who complained about the series.
It has been my experience that you can just about suggest that God might not have created the universe in six days, but might instead have set up some physical rules by which the universe is set spinning, and people will still remain in their seats. Should you, however stray into questions of what makes as we are and non-believers and believers alike take to their barricades. Neither side seems to be content to let the other side think what they wish. Dawkins felt compelled to say that religious ‘explanations’ by which he seems to mean all religious beliefs are mentally degrading. While the more fundamentally minded believers of Islam and Christianity want the theory of evolution to be removed from schools and their children to not even have the chance to reject it for themselves AFTER they have learnt what it is. They have it rejected for them, which seems to me to be a wholly unsatisfactory way of bringing up children.
There is a generation (perhaps more than one) of believers and anti-believers who are, it seems, permanently locked together in mutual distrust. Not having been brought up in any religion, I have never felt either the censure of medieval or bronze age restrictions, nor consequently the burning need to reject them. Anyway this was the quagmire in which I feared we would get bogged down.
I wanted to find some structure in which we could set a discussion of genes but which would reach out beyond them to include the actual experiences (including religious belief) of being human. You have to start with the actual experiences of being human and at least try to explain them, not set them aside as ‘illusions’ or explain them away. Sadly, many biologists have resorted to both these ploys.
The idea I had for trying to set a frame, was to bring together into the same film the life testimony of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who as a young girl in World War Two survived both Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, and Jürgen Moltmann who was perhaps Germany’s most famous theologian and had, as a boy, been forced to man the anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg. Perhaps not everyone will agree but I feel that bringing them together made a container powerful enough to let both genes and belief, both Darwin and the Divine have their say. I found both Jürgen and Anita very moving and compelling.
Picture wise, Maltmann’s story allowed me to continue the fiery visuals of creation that we set running in film one. This time the fire of creation was the creation of conscience and belief which are, after all, both parts of the natural order of things.
As I’ve already mentioned I am not myself religious and have felt the need neither to believe in a god nor to cry out against one. So when we went to see Maltmann I wasn’t looking for any sort of religious affirmation. I was there to speak to him, much as I had spoken to Anita, as a person of deep personal belief, based on profoundly life-changing experience, more than as a bookish theologian. I ran away from Sunday School when I was 4 after telling the elderly teacher that I thought she was stupid. I was not seeking scriptural enlightenment. But I got it anyway. When Maltmann turned the parable of The Prodigal Son (which I have always found to be utterly unconvincing) on its head, I felt humbled. Here was a man who had truly had his ‘dark night of the soul’ and come out of it with an understanding I had never glimpsed. I still do not share Maltmann’s belief but his parable of ‘The Waiting Father’ opened a door for me to understand his belief.
And it is belief that becomes the focus of the second part of the film, looking at whether AI might come to believe, (which I think it will) for reasons similar to why humans believe. It’s a tricky argument that I am not sure we got quite right. But I think we were on the right track. It is the theme that we then took on in to film 3.
I have no idea why the algorithm chose this frame from the film. Don’t be put off thinking this film is a church sermon. It isn’t. Film Two of Testing God is about good and evil, altruism and selfishness, about genes and culture and about AI, belief and the take-off of culture.
I knew from the start that this would be, for me, the least rewarding of the three. Not because it’s dull stuff, but because the arguments about selfish genes and culture already felt tired, worn out and destined to get bogged down with people talking past each other. More than the other two films in the series it is where the two world views of traditional religion and modern science, have come into the bitterest and most implacable opposition. As Richard Dawkins says early in the film, in his usual provocative way, ‘Biology is where god did his best work and so Darwin pulled out a far larger rug from under God than physics ever has’. I suspect this is the film, being so directly about us as human animals, which so annoyed both Richard Dawkins and the Christian organisation who complained about the series.
It has been my experience that you can just about suggest that God might not have created the universe in six days, but might instead have set up some physical rules by which the universe is set spinning, and people will still remain in their seats. Should you, however stray into questions of what makes as we are and non-believers and believers alike take to their barricades. Neither side seems to be content to let the other side think what they wish. Dawkins felt compelled to say that religious ‘explanations’ by which he seems to mean all religious beliefs are mentally degrading. While the more fundamentally minded believers of Islam and Christianity want the theory of evolution to be removed from schools and their children to not even have the chance to reject it for themselves AFTER they have learnt what it is. They have it rejected for them, which seems to me to be a wholly unsatisfactory way of bringing up children.
There is a generation (perhaps more than one) of believers and anti-believers who are, it seems, permanently locked together in mutual distrust. Not having been brought up in any religion, I have never felt either the censure of medieval or bronze age restrictions, nor consequently the burning need to reject them. Anyway this was the quagmire in which I feared we would get bogged down.
I wanted to find some structure in which we could set a discussion of genes but which would reach out beyond them to include the actual experiences (including religious belief) of being human. You have to start with the actual experiences of being human and at least try to explain them, not set them aside as ‘illusions’ or explain them away. Sadly, many biologists have resorted to both these ploys.
The idea I had for trying to set a frame, was to bring together into the same film the life testimony of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who as a young girl in World War Two survived both Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, and Jürgen Moltmann who was perhaps Germany’s most famous theologian and had, as a boy, been forced to man the anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg. Perhaps not everyone will agree but I feel that bringing them together made a container powerful enough to let both genes and belief, both Darwin and the Divine have their say. I found both Jürgen and Anita very moving and compelling.
Picture wise, Maltmann’s story allowed me to continue the fiery visuals of creation that we set running in film one. This time the fire of creation was the creation of conscience and belief which are, after all, both parts of the natural order of things.
As I’ve already mentioned I am not myself religious and have felt the need neither to believe in a god nor to cry out against one. So when we went to see Maltmann I wasn’t looking for any sort of religious affirmation. I was there to speak to him, much as I had spoken to Anita, as a person of deep personal belief, based on profoundly life-changing experience, more than as a bookish theologian. I ran away from Sunday School when I was 4 after telling the elderly teacher that I thought she was stupid. I was not seeking scriptural enlightenment. But I got it anyway. When Maltmann turned the parable of The Prodigal Son (which I have always found to be utterly unconvincing) on its head, I felt humbled. Here was a man who had truly had his ‘dark night of the soul’ and come out of it with an understanding I had never glimpsed. I still do not share Maltmann’s belief but his parable of ‘The Waiting Father’ opened a door for me to understand his belief.
And it is belief that becomes the focus of the second part of the film, looking at whether AI might come to believe, (which I think it will) for reasons similar to why humans believe. It’s a tricky argument that I am not sure we got quite right. But I think we were on the right track. It is the theme that we then took on in to film 3.
