For BBC and Humanists, God is the missing link

Leaving creation out of evolution raises bigger questions than their answers, argues George Pitcher

I’ve watched two media events in the past few days that have raised profound questions on the meaning of life. And neither of them have involved presenters commissioning explicit images from anyone else.

The first, a short animated video voiced by celebrity scientist Professor Alice Roberts, is from the campaigning group Humanists UK. Called Where Do We Come From?, it’s aimed at primary school children as part of the Understanding Humanism platform.

The other one was this week’s opener of four documentaries from BBC2 called Earth, fronted by celebrity naturalist Chris Packham, which examines how our planet was formed over hundreds of millions of years of its pre-history.

All you need is lava: The BBC circa 250m years BC

Both films are as excellent as they are entirely different. The Humanists’ offering is a cute and engaging cartoon about how the Big Bang led to planets and life. The BBC one-hour documentaries are the kind of gothic extravaganzas that it does so splendidly and which alone justify the corporation’s licence fee, if not its very existence.

Ignore theology

What they both have in common is that they ignore theology. I can understand and I’ll explain why. I like the people of Humanists UK and have shared a conference platform at some BBC event or other. They are reasonable and kind and as stylistically different from what the philosopher Terry Eagleton dubbed “Ditchkins” – a composite of celebrity atheists Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens – as it is possible to be.

But it’s still true that they campaign to have religion expunged from the public square. A cursory browse of their website shows that they set up straw-man struggles. They campaign, for instance, for the teaching in schools of evolution over creationism. It already is so taught, except in the most nutjob of academies – and Ofsted can regulate those.

So it’s only to be expected that Humanists aren’t going to mention a deity in their video. Packham’s brief, meanwhile, is to trace the geological and biological narrative of Earth from a molten mass of lava and gas to our present age’s Eden (we might call it Originwatch). Again, he bears no burden of responsibility to bring religious belief into that story.

Elephantine god in the room

But my issue is this: The more they ignore the divine hand in what I’ll call the creation of all this, the more they draw attention to it. Both the Humanists and Packham are trying to tell their stories while ignoring an elephantine god in the room.

Those of us with a religious faith (ignoring, for a moment, those of us with an idolatrous faith in the material) are often accused of worshipping a “god of the gaps”. That is, a desire to fill in any hole in scientific knowledge with our divinity – an ever-diminishing effort on our part, it’s claimed, as science irresistibly marches towards a complete explanation and understanding of everything.

But the BBC and the Humanists, in their studiously secular approach, are the very ones here who are creating their own yawning gaps.

Grain of sand

Let me offer a couple of examples, having watched them both in some detail. The Humanist video opens with Big Bang and Professor Roberts intoning that “Billions of years ago the whole universe was packed tightly together, smaller than a grain of sand.”

Eh? As Roberts will know, the physics jury has been out on that one for some centuries. What space and, therefore, time would this speck of infinite mass and density be occupying? Following on, why is there something rather than nothing? Theology posits some answers to that, but Roberts and, consequently, the Humanists don’t.

Yes, I know this is for primary school children, but isn’t this exactly the kind of speculation, which is invited by their own scripting, that they want to remove from schools?

We are stardust

Likewise, the school video goes on to say that “you are made from stardust”. This may not be religious talk, but it’s mushy-hippy spirituality, reminiscent of Joni Mitchell singing “We are stardust… and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” I thought it was we religious folk that did this pre-lapsarian stuff?

As for Packham, whom I hereby nickname Sir Chris Packhamborough, he stands on a mountain range and, referencing the destruction of 90 per cent of all life on earth 252 million years ago, asks the grown-up question: “Do we want those sorts of extinctions on our conscience? I don’t think so.”

Conscience and consciousness

It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the conscience to which he refers is just as much a part of the wondrous created order he surveys as anything else. As is the human consciousness with which he surveys it. As, for that matter, are hope and love and, indeed, faith.

All these may have evolved from volcanic eruptions, I suppose, or a selfish gene. But, then again, whose selfish gene would that be? We may yet again be witnessing a scientism that will accept no miracles other than its own.

This is not a competition. It isn’t us or them. Scientific discovery and theological exploration go hand in hand through history and, one hopes, the future. But it’s also just to say that the Humanists and the BBC raise as many, if not more, God-shaped questions as they seek to ignore.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest