Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (2012) s01e03 Episode Script
The Meaning Of Life
We are all going to die.
We just don't know how, or when.
Easily snuffed out in an instant, what is life's meaning? Oh, man! I see it, I see it.
We're gonna get closer, we're gonna get closer.
Over 1,000 tornadoes rip through the United States every year.
Most do little damage.
This one was different.
There it is.
Oh, my gosh! It's going to go down that road right there.
Oh, gosh, that is a monster tornado! Right up there on the back wall, that was the sanctuary, and that's where the altar was.
Behind that was the house that I was in, just real close to it.
The tornado destroyed the city of Joplin, Missouri and killed 162 people.
That was Green Briar Nursing Home, and there were five people died in there.
It's a terrible, terrible sight.
It's an awful sight.
In the face of catastrophe, this Catholic priest finds comfort in his religious faith.
I have to believe there's a plan and that God is going to accomplish something through this.
I feel like God is doing something for us.
I think we have to see somewhere a higher power.
Father Monaghan's faith must have been tested to the limit by this terrible experience.
For those of us who don't believe in any kind of Gods, how do we cope? More and more people now realise there is no God.
Yet religious values have dominated our lives for hundreds of years and still have a hold over us.
In this series I'm exploring what reason and science can offer us in the place of religion to bring comfort in the face of death, help us tell right from wrong, or provide meaning in an indifferent and uncaring universe.
So do you think that we in the west are too materialistic? I think so.
I suppose Jesus is an unpaid babysitter.
It's like, if I'm not watching you, Jesus is.
Do you think mothers are ever going to meet their babies again? Yes.
The mothers believe it, and the fathers.
If there is no God, what is the meaning of life? Some of the greatest minds in history have battled depression and even toyed with suicide, struggling to answer the ultimate question that we all face - what's the point? For many, there is no point if there is no God.
One of the questions I'm most often asked after giving a lecture is, "Why do you bother to get up in the mornings?" This film is my attempt to answer that question.
Like most English children, I was sent to Christian schools and I was confirmed into the Church of England at the age of 13.
I believed in the Christian God.
A couple of years later, I realised it wasn't true.
There was no God.
There was nothing out there.
Many people have had that experience and different people respond to it in very different ways.
One of the oddest reactions to facing up to life without God was that of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.
Like me, Tolstoy was brought up a Christian and, as a young man, lost his faith.
He had wealth, a family, and celebrity status thanks to his novels War And Peace and Anna Karenina.
But in his late 40s, he began to question everything.
Tolstoy was in despair, staring into an abyss of suicidal depression.
He could find no answer to what tormented him.
Why do I live? Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death? Desperate to believe that life had a greater purpose, Tolstoy scoured philosophy and the sciences for what it might be, but his torment only deepened.
You are a temporary incidental accumulation of particles.
You are a randomly-united lump of something.
Eventually, Tolstoy found an answer and stepped back from the abyss.
Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire is home to 36 Cistercian monks.
And this, in essence, was Tolstoy's solution - spiritual retreat and devotion.
There are no special announcements this morning.
Our order is what's called a contemplative order so we stay within the confines of the monastery.
We don't have schools, hospitals or parishes.
We stay within the monastery.
And you're silent for part of the day, is that right? We are, for a good part of the day, especially in the early morning.
Yes.
So the library is just up here.
Yes.
Oh, my, this is very nice.
It is a very nice library indeed, yes.
'Like Tolstoy, these monks live between two worlds.
'Their library is better than I would have expected.
' Stephen Hawking's Universe, Just Six Numbers, Carl Sagan.
Excellent, very good.
I wish I'd brought some of my books to present to you! Oh, there's one, there! We have one.
Oh, really? Richard Dawkins, Modern Science Writing.
Oh, excellent! The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing.
Very good.
There may be others, erm Well, I won't do that usual thing authors do of looking for them! Tolstoy's answer to the threat of meaninglessness was to go back and consciously embrace God.
He does exist.
I had only to recognise this for an instant and I would feel the possibility and joy of living.
I returned to a belief in God.
I now knew that I could not live without it.
As an old man, Tolstoy separated himself from society to lead a Christian sect.
He ended up, like these monks, a religious recluse.
But I want to know, can a person find meaning and fulfilment, devoting himself to spiritual life? Brother Michael, one of the youngest monks in the order, has, like Tolstoy, given up the world and earthly possessions.
My life I direct towards God and finding a relationship with God, and I find meaning in that, and ashopefully I grow towards God, I'll grow towards other people.
What do you miss about the life you could've had? Erm This morning I had to go to the chemist, and on the way out, there was a young lady er with her child, and as they walked down the street, they had Tigger the tiger holding between their hands.
Tigger from Winnie the Pooh? Tigger from Winnie The Pooh, and it stirred my heart.
My heart sort of You feel you'd have liked to have had a child of your own? Yeah.
It's just likeyeah.
I've given up a family, which is part of the life.
I worry that these men are running from reality and squandering their lives.
Isn't facing up to the challenges of the real world what makes life worthwhile? - Can you talk while polishing? - Yes.
Brother William gave up a career as a banker to join the monastery ten years ago.
The meaning of life for me is being there for other people.
Yes.
And it's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make.
But if you want to do good to other people, it seems a slightly odd way to go about it to shut yourself away in a monastery.
Couldn't you do more good if you were out there in the outside world? You can see how our prayers affect people's lives, and how they've come through a personal problem, that they've felt our support here.
