- [Narrator] The Bible, a book whose origins
lie thousands of years ago in the Middle East.
It still inspires billions today.
- Creation roots us in the wonder of our own drama.
What a beginning.
- [Narrator] Its teachings, provoke controversy.
- The 10 Commandments of the hysterical believers
of a group of desert tribes.
- We know the Bible is completely accurate.
- It shows me how dangerous Revelation can be.
- "Blessed are those pure in heart
"for they shall see God."
- [Narrator] Seven figures from different walks of life
offer their personal perspective on the best-selling book
of all time and what it means to them.
- The women at the Bible still speak to us today.
- Who was Jesus Christ and who was it that murdered him?
- Even if you've never read a word of the Bible
your life will have been shaped by it.
- [Narrator] In this program,
Howard Jacobson explores the story of the creation.
(dramatic music)
- "In the beginning,
"God created the heaven and the Earth,
"and the Earth was without form and void,
"and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,
"and God said, 'Let there be light.'
"And there was light.
"And God saw the light that it was good,
"and God divided the light from the darkness.
"And God called the light day and the darkness
"He called night."
With these exquisite opening sentences
of the Old Testament life begins.
In six days God speaks the universe into existence.
There is no struggle and no harshness, a mere breadth,
and in God's own image we are made.
And then seeing that His creation is good, He rests.
(serene music) (congregant clapping)
Serene itself, the creation story excites angry controversy.
On the one hand churches
for whom the creation story is literal truth.
- The universe exists to display the glory of God
and therefore those who try to give an account
for the universe that exists
in a non God way are not only laughable
but they are blasphemous.
(exploding)
- On other hand, fervent atheists are exasperated
that anyone should still revere the stories of the Bible.
Today, a fierce battle rages between those who believe
that Genesis is a true account of how life began
and those who think it's childish nonsense.
It is impossible not to have a position.
The creation story is either true or it's false.
It either happened or it didn't.
But are these our only choices?
In this film, I aim to find a path
between the fundamentalism of religion
and atheism to find a vocabulary
for describing the wonderful poetry of the creation story
which doesn't leave it vulnerable to the absolutes
of faith or denial, and to explore why whatever we believe
it's a story we cannot shake our imaginations free of.
In the beginning, there is no where else to start.
(dramatic music)
(light upbeat music)
The book of Genesis teams with stories;
Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel,
Noah and Abraham.
But the creation is the heart of it.
It tells Jews and Christians alike, how their world began,
how God pulled forth life in abundance,
causing it to grow and multiply,
finally creating man himself.
To this day it provides us with the rhythm
of our working week, crowned by the Sabbath,
the day of rest and worship.
(deep thoughtful music)
But the creation story also provides us
with something still more fundamental.
The first unequivocal statement in world literature
of belief in a single all powerful God.
This concept would be the Jews' great contribution
to civilization, the unassailable foundation
not only of Judaism but of Christianity and Islam.
No other idea would have such a profound influence
on the history of humanity.
(chanting in prayer)
(upbeat music) (traffic bustling)
But where did the story of one God
gifting the world into existence originate?
Who were its authors?
How was it meant to be read and how thousands
of years after it was written, are we to read it now?
- Howard. - Chief Rabbi.
- Lovely to see you. - Lovely to see you.
- Lord Sacks is Britain's Chief Rabbi,
a theologian, a philosopher and a biblical scholar.
- To understand Genesis one, you have to understand
that this is a polemic
against all the stories in the ancient world
about how the world came to be the way it is,
which are all stories about multiplicities
of God's huge cast list of deities.
All of whom are fighting, squabbling,
plotting each other's downfall
or hacking each other to pieces,
and they come in endless shapes and forms.
And, of course, Judaism gets rid of the entire cast list.
All of a sudden you get this extraordinary, radical idea
that there is just one God,
and He has no company up there.
The only company He has is this creature that he has created
in love, in His own image.
Which is why Genesis 1 is so serene.
God says, "Let there be," and there is.
(upbeat music)
- We forget how radical the idea
of one God creating the world must have been
in a world of many gods.
So where did it come from?
(light upbeat music)
(people chattering)
If we are to discover the origins of the creation story
we have to track down the origins
of the Jewish belief in that one God
without which creation could not have been written.
The one thing we can say for sure is that you can't write
the story of one God creating the world
unaided and unopposed until you've stopped worshiping
all other gods.
All roads lead to Jerusalem
a city holy to the three great monotheistic religions,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
According to traditional theology, the first five books
of the Bible are the unmediated word of God,
as dictated to Moses 3,000 years ago, or more.
Monotheism, allegiance to a single or powerful creator
is supposed to go back even further to Abraham,
only 20 generations on from Adam.
But the findings of archeologists here in Jerusalem are
undermining such assumptions,
suggesting that both the creation story and the belief
in a single God are a far more recent origin.
These are the remains of residential dwellings dating
from around 800 B.C. located just outside
the walls of Jerusalem.
Oded Lipschits is one of Israel's leading archeologists.
Oded thinks that the Jewish belief in a single God
of creation did not take hold until many centuries
after Moses supposedly wrote the creation story down.
- We have archeology and we have the Bible.
From the pure archeological point of view
you have 100s, you have now more than 1,000
small kind of amulets, figurines, symbolizing
a belief in a feminine God.
You have two main types of it,
one is a very simple type of a figurine, handmade,
these are kinds of symbols of feminine goddess.
- The presence of these fertility symbols in Jewish homes
tells Oded that Jews were still worshiping multiple gods
hundreds of years after Moses, which suggests the story
of one God creating the universe could not yet
have been written.
For Oded it was only at the end of the eighth century B.C.
that Jews began slowly to place their trust
in one supreme being, a trust that was severely tested
when in 586 B.C., the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem.
The evidence for this disaster still survives.
- Just in this area a huge destruction level was discovered
was a very, very big ash layer,
and with a lot of arrowheads
like this one used by the Babylonian army.
(dramatic music)
- [Howard] The temple in Jerusalem was sacked
and thousands were hauled off to exile in Babylon.
What did this tell the Jews
about their all powerful God and protector?
- It was a horrible surprise because it went
against all the lessons that they started to learn about,
if we will believe in one, God
we have insurance that nothing will happen.
And suddenly Jerusalem was destroyed,
and, I think, that it put a big question mark
on all the Judean identity, belief and theology.
(daunting music)
(people chattering)
- [Howard] How can you go on believing
in a God who abandons you to your fate?
It's the question Jews have had reason to ask
more than once in their long history.
(singing in prayer)
At this stage, according to Oded
the creation story was still to be written.
And one wonders how it ever was?
The disaster ought to have finished off the Jewish religion.
It didn't.
Instead it was from the trauma of exile
that the extraordinary story
of a single all powerful God speaking the world
into existence would emerge.
(daunting music)
According to traditional Jewish and Christian belief
the creation story was dictated by God to Moses
more than 3,000 years ago.
But historians and archeologists tell us
that belief in a single all powerful God of creation
was still in the making when the Jews were hauled off
to exile in Babylon in 586 B.C.,
more than 500 years after Moses was thought to have lived.
So when was the creation story written?
Yairah Amit is a biblical scholar.
I met her at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem
where the oldest copies of Judaism's most sacred texts,
the Torah are kept.
Yairah believes that it's from this period
of the Jewish exile in Babylon, that the creation story
and many other parts of the old Testament date.
What could have happened is that the Jewish God Yahweh
vanishes, and that they start worshiping Babylonian gods,
and some did?
- I'm sure, but what is very interesting
that not all of them assimilated.
And if you ask why, is the question is
because of spiritual or intellectual leaders
and those leaders said to them,
"We sinned and here were punished."
- The thing that you're describing is extraordinary, really.
You were saying that, "We have sinned
"therefore everything that's happened is our fault."
- Yeah.
- I mean, how new a theological concept is that?
This concept is very new
that we are here because our God
who is the only one God wants us to be punished
and therefore the exile is temporary.
And if we will, if we are loyal to our God
and if we behave according to his laws
we have hope and we shall come back to our country.
And this seed is the beginning of Judaism.
(water gurgling) (thoughtful music)
- Rather than believe their God had abandoned them
or simply been defeated the Jews read their exile as proof
of His unequal power.
They had sinned and this was His thundering punishment.
Even the Babylonians were subject to His command.
It was in this period that Jewish thinkers
began to write their history in earnest wishing to show
that their God was without peer,
had always been with them and had planned their destiny
from the very start of creation.
Is that the order of it, we discover the necessity
to think historically about ourselves,
so we must write the history of us.
- We must write the history because the history
is the real evidence for what happened to us
from the historical point of view
and in order to to understand our belief.
- And the creation story is is written out of this?
- Of course. - At this time.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(deep pondering music)
- The creation story draws heavily on Babylonian
and other Middle Eastern creation myths.
They too see creation as the victory of order over chaos,
but in these the world is born out of conflict
between the gods.
The Jewish God by contrast works alone
in wonderful isolation creating the world
in an act of benign will.
(deep pondering music)
50 years after the fall of Jerusalem, Babylon was conquered
by the Persians and the Jews were set free.
Their faith had been rewarded and they returned
to Israel with a monotheism made more fervent by exile.
They now had a sophisticated creation story
shaped to demonstrate God's good intentions
from the very beginning,
and a new dedication to scholarship and analysis.
They returned, in other words, as people of the book.
(speaking in foreign language)
- 2,5000 years later
his passion for learner disputatiousness
in which no word is allowed to go unexamined
or unilluminated still survives
in the yeshivas or seminaries of Jerusalem.
(people chattering)
So the creation story might not after all
have been handed down by God to Moses,
but it reflects an extraordinary development
in religious thinking.
By reading the humiliating defeat
of their nation, as proof of the power
of their almighty God, the Jews turn a political disaster
into a theological triumph.
Instead of residing in a temple in a ruined city
God can now go everywhere with the Jews,
He is the God of the creating word
and the soul-loving architect of humanity.
For the next 2,5000 years He reigns unchallenged
in his heavens.
600 years after he cleared out all rivals as God of the Jews
he became the God of the Christians,
and 600 years after that, the God of Islam
Despite the best efforts of historians, archeologists
and scientists to dissuade them, millions of Jews,
Christians and Muslims still believe
with unshakeable conviction
in the literal truth of the creation story.
This for them remains the only account
of how the world began.
(upbeat music)
(thundering) (light upbeat music)
In pursuit of such unshakable conviction
I am returning to where I began,
not exactly the garden of Eden, but Manchester.
(light upbeat music)
I grew up here as a non-Orthodox Jew
not so much rejecting the Jewish religion
as leaving it to others.
Judaism confused and frightened me
and too much of it was in a foreign language.
I read the Bible in English, not Hebrew.
When God said, "Let there be light,"
he said it in a Manchester accent.
But I had relatives who were very different.
- Howard. - How lovely to see you.
- [Rabi] Lovely, you as well, come in.
- [Howard] How are you?
- [Rabi] Thank God, I'm fine and you.
- [Howard] I'm all right, thank you.
I'm all right.
- Hey! - Howard (laughs).
(speaking in foreign language)
- My cousin Susan married, Avraham, a rabbi who belongs
to the strictly Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Avremi is their son-in-law and also a rabbi.
(singing in foreign language)
- And what exactly did the words
(speaking in foreign language) mean?
- They mean, we bless you God King of the universe
who has created the fruit of the vine.
- They are reminding me how Jews commemorate the Sabbath,
the day, God rests after the creation.
- You have to light the candles, cover your eyes
so that you don't see actually the candles.
- As Orthodox Jews they could never allow us
to film the real thing
because for them the Friday night ritual is deeply holy,
nothing less than a reenactment of creation itself.
- That is what Shabbat is.
It's the day when the world is the celebration
of God's combination of the perfection
the completion of the world.
And we celebrate the wonderful gift that he has
given us, this world.
The Talmud says that when we hold a glass of wine
on Friday night and say these words
we become partners in the act of creation.
- Really? - Yeah.
- Do I need to be saying these words at the same time
as I'm drinking the wine or drinking the wine
be enough? - You drink
after you say the words.
- When you finish your drink.
- That's lovely idea being,
it is a lovely idea of being a partner in it, right.
So we're partner with God
in a sense? - With God, oh yeah.
- This is not a question you normally bring up
at a family occasion, but I have to ask it.
God made the Earth and all the creatures on it in six days,
is that your understanding of how we got here?
- That's what we've been taught for thousands of years,
from childhood onwards.
- And you believe that?
- Implicitly.
- The bottom line is belief transcends rationale
and understanding, and understanding takes us
to a certain level, but then belief and faith kicks in.
You can't rationalize faith.
- I'm much effected by that.
I love the idea of our being partners in creation
because it humanizes the whole story,
and it reminds us of our creativity.
And I'm touched too, by the fact that every Friday night
creation is remembered and reenacted.
I think that's extraordinary that there are people,
Jews who are able to feel that they are
living continuously with that story,
and living as though again and again,
week upon week as though at the beginning of time.
But for it to work they say that you have to have faith.
And if you don't have the faith in that story,
the truth of that story, where are you?
(pondering music)
The big question for me is how to believe or not believe
at the same time, to do justice to the poetic subtlety
of the creation story without exposing it to the ridicule
of those for whom scientific evidence is the only
measurement of truth?
Let's confront the absolutists, those who absolutely believe
and those who absolutely don't.
(dramatic music)
"And God saw everything that He had made,
"and behold, it was very good.
"And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
"And on the seventh day God ended His work
"which He had made, and He rested on the seventh day
"and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it."
Today, there are many for whom this image
of a God made world is not good.
A militant new atheism is in the wind and I've come
to its holiest shrine, The Natural History Museum in London,
a temple to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Here room after room of fossils and skeletons testify
sometimes with great beauty
to the Earth's not being thousands
but billions of years old.
(mellow music)
Conclusive evidence that life is not the product
of divine will, but of the brutal laws
of natural selection.
Doubts about creation did not suddenly surface
the day Darwin published on the "Origin of Species."
Doubt is as old as faith,
but Darwin's certainly armed religious skeptics
with an alternative explanation of how life began.
If we got here the way Darwin said we got here
they argue, then God, hasn't only left us,
he never made us in the first place,
and to think otherwise is willful
not to say wicked irrationality.
I am meeting a good friend who has no patience
for such irrationality.
Professor A.C. Grayling is a distinguished philosopher
and one of Britain's most vocal atheists.
- How lovely to see you. - Lovely to see you.
You all right? - Yeah, absolutely.
- We meet beneath the disconcertingly benevolent gaze
of Charles Darwin.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth."
I would like to ask you, did he?
Accept, I'll know what you're going to say,
so I'll ask you instead,
how do you know he didn't?
- Well, firstly, there are so many different creation
myths from so many different parts of history,
so many different cultures,
and all of them share something in common,
which is the ignorance of the people
who created the creation myths.
What they wanted was a story to tell,
they wanted a narrative,
they want a beginning for things,
and so they made up a story about an agent
bigger, stronger than they were
from which the world came.
- Out of ignorance?
- [Grayling] Out of ignorance.
- That's quite, I mean, that's quite scornful.
- Think of this.
If you thought that the wind and the thunder were agents
like yourself, but invisible or more powerful,
and then you discovered over many generations
that they weren't, that they were part of nature,
the agencies in question will begin to move out of nature
up to the mountain tops and then into the sky
and finally outside space and time all together.
As the horizons of knowledge advance,
so the gods vanished,
further and further. - Then you're not
explaining the necessity for them.
If we've answered all those other questions, why did men go,
why didn't they just jettison it?