(THEY CHANT) These monks find meaning in devotion to God, in prayer and solitude.
They're entitled to their beliefs of course.
But, what a slender life to lead when you could be out there in the real world, teaching, learning, maybe doing good.
It seemed to me to be a sort of sadly inadequate life.
Not really a life at all.
Just very, very sad.
Of course, I don't believe in God, but I do understand Tolstoy's predicament.
I just don't see how cloistering yourself away like this can add meaning to life.
Perhaps a better approach would be to embrace life's uncertainties and take a few risks? Many of our greatest minds have struggled with the idea that if there is no God, life has no meaning.
One of the bleakest reactions was that of Graham Greene.
Greene was of course to become one of the great Catholic writers of the 20th century, but as a young man he was agnostic.
He was also reckless and extremely bored.
He carried what he called his "war against boredom" to a shocking and dangerous extreme.
Greene lived to the ripe old age of 86, but statistically he shouldn't have made it past 19.
"I remember very clearly the afternoon I found the revolver "in the brown deal corner cupboard, in a bedroom "which I shared with my elder brother.
"It was the early autumn of 1923.
"I slipped the revolver into my pocket "and the next I remember, "was crossing the Berkhamstead Common towards Ashridge Beaches.
" Greene had been reading a book about soldiers during the Russian Civil War.
Away from the frontline, they invented hazardous games to avoid boredom.
"This was not suicide, "whatever a coroner's jury might have said, "it was a gamble with five chances to one against an inquest.
"I slipped a bullet into a chamber "and holding the revolver behind my back "spun the chambers round.
"I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear.
" CHAMBER CLICKS "There was a minute click and looking down I could see the charge had moved into the firing position.
"I was out by one.
" Graham Greene lived by chance.
He had absolutely no control over the outcome when he pulled the trigger.
What Greene did was utterly crazy.
No matter how bored I was, I would never trust my life to chance in such a way.
But the reality is that we have less control over our lives than we might like to think.
When a tornado struck Joplin, Missouri in May 2011, death and destruction were indiscriminate.
The young Graham Greene would have embraced the truth of that tornado.
Joplin's fate hung on chance, just like his game of Russian roulette.
While 7,000 buildings were blown away, others survived unscathed.
There is tremendous survivor's guilt in the community.
That, I haven't experienced before.
Survivor's guilt meaning why did I survive when someone else died? Why did that little child died? I'm 70 years of age, why didn't you take me, God? Why should that mother lose that child? But do you think he could have stopped the tornado? Of course he could, he could stop anything he wants.
Then, why didn't he? Er - .
.
because we don't understand, it's a mystery! - He is a mystery? He is a mystery, and I can't intellectually explain that.
And if someone tries to do that, they're gonna come to a dead end and say it makes no sense.
It's almost moving the way religious people struggle, twist and turn to find some excuse for this, some sort of meaning, some part of God's plan.
If it was part of anybody's plan, what an unthinkably awful plan it would have to be! But even if you're an atheist, the idea of living or dying by chance alone is hard to accept.
Atheists may think they've given up God, but it's only human to cling to the idea that "things happen for a reason".
If you look at the misfortune and fortune in human life, in the universe generally, there is no pattern as relates to people, the pattern is entirely related to physics.
The universe has exactly the properties we'd expect if there was no plan, no design, no aim, just blind indifferent forces of nature.
If, like Graham Greene, you understand life as a game of chance, and if you believe there is no God pulling your strings, making plans for you, why not just play the game? The great gambling game of life.
Unbelievable place.
It's sort of trying to be the seven wonders of the world.
Look at that medieval castle there.
There's the Statue of Liberty.
There's a replica of Venice somewhere.
There's the Chrysler Building.
I'm often told that my vision of a godless future is just as devoid of meaning as Las Vegas.
That without God, all you're left with is materialism and mindless slot machines.
But I've come here because I think Las Vegas reveals something fascinating, humanity's deep-seated belief that we can prevail over chance.
People come here filled with hope.
Everybody knows the casinos have a terrific mark-up percentage for the house, and yet they still go on feeding that hope, and feeding the slot machines and losing their money.
Hey, Richard.
How's it going? OK.
You winning? - No, I've lost every time so far.
- Oh, my God! Well, now your luck's gonna change, because I know physics! OK.
He may look like a card sharp, but the gentleman in the shades is actually a physicist.
Leonard Mlodinow is fascinated by how human beings are incapable of understanding chance.
I won and I lost.
When people are playing these games we see around us, am I right that many of them, even if there's absolutely no bias between red and black, many people will say, "Oh, well it has been red, red, red, for such a long time, it's black's turn.
" That's right.
That's called The Gambler's Fallacy.
I you flip a coin a zillion times, you're going to get about half a zillion heads and half a zillion tails.
So people's thinking goes, if they bothered to logically think about it, is that, "OK, I've seen 10 tails in a row, "so if it's gonna be half heads and half tails, the heads better catch up.
" - But that's not the way it works.
- OK.
You could throw it a zillion times and get all heads.
The point about our brain is that it insists on seeing order, meaning and pattern even where there is none.
It's a very human characteristic to fool ourselves that we are in control.
In today's world, it seems that we make more mistakes seeing patterns that aren't there rather than missing patterns that are there.
In fact, there's a great experiment on that, they put a rat in front of a red light and a green light.
And the red light and the green light flash without any pattern, at random.
But the green light flashes 75% of the time, and the red light flashes 25% of the time.
And the rat, if it guesses correctly which is going to flash, it gets a little sugar water.
So when they let the rats do this, they see after a while that the green light is flashing more than the red light and they just start guessing green, green, green, green, every time.
And they get it right 75% of the time and are happy with that.
Which is sensible.
- That's what you should do.
- Yeah.
But people, we think we know better, right? So when they put humans in front of such an experiment, most people won't do what the rat does.
They've seen that it's 75% green and they'll guess a pattern.
They'll go, green, green, red, green, green, green, red.
They'll start spewing out these red and greens in some weird pattern that's tailored to be 75% green and 25% red, thinking that they can, you know, beat the system, just like the people here in the casino think they can.
And when you do that, you end up about, I think, 60% of the time you get it right, instead of 75%.
And so the humans are out performed by a rat.
Yes.
That's because we see patterns where there aren't any.
That's just the way our minds work.
Too clever by half.
Or too clever by three quarters, in this case.
Too clever, yes.
I'm going to throw everything on my birthday.
Yours is the 26th? Mine is the 26th! Oh, wow! Both our birthdays are the 26th! So (LAUGHS) 26 is even so I'm going to win that too.
Maybe I should put this on odd? Perhaps this is part of the explanation why religion evolved in the first place, it satisfied our desperate desire to find meaning and order in the chaos.
In playing the ultimate game of chance, Russian roulette, the young Graham Greene grasped what so many of us fail to, there is no pattern.
26! 26! We have no control.
Ooh! We came so close! Greene took his chances and pulled the trigger on another five occasions, before the effect of what he called "his adrenaline drug" wore off.
What Greene did may seem crazy, but there is a grim logic to it.
Seize the reins, dance with death! You're going to die anyway.
CHAMBER CLICKS Happily for Greene, he beat the odds.
Greene would later convert to Roman Catholicism, but Russian roulette of a kind stayed with him.
As a journalist and spy, Greene risked his life in numerous war zones.
"The fear of ambush served me just as effectively "as the revolver from the corner cupboard, in the life-long war against boredom.
" Tolstoy found meaning by hiding himself away.
Greene went in the opposite direction.
But the next great mind I shall consider tried to argue meaning into even the most meaningless toil imaginable.
More and more of us now do not believe in God or life after death.
We live and then we die, and that's it.
We are born by chance, and our lives are shaped by chance events.
I know this is a difficult pill to swallow for many people, especially those for whom religion still has a hold over their lives.
Many people have struggled to come to terms with the reality of a purely physical universe.
So, how do we find meaning? The Second World War laid bare the extent of man's capacity for evil.
In Paris, philosophers like Albert Camus met in cafes like this, to try to make sense of the brutality.
"Without the aid of eternal values, it is legitimate "and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning.
" Camus was interested in what he called "the absurd", that our life must have meaning for us to value it, but we live in a world that offers no meaning.
Unlike Tolstoy and Graham Greene, Camus rejected religion as a source of the meaning he craved.
He found inspiration in another myth.
The story of a man whom the Ancient Greek gods had cursed.
Camus consoled himself with the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus was condemned to spend his whole time rolling a boulder up a mountain and then it rolled to the bottom again, he went to the bottom and rolled it up again, and this went on forever.
For Camus, accepting even this most futile and repetitive of tasks and not giving up, itself had value.
"The struggle itself towards the heights "is enough to fill a man's heart.
"We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
" Camus took comfort from this because by going to the bottom of the mountain again and rolling the stone back up, he was at least doing something.
But can we really find meaning in futile work? Sisyphus may seem admirable to a French intellectual, but I don't see the appeal of resigning oneself to life's injustices.
India - one of the fastest developing and most unequal economies in the world.
The human condition doesn't come much more human than this, or much more extreme.
Everything's going on - the noise, the bustle.
It's like an ant-heap of activity.
It's a terrifying and yet rather a moving sight.
This latter-day Sisyphus is called Hori Lal.
His struggle is to clean the streets and the public lavatory here in Varanasi.
His task is as endless as Sisyphus' boulder-rolling.
These streets are never clean.
Do you enjoy your job? TRANSLATION: Yes, yes.
I enjoy doing my job.
Do you do the same thing every day? TRANSLATION: Yes, I do it every day.
How long have you been doing this job? TRANSLATION: It must be 20 years now.
What hope do you have for the future? TRANSLATION: What hope can I have? I have a job to do and I will continue doing it.
TRANSLATION: It's fate.
What we have been made, we will remain.
It can't be changed.
I suppose there is something a bit inspiring about Hori Lal's cheerfulness and good humour in the face of life's hardships.
Perhaps it's what Camus saw in the myth of Sisyphus, and it's certainly a wonderful antidote to us whingers in the rich West, when we dare to moan about patchy mobile phone reception, or the cost of supermarket food.
But what bothers me is why Hori Lal has been cursed like Sisyphus.
It's because here, life's lottery begins at birth, thanks to the confines of the ancient caste system.
This is the Sunday edition of the Hindustan Times and it's got a section called "Matrimonials", in which fathers advertise for husbands for their daughters.
And there's a section called "Brides", where men advertise for wives.
And the men are usually described as handsome.
The women are often described as "homely", which I presume means home-loving.
But a curious thing about this matrimonials page is the way it's classified.
There are headings like Brahmin, and other names from the ancient Hindu caste system, whereby society is stratified into levels, into separate castes, which are not supposed to marry each other.
Ancient Hindu scripture divided society into four distinct groups that you could be born into - scholars warriors merchants and labourers.
Falling outside this system were the Dalits, the untouchables, who, like Hori Lal, were condemned to shovel the excrement of the higher castes.
This is where I think Camus got it wrong.
Rather than accept fate, surely meaning is found when we revolt against outrageous fortune? - Mahendra? - Yes.
- Very nice to meet you.
- Please come.
- Thank you.
TRANSLATION: When my father died, I was told that because there is no money in the family now, you can't study any more.
At that time I was very sad because I had this dream from the start, I have to study.
Like Hori Lal, Mahendra is a Dalit.
His father died when he was 14 years old, leaving the family penniless.
Mahendra spent the next four years working as a bonded labourer, weaving saris.
But, unlike Sisyphus, Mahendra defied the gods and threw his boulder away.
TRANSLATION: I had to face so much discrimination in the society for being a Dalit that I felt education could be a good medium to get out of the system.
A lot of people in your position would probably have given up.
I hugely admire you for not giving up, but what drove you at that time? TRANSLATION: I had always felt that I have to become a part of the mainstream society.
And that is why I have this thing that I have to study a lot and earn money so that I can reach mainstream society.
Today, Mahendra is studying for a master's degree and wants to fight the Dalit cause - help other boulder-rollers break free from their struggle.
It is wonderful to see how an individual can bring himself out of poverty and downtrodden-ness.
With Mahendra, we come closer to finding at least one worthwhile meaning of life.
He is creating his own meaning, but it has a deeper purpose, making a difference to others as well.
We can find meaning in struggle, but we have to define our own meaning in our own struggle, not one dictated by the gods, by authority or by accident of birth.
So I think meaning is subjective, something personal we may not all agree on.
But that shouldn't be an invitation to egotism or self-absorption.
Here in northern India, Westerners still come in droves in the hope of finding some deeper meaning in Eastern mysticism.
People go up mountains for refreshment, they go up mountains for wisdom.
Moses went up Mount Sinai and came down with the tablets of traditional Hebrew wisdom.
There are lots of people who come from all over the world to a place like this, up a mountain like this, where there's a Tibetan monastery, seeking what they would call "spiritual wisdom".
Geshe Lhakdor is a Master of Tibetan Buddhism.
He's the Dalai Lama's official translator and archivist.
The complete teaching of the Buddha is aimed towards transforming your mental outlook because the ultimate purpose is to remove all kinds of problems and sufferings.
And problems and sufferings and disturbances cannot be removed by relying on external forces or external material sources, or your relatives and friends.
At the end of the day, the real source of long-lasting peace and happiness has to come from within.
For a Buddhist, what matters is accepting that reality will always change.
To be happy in this changing reality, Buddhists teach that we must eliminate our attachments to people and possessions.
I sort of half understand that.
They try to get that sense of direction or happiness from material accumulation, from marriage, from wealth, from name, but in all these cases here or there, they get a lot of problems, a lot of difficulties.
So do you think that we, in the West, are too materialistic in our way of life? I think so.
To be honest, I think so.
I think I would agree with you that one doesn't want to devote one's life to accumulating material, hedonistic happiness I'm not sure that I would look inward though.
I think I would I might get happiness from music and from science.
Exactly.
Then you do something that is creative, something that really satisfies your inner arts, you know.
Yes, but meditating and looking inwards doesn't sound to me as though that's really doing that.
Perhaps it helps Of course, of course.
The peace and happiness, the tranquillity that you get when you know how to stay alone and go within cannot be measured by anything else.
While I agree that an unhealthy consumerism dominates our lives today, how convincing is it that we should detach ourselves from the real world through meditation? The great minds we've looked at, Tolstoy, Greene and Camus, all stood out in deeply religious times.
But we are now at a point in history, in the West at least, when more people than ever are atheist.
So if we are finally shaking off the influence of God, how nowadays do we find meaning? I'm going to talk to an outspoken satirist of modern life.
That's that.
No.
That's that.
Religion is that "nooooo!" We've seen that there isn't a simple, single answer to the meaning of life in a world without God.
Meaning is something we need to carve out for ourselves.
We have to find our own meaning from the opportunities and challenges that life throws our way, even if that does mean defying convention sometimes.
I'm going to meet a man who has definitely defined his own way and made a huge success of it, but he has ruffled quite a few feathers in doing so.
Thanks to everyone in the room for being good sports.
Thanks to NBC.
Thanks to Hollywood Foreign Press.
Um, thank you for watching at home.
And thank you to God for making me an atheist.
When I signed off the Golden Globes by saying and thanked God for making me an atheist, now, clearly, that was a play on words.
Um, it was a little bit of a redressing the balance to everyone who thanks God for winning an award.
I've never seen so much outrage as thanking God for making me an atheist.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
If God exists, He did make me an atheist, didn't he? Didn't He? Why did He do that? I read about that.
It was astonishing.
I mean, it really did cause outrage, did it? You usually have to murder and eat someone to get that much publicity in America.
How funny.
Yeah.
- How very funny.
- Yeah.
When did you first realise that you didn't believe in God? My next brother, Bob, when I was about eight He was 11 years older than me so he was about 19.
And I was drawing a picture of Jesus for Bible studies and he, er He came in and he looked at it and he went, "Why do you believe in God?" And my mum went "Bob!" And I knew from body language.
Why didn't she even want the question? Oh.
She was hiding something from me.
And I thought about it and it all made sense.
Then I started reading and, um, I've, er I've been an atheist for 40 years.
I love that some people mistake atheists for Satanists.
Oh, yes.
I go, "No, I don't believe in him either.
" He's just as ludicrous.
I don't believe in him.
Why can't God sort out Satan? Why can't he? He's all-powerful.
What's he doing? What's he doing? 'So, why does a 21st-century British atheist get up in the morning?' I think you have to have worth.
I think you have to feel in yourself you have worth.
Friends, family, a loving relationship Um Just because we're human and that's how we're built.
And for me personally, something creative.
It doesn't have to be painting the Sistine Chapel.
It can be gardening, but I think you have to do something and enjoy it and fill you free time and stand back and think, "I did that.
" These are all reasons to stay around for as long as you can.
I would agree with all that, and I think I would add "understanding" as well.
Religious believers tell me they're puzzled that non-believers like Ricky Gervais and me can find any meaning or purpose in a godless existence.
But, for me, the world teems with meaning.
It is up to each of us to give our own lives meaning through our work, our relationships, and passions, and, I think, through one other thing - understanding who we are, and trying to understand why we're here.
That has been the mission of Western science, the most important tool I believe mankind has ever invented.
For centuries, human eyes could see clearly no further than only a few miles.
Telescopes enabled our eyes to leap outwards, and see distant stars millions of miles away.
Even better than that, a telescope is a kind of time machine.
Because it takes light so long to reach us from a distant star, when you look at a distant star you're looking backwards in time, maybe hundreds of millions of years.
And if you look at a distant galaxy, you may be looking at the origin of the universe itself.
You're looking at the very beginning of space and time - the Big Bang.
Humanity's gaze has also turned towards inner space.
Microscopes have unlocked our understanding of the cells that make up all living things and revealed the world of the smallest and simplest organisms around us and in us.
The new science of genetics has unexpectedly completely revolutionised and unified our understanding of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, physics has discovered particles smaller by far even than the atom.
And at laboratories like CERN, scientists studying the collisions of these particles are on the cusp of understanding how the universe got started in the first place.
The poet John Keats voiced what many people fear about science - .
.
that, in explaining the world, it makes it less amazing, less extraordinary, somehow banal.
"Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, "Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine - "Unweave a rainbow.
" Keats could not have been more wrong.
Isaac Newton's unweaving of the rainbow led directly to a massive deepening and widening of our understanding of the universe.
It led to James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and from there to Einstein's special theory of relativity.
If you think the rainbow has poetic mystery, you should try relativity.
Science does the opposite of making things banal.
It's about unleashing curiosity and uncovering more mysteries to solve.
We take so much for granted, we've become anaesthetised by our familiarity with what's around us.
Science shakes off the anaesthetic and we look again with new and clearer eyes.
If you found a bramble in your garden, you'd probably think it an annoying weed.
But like every other plant and every other animal, it is an astonishing piece of natural engineering.
A leaf is a chemical factory.
It's a flat-roofed factory and on the flat roof are solar panels gathering sunlight to drive the machinery of the factory.
There are wheels, almost literally wheels going round and round, biochemical wheels, driven by the energy from the sun and manufacturing food for the plant - sugars.
And the sugars are then piped in this, what almost looks like a river system, into the central stem and into the rest of the plant.
That's where all the food for the plant comes from and even OUR food comes from that because we eat plants, or we eat animals that eat plants, and so the energy that drives our bodies, every one of our trillions of cells comes ultimately from the sun and it flows down a river system like this, ultimately into us.
It gets even better - the genetic code that's used by this plant is the same as the one that's used by you.
Even 50% of the genes are the same.
This plant is your cousin.
Just a weed? 'Some people would say that the scientific view 'is rather bleak and cold.
Do you find it bleak?' There's no God-fearing person of any religion who feels as much awe as me as when I see a mountain or a tree.
Or the stars.
Or the stars.
Or, um anything in science and nature and art.
And you and I are privileged to be here to enjoy it, even if for a short time.
That's a wonderful thought.
We cherish this life.
It's sacred so enjoy it.
This is all we've got and it's brilliant.
Make the most of it.
- Make the most of it.
- It's brilliant! It's amazing! We are lucky to be born.
We win the lottery just in being here at all.
Your unique identity is the result of one sperm amongst hundreds of millions fertilising one particular egg in one particular sexual exchange.
And the same lucky break had to favour your ancestors in every generation back to the very beginning of life.
And we are luckier still as individuals to have been born NOW.
We have so much available to us - possible only through the understanding that science has already given us.
Just look how far we've come in my lifetime - we've got life-saving medicine, super-computers, the internet.
We can travel further and faster, higher and deeper than ever before.
We constantly push at the frontiers of possibility.
Imagine what's still to come! We are made by the laws of physics working through four billion years of evolution.
We have a brief window of life through which to see the universe and understand how we came to be in it.
The truth may not always be comforting in the face of suffering, but it has a majesty of its own.
That's what I tell people when they ask me, "Why do you bother to get up in the mornings?" Red Bee Media Ltd
We just don't know how, or when.
Easily snuffed out in an instant, what is life's meaning? Oh, man! I see it, I see it.
We're gonna get closer, we're gonna get closer.
Over 1,000 tornadoes rip through the United States every year.
Most do little damage.
This one was different.
There it is.
Oh, my gosh! It's going to go down that road right there.
Oh, gosh, that is a monster tornado! Right up there on the back wall, that was the sanctuary, and that's where the altar was.
Behind that was the house that I was in, just real close to it.
The tornado destroyed the city of Joplin, Missouri and killed 162 people.
That was Green Briar Nursing Home, and there were five people died in there.
It's a terrible, terrible sight.
It's an awful sight.
In the face of catastrophe, this Catholic priest finds comfort in his religious faith.
I have to believe there's a plan and that God is going to accomplish something through this.
I feel like God is doing something for us.
I think we have to see somewhere a higher power.
Father Monaghan's faith must have been tested to the limit by this terrible experience.
For those of us who don't believe in any kind of Gods, how do we cope? More and more people now realise there is no God.
Yet religious values have dominated our lives for hundreds of years and still have a hold over us.
In this series I'm exploring what reason and science can offer us in the place of religion to bring comfort in the face of death, help us tell right from wrong, or provide meaning in an indifferent and uncaring universe.
So do you think that we in the west are too materialistic? I think so.
I suppose Jesus is an unpaid babysitter.
It's like, if I'm not watching you, Jesus is.
Do you think mothers are ever going to meet their babies again? Yes.
The mothers believe it, and the fathers.
If there is no God, what is the meaning of life? Some of the greatest minds in history have battled depression and even toyed with suicide, struggling to answer the ultimate question that we all face - what's the point? For many, there is no point if there is no God.
One of the questions I'm most often asked after giving a lecture is, "Why do you bother to get up in the mornings?" This film is my attempt to answer that question.
Like most English children, I was sent to Christian schools and I was confirmed into the Church of England at the age of 13.
I believed in the Christian God.
A couple of years later, I realised it wasn't true.
There was no God.
There was nothing out there.
Many people have had that experience and different people respond to it in very different ways.
One of the oddest reactions to facing up to life without God was that of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.
Like me, Tolstoy was brought up a Christian and, as a young man, lost his faith.
He had wealth, a family, and celebrity status thanks to his novels War And Peace and Anna Karenina.
But in his late 40s, he began to question everything.
Tolstoy was in despair, staring into an abyss of suicidal depression.
He could find no answer to what tormented him.
Why do I live? Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death? Desperate to believe that life had a greater purpose, Tolstoy scoured philosophy and the sciences for what it might be, but his torment only deepened.
You are a temporary incidental accumulation of particles.
You are a randomly-united lump of something.
Eventually, Tolstoy found an answer and stepped back from the abyss.
Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire is home to 36 Cistercian monks.
And this, in essence, was Tolstoy's solution - spiritual retreat and devotion.
There are no special announcements this morning.
Our order is what's called a contemplative order so we stay within the confines of the monastery.
We don't have schools, hospitals or parishes.
We stay within the monastery.
And you're silent for part of the day, is that right? We are, for a good part of the day, especially in the early morning.
Yes.
So the library is just up here.
Yes.
Oh, my, this is very nice.
It is a very nice library indeed, yes.
'Like Tolstoy, these monks live between two worlds.
'Their library is better than I would have expected.
' Stephen Hawking's Universe, Just Six Numbers, Carl Sagan.
Excellent, very good.
I wish I'd brought some of my books to present to you! Oh, there's one, there! We have one.
Oh, really? Richard Dawkins, Modern Science Writing.
Oh, excellent! The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing.
Very good.
There may be others, erm Well, I won't do that usual thing authors do of looking for them! Tolstoy's answer to the threat of meaninglessness was to go back and consciously embrace God.
He does exist.
I had only to recognise this for an instant and I would feel the possibility and joy of living.
I returned to a belief in God.
I now knew that I could not live without it.
As an old man, Tolstoy separated himself from society to lead a Christian sect.
He ended up, like these monks, a religious recluse.
But I want to know, can a person find meaning and fulfilment, devoting himself to spiritual life? Brother Michael, one of the youngest monks in the order, has, like Tolstoy, given up the world and earthly possessions.
My life I direct towards God and finding a relationship with God, and I find meaning in that, and ashopefully I grow towards God, I'll grow towards other people.
What do you miss about the life you could've had? Erm This morning I had to go to the chemist, and on the way out, there was a young lady er with her child, and as they walked down the street, they had Tigger the tiger holding between their hands.
Tigger from Winnie the Pooh? Tigger from Winnie The Pooh, and it stirred my heart.
My heart sort of You feel you'd have liked to have had a child of your own? Yeah.
It's just likeyeah.
I've given up a family, which is part of the life.
I worry that these men are running from reality and squandering their lives.
Isn't facing up to the challenges of the real world what makes life worthwhile? - Can you talk while polishing? - Yes.
Brother William gave up a career as a banker to join the monastery ten years ago.
The meaning of life for me is being there for other people.
Yes.
And it's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make.
But if you want to do good to other people, it seems a slightly odd way to go about it to shut yourself away in a monastery.
Couldn't you do more good if you were out there in the outside world? You can see how our prayers affect people's lives, and how they've come through a personal problem, that they've felt our support here.
(THEY CHANT) These monks find meaning in devotion to God, in prayer and solitude.
They're entitled to their beliefs of course.
But, what a slender life to lead when you could be out there in the real world, teaching, learning, maybe doing good.
It seemed to me to be a sort of sadly inadequate life.
Not really a life at all.
Just very, very sad.
Of course, I don't believe in God, but I do understand Tolstoy's predicament.
I just don't see how cloistering yourself away like this can add meaning to life.