- Nobody really believes it.
What people want is they want to believe it.
And they therefore stop themselves
thinking about it too clearly.
- Well, let me tell you, I am the opposite.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe any of it.
I don't believe it as much as you don't believe it,
but I want to believe it
because it seems to me it's an access.
No, it's not true that I want to believe it.
I just think there are,
I just think there is something there that they believe
that is not negligible,
this this issued in great thought, in great beauty,
and in beautiful literature, and in beautiful music.
I simply want to honor the imaginative necessity
that drives people to believe,
and hat all your reasoning in the world doesn't answer for.
- Then nobody can deny, absolutely no one can deny
that our emotional lives, what in a secular sense
I would call our spiritual lives,
are the most important thing about us.
That is why poetry and music matter.
That is why love matters.
That's why human relationships matter.
Why is it necessary
in addition to the beautiful music,
to the starring poetry, to the profundity of our love
for other people to add on these ancient stories
of gods and ghosts-- - That's not the order.
- They don't do anything to enrich it,
and even indeed, historically, they get in the way of it.
- There's an old Jewish joke,
"That God you don't believe in,
"the rabbi tells the atheist, "I don't believe in either."
How many religious people I wonder recognizes the God
in whom atheists don't believe,
and how many religious people feel driven
by the new atheism to assert their faith more obstinately
than they would have in the past?
♪ So sing my soul ♪
♪ Then sing my soul ♪
♪ My Savior God to Thee ♪
- No, this isn't the American Bible Belt
it's Central London.
Here just a short bus ride from the Natural History Museum,
but undeterred by its findings
people flock to hear the teachings of creationism.
I cannot myself feel contempt for whatever consolations
this congregation finds in its religion,
belief assuages sorrow, but at what cost to reason?
- "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth,"
and you'll notice there's no attempt made here
or anywhere else in the Bible to prove the existence of God.
Actually the very attempt to do so
can be somewhat insulting to Him.
It's like someone asking you,
"Prove that you had a father or mother.'
Well, you wouldn't be here (chuckles) if you hadn't.
- Greg Haslam is senior pastor at the Westminster Chapel
and an ardent believer in the literal truth of the Bible,
including the creation story.
For you creation is true?
- Absolutely true.
- God makes the world
and everything alive in it in six days?
- In six days, yeah.
- You are, of course, well aware that there are many people
out there who would say this is bunkum.
- I'm very much aware of that.
I certainly am familiar with all that our critics say
about us, but I believe
the science is on our side, not theirs.
You have the science on your side?
I believe so, yeah.
I was taught the same things that they believe
and then came to see them with different pair of eyes
as it were, different pair of glasses.
So the fossil record and sedimentary layers
of the Earth, fossils aren't formed gradually over time
because dead animals, rot, or they're eaten by predators.
How could a whole dinosaur be preserved
without sudden catastrophic burial?
Noah's flood.
So that's a different lens to look at the same facts
and interpret them differently.
- Why do you even want the science on your side?
Why don't you say to the scientists,
"You do your thing, I do my thing."
- Because biblical faith, as opposed
to other religious perspectives in this world is rooted
in events that happen in history,
and if the facts could be proved to be untrue
the faith is without foundation.
- But you're becoming, you're fighting the scientist
with his own tools.
Let them have mere fact, what do you want
fact for? - It's not mere fact.
- You've got this wonderful poetry,
you've got these wonderful stories,
which talk to us in so many ways, fact!
- So my faith is not anchored
in a mythical upper story realm that has nothing to do
with the real world, it's anchored in the total reality
God has made, and it ought to accord
with that total reality.
That's why science is important.
- It is not Reverend Haslam's faith
I find problematic, but the distortion
of science to support it.
The religious are easy pickings for atheists
when they fly in the face of reason.
A longing for absolute truth hides in the human heart,
absolute atheism, absolute creationism dance
to the same tune, each driving the other
to further and further extremes of absolute conviction.
For me, neither position leaves room for what the poet
John Keats called negative capability,
mystery, uncertainty, doubt.