Perhaps a better approach would be to embrace life's uncertainties and take a few risks? Many of our greatest minds have struggled with the idea that if there is no God, life has no meaning.
One of the bleakest reactions was that of Graham Greene.
Greene was of course to become one of the great Catholic writers of the 20th century, but as a young man he was agnostic.
He was also reckless and extremely bored.
He carried what he called his "war against boredom" to a shocking and dangerous extreme.
Greene lived to the ripe old age of 86, but statistically he shouldn't have made it past 19.
"I remember very clearly the afternoon I found the revolver "in the brown deal corner cupboard, in a bedroom "which I shared with my elder brother.
"It was the early autumn of 1923.
"I slipped the revolver into my pocket "and the next I remember, "was crossing the Berkhamstead Common towards Ashridge Beaches.
" Greene had been reading a book about soldiers during the Russian Civil War.
Away from the frontline, they invented hazardous games to avoid boredom.
"This was not suicide, "whatever a coroner's jury might have said, "it was a gamble with five chances to one against an inquest.
"I slipped a bullet into a chamber "and holding the revolver behind my back "spun the chambers round.
"I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear.
" CHAMBER CLICKS "There was a minute click and looking down I could see the charge had moved into the firing position.
"I was out by one.
" Graham Greene lived by chance.
He had absolutely no control over the outcome when he pulled the trigger.
What Greene did was utterly crazy.
No matter how bored I was, I would never trust my life to chance in such a way.
But the reality is that we have less control over our lives than we might like to think.
When a tornado struck Joplin, Missouri in May 2011, death and destruction were indiscriminate.
The young Graham Greene would have embraced the truth of that tornado.
Joplin's fate hung on chance, just like his game of Russian roulette.
While 7,000 buildings were blown away, others survived unscathed.
There is tremendous survivor's guilt in the community.
That, I haven't experienced before.
Survivor's guilt meaning why did I survive when someone else died? Why did that little child died? I'm 70 years of age, why didn't you take me, God? Why should that mother lose that child? But do you think he could have stopped the tornado? Of course he could, he could stop anything he wants.
Then, why didn't he? Er - .
.
because we don't understand, it's a mystery! - He is a mystery? He is a mystery, and I can't intellectually explain that.
And if someone tries to do that, they're gonna come to a dead end and say it makes no sense.
It's almost moving the way religious people struggle, twist and turn to find some excuse for this, some sort of meaning, some part of God's plan.
If it was part of anybody's plan, what an unthinkably awful plan it would have to be! But even if you're an atheist, the idea of living or dying by chance alone is hard to accept.
Atheists may think they've given up God, but it's only human to cling to the idea that "things happen for a reason".
If you look at the misfortune and fortune in human life, in the universe generally, there is no pattern as relates to people, the pattern is entirely related to physics.
The universe has exactly the properties we'd expect if there was no plan, no design, no aim, just blind indifferent forces of nature.
If, like Graham Greene, you understand life as a game of chance, and if you believe there is no God pulling your strings, making plans for you, why not just play the game? The great gambling game of life.
Unbelievable place.
It's sort of trying to be the seven wonders of the world.
Look at that medieval castle there.
There's the Statue of Liberty.
There's a replica of Venice somewhere.
There's the Chrysler Building.
I'm often told that my vision of a godless future is just as devoid of meaning as Las Vegas.
That without God, all you're left with is materialism and mindless slot machines.
But I've come here because I think Las Vegas reveals something fascinating, humanity's deep-seated belief that we can prevail over chance.
People come here filled with hope.
Everybody knows the casinos have a terrific mark-up percentage for the house, and yet they still go on feeding that hope, and feeding the slot machines and losing their money.
Hey, Richard.
How's it going? OK.
You winning? - No, I've lost every time so far.
- Oh, my God! Well, now your luck's gonna change, because I know physics! OK.
He may look like a card sharp, but the gentleman in the shades is actually a physicist.
Leonard Mlodinow is fascinated by how human beings are incapable of understanding chance.
I won and I lost.
When people are playing these games we see around us, am I right that many of them, even if there's absolutely no bias between red and black, many people will say, "Oh, well it has been red, red, red, for such a long time, it's black's turn.
" That's right.
That's called The Gambler's Fallacy.
I you flip a coin a zillion times, you're going to get about half a zillion heads and half a zillion tails.
So people's thinking goes, if they bothered to logically think about it, is that, "OK, I've seen 10 tails in a row, "so if it's gonna be half heads and half tails, the heads better catch up.
" - But that's not the way it works.
- OK.
You could throw it a zillion times and get all heads.
The point about our brain is that it insists on seeing order, meaning and pattern even where there is none.
It's a very human characteristic to fool ourselves that we are in control.
In today's world, it seems that we make more mistakes seeing patterns that aren't there rather than missing patterns that are there.
In fact, there's a great experiment on that, they put a rat in front of a red light and a green light.
And the red light and the green light flash without any pattern, at random.
But the green light flashes 75% of the time, and the red light flashes 25% of the time.
And the rat, if it guesses correctly which is going to flash, it gets a little sugar water.
So when they let the rats do this, they see after a while that the green light is flashing more than the red light and they just start guessing green, green, green, green, every time.
And they get it right 75% of the time and are happy with that.
Which is sensible.
- That's what you should do.
- Yeah.
But people, we think we know better, right? So when they put humans in front of such an experiment, most people won't do what the rat does.