And since these are what make for creativity
they are precisely what we must bring to the creation story.
(pondering music)
Let us see then where mystery and uncertainty
ought to be found.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat tickling music)
My attempt to steer a path
between the competing extremes of unswerving belief
and unswerving disbelief has brought me to Cambridge
where I read English literature in the 1960s.
Among the writers I most enjoyed was Coleridge
who dismissed attempts to subject the Bible
to scientific inquiry by saying that the Bible found him
and that was evidence enough.
It's the final word on all writing.
It finds you or it doesn't.
You were never far from literature
when you put your mind to religion
and you were never far from religion
when you put your mind to literature.
I studied English literature here in Cambridge
imagining I was leaving Jewishness behind.
But, in fact, I was doing what the boys I observed
at the Jerusalem yeshiva were doing interpreting,
interrogating, discriminating.
You could say that creation itself
was the first great act of discrimination.
God calling for light, and then distinguishing
this from that, see here land there,
this day holy that day not.
The emergence of clarity from lightless chaos
in the creation story is to me a thing
of immense intellectual beauty,
a beauty which scientists too can appreciate.
(pondering music)
I'm off to meet one who does appreciate that beauty.
The Reverend John Sir Polkinghorne is a particle physicist
and one of Britain's most celebrated scientists.
He's also an ordained Anglican priest, a combination
that bewilders people who are rigid in their distinctions.
I noticed that you have the distinction,
the dubious distinction of being mentioned
by Dawkins in his "God Delusion" book as one
of the good scientists who believe or one
of the good religious scientists.
- Yes, he's sort of incredulous
about how I could be so stupid.
- Well, that's what I was going to ask you.
What's he so puzzled about?
- He's puzzled because he has such a distorted
and caricature view of religion.
I mean, he thinks, for example, that typical creationists
and believes the world is 6,000 years old and so on,
and came into being in the course of a hectic week
is the typical religious believer.
And of course it's very easy to scorn and demolish
straw men of that kind.
- So what is it in relation to the creation story
which is our subjects that you believe?
- When you read something like the early chapters
of the Bible you have to figure out
what it is you're reading?
You think it's a scientific account
of a hectic six days of divine activity,
then, of course, you'll think it's all nonsense.
But it isn't that, and you're abusing the text
if you try and read in that way, it is something deeper
and more interesting than that it's theological text.
The message of Genesis 1 is not,
God did this and then did that,
but nothing exists except through the will of God.
God said, "Let there be."
For Dr. Polkinghorne, his scientific knowledge
far from undermining his faith actually bolsters it.
He's fascinated by how precisely the physics
and the chemistry of the universe must be structured
in order to make it possible for life on Earth to evolve.
- Science, explores the world, and it finds
that the world is deeply and wonderfully ordered.
And that suggests to me that there is a divine mind
behind the order of the world, for example,
we have discovered that we live in a universe
that is very special, very particular.
We find that a world that is capable of producing
carbon-based life has to be a very particular world indeed
in it's given physical fabric.
That's to say the laws of nature, which operated
following the Big Bang, have to take a very specific form.
If they'd been a little bit different, there would be
no carbon and there would be no carbon-based life.
That's very surprising.
And again, you have to ask the question,
is that just our luck?
Or is it because we don't, in fact, live in a world
that's any old world, but a world that is a creation
which has been designed by its creator
in the sense of being given the intrinsic potentiality
that will enable it to have the fruitful history
that brings forth carbon-based life.
And, of course, it's the last understanding
that I find the most coherent and intellectually satisfying.
- This much I am now settled in my mind about,
you don't have to deny the findings
of science to call yourself a religious man,
you can be for Darwin and for the Creator.
It's a nonsense to say the creation story fails the science,
the two are on entirely different errands.
(light thoughtful music)
So what is the errand of the creation story
and why does it resonate so powerfully
with an unreligious man like me?
(light thoughtful music)
Mary Midgley is a moral philosopher, she's 90 years old,
and throughout her distinguished career has put her mind
to what religion means for human beings.
She believes we cannot understand
what the creation story is for
unless we grasp the power of myth.
- I do think we have to shake ourselves
and think again about how we view myths in general
because this is primarily a myth that is to say,
it's an imaginative vision, which serves
as a background to all the rest of life,
and that is not something that anybody can live without.
- I'll tell you, when I hear you speaking like this
you might be surprised to hear me say this,
but you remind me of D.H. Lawrence.
Lawrence says, "The human heart must have an absolute.
"And when the human heart doesn't have an absolute
"the center falls apart," he says.
And I have read you, and you talk about the center bleeding
when there's nothing beyond ourselves.
- I mean, I think the point is
that we are far too limited, isn't it?
I mean, the natural way to think of ourselves
is as part of a greater whole, to try to do without that,
I think is totally unnatural to Homo sapiens.
- What do you think about the new atheists
and how they're reading these stories?
- Well, they've made an extraordinary jump to the idea
that only literal meaning should ever be taken seriously.
And if you've just been to performance of King Lear
your question afterwards is not
"Well, was there a King Lear at that particular time?
"Did his daughters really?"
You know, it isn't that kind of question.
The sort of importance that people feel science has
these days is due to a great quest for certainty.
- So it's no different from religion.
- Oh, no, not in that respect, yes.
Except it is not so nutritious.
- It's not so nutritious (laughs).
- [Mary] Yes.
- We have forgotten how to read the Bible,
mot because we are too sophisticated,
but because we are not sophisticated enough.
Mary Midgley reminds us of the lessons to be drawn from art
whether it's King Lear or a soap opera.
We know they are made up, but still we are enthralled.
The made up issues from our imaginations
and our imaginations outstrip mere fact and reason.
The concept that something can be both true
and untrue is one that religious people seem
better able to grasp than atheists.
- It seems to me that what Genesis is, is a kind of Jewish
equivalent of what in Greece was philosophy.
Only the Greek saw truth as system,
and the Jews saw truth as story.
So the opening of the Bible is,
here are the first principles,
this is what life is about.
- Does this get us out then of having to argue
with scientists about what could
scientifically have happened at such and such a date?
- I think so because clearly the Bible isn't science,
it's about, you know, telling the human story and adding
that one crucial dimension that we are not alone.
The idea of God in search of man is the real drama,
the driving drama of the Bible.
Religion is not an explanation of how the universe
came into being, it's not a means of saving
our eternally guilty self.
Religion is the redemption of solitude.
(upbeat music)
(people chanting in prayer)
- It's just possible that in the course of making this film
I have become a little more religious
or at least a little less non-religious than I was.
I've grown in my attachment, anyway, to the God
of creation who was yet to become the glowering Yahweh
so detested by atheists, he is fresh to himself
as we and creation are fresh to ourselves
everything is to play for.
That's what moves me most, the idea
that we are delivered still warm from the kiln as it were
into our own hands and yet not cast adrift.
(dramatic music) (waves whooshing)
A myth does not shrivel at the first dry touch of science.
Those who wrote this myth 2,5000 years ago
did not know what we know, but creation still
describes existence in a magnificent simplicity
of language that binds us to them.
It remains a story.
It does our hearts good to know
that we are made in the image of a Creator who reveled
in creativity for its own sake.
He made us out of no other motive than an artist's joy
in making and saw that we were good.
This I now understand is the enchantment
of the creation story.
Forget the supernatural, creation roots us in the wonder
of our own drama, the children of a marvelous,
utterly mysterious act of giving,
gifted with the marvelous ourselves.
What a beginning.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In the next program
journalist Rageh Omaar goes in search
of the prophet Abraham.
- We're descendants of Abraham, who is the man who signed
on the dotted line with God.
- [Narrator] But Abraham's children seem to be at war.
- Is Abraham's legacy one the greatest sources of division
in the world today or does the great patriarch
hold the key to peace and reconciliation?
(chanting in prayer) (upbeat music)