They've seen that it's 75% green and they'll guess a pattern.
They'll go, green, green, red, green, green, green, red.
They'll start spewing out these red and greens in some weird pattern that's tailored to be 75% green and 25% red, thinking that they can, you know, beat the system, just like the people here in the casino think they can.
And when you do that, you end up about, I think, 60% of the time you get it right, instead of 75%.
And so the humans are out performed by a rat.
Yes.
That's because we see patterns where there aren't any.
That's just the way our minds work.
Too clever by half.
Or too clever by three quarters, in this case.
Too clever, yes.
I'm going to throw everything on my birthday.
Yours is the 26th? Mine is the 26th! Oh, wow! Both our birthdays are the 26th! So (LAUGHS) 26 is even so I'm going to win that too.
Maybe I should put this on odd? Perhaps this is part of the explanation why religion evolved in the first place, it satisfied our desperate desire to find meaning and order in the chaos.
In playing the ultimate game of chance, Russian roulette, the young Graham Greene grasped what so many of us fail to, there is no pattern.
26! 26! We have no control.
Ooh! We came so close! Greene took his chances and pulled the trigger on another five occasions, before the effect of what he called "his adrenaline drug" wore off.
What Greene did may seem crazy, but there is a grim logic to it.
Seize the reins, dance with death! You're going to die anyway.
CHAMBER CLICKS Happily for Greene, he beat the odds.
Greene would later convert to Roman Catholicism, but Russian roulette of a kind stayed with him.
As a journalist and spy, Greene risked his life in numerous war zones.
"The fear of ambush served me just as effectively "as the revolver from the corner cupboard, in the life-long war against boredom.
" Tolstoy found meaning by hiding himself away.
Greene went in the opposite direction.
But the next great mind I shall consider tried to argue meaning into even the most meaningless toil imaginable.
More and more of us now do not believe in God or life after death.
We live and then we die, and that's it.
We are born by chance, and our lives are shaped by chance events.
I know this is a difficult pill to swallow for many people, especially those for whom religion still has a hold over their lives.
Many people have struggled to come to terms with the reality of a purely physical universe.
So, how do we find meaning? The Second World War laid bare the extent of man's capacity for evil.
In Paris, philosophers like Albert Camus met in cafes like this, to try to make sense of the brutality.
"Without the aid of eternal values, it is legitimate "and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning.
" Camus was interested in what he called "the absurd", that our life must have meaning for us to value it, but we live in a world that offers no meaning.
Unlike Tolstoy and Graham Greene, Camus rejected religion as a source of the meaning he craved.
He found inspiration in another myth.
The story of a man whom the Ancient Greek gods had cursed.
Camus consoled himself with the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus was condemned to spend his whole time rolling a boulder up a mountain and then it rolled to the bottom again, he went to the bottom and rolled it up again, and this went on forever.
For Camus, accepting even this most futile and repetitive of tasks and not giving up, itself had value.
"The struggle itself towards the heights "is enough to fill a man's heart.
"We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
" Camus took comfort from this because by going to the bottom of the mountain again and rolling the stone back up, he was at least doing something.
But can we really find meaning in futile work? Sisyphus may seem admirable to a French intellectual, but I don't see the appeal of resigning oneself to life's injustices.
India - one of the fastest developing and most unequal economies in the world.
The human condition doesn't come much more human than this, or much more extreme.
Everything's going on - the noise, the bustle.
It's like an ant-heap of activity.
It's a terrifying and yet rather a moving sight.
This latter-day Sisyphus is called Hori Lal.
His struggle is to clean the streets and the public lavatory here in Varanasi.
His task is as endless as Sisyphus' boulder-rolling.
These streets are never clean.
Do you enjoy your job? TRANSLATION: Yes, yes.
I enjoy doing my job.
Do you do the same thing every day? TRANSLATION: Yes, I do it every day.
How long have you been doing this job? TRANSLATION: It must be 20 years now.
What hope do you have for the future? TRANSLATION: What hope can I have? I have a job to do and I will continue doing it.
TRANSLATION: It's fate.
What we have been made, we will remain.
It can't be changed.
I suppose there is something a bit inspiring about Hori Lal's cheerfulness and good humour in the face of life's hardships.
Perhaps it's what Camus saw in the myth of Sisyphus, and it's certainly a wonderful antidote to us whingers in the rich West, when we dare to moan about patchy mobile phone reception, or the cost of supermarket food.
But what bothers me is why Hori Lal has been cursed like Sisyphus.
It's because here, life's lottery begins at birth, thanks to the confines of the ancient caste system.
This is the Sunday edition of the Hindustan Times and it's got a section called "Matrimonials", in which fathers advertise for husbands for their daughters.
And there's a section called "Brides", where men advertise for wives.
And the men are usually described as handsome.
The women are often described as "homely", which I presume means home-loving.
But a curious thing about this matrimonials page is the way it's classified.
There are headings like Brahmin, and other names from the ancient Hindu caste system, whereby society is stratified into levels, into separate castes, which are not supposed to marry each other.
Ancient Hindu scripture divided society into four distinct groups that you could be born into - scholars warriors merchants and labourers.
Falling outside this system were the Dalits, the untouchables, who, like Hori Lal, were condemned to shovel the excrement of the higher castes.
This is where I think Camus got it wrong.
Rather than accept fate, surely meaning is found when we revolt against outrageous fortune? - Mahendra? - Yes.
- Very nice to meet you.
- Please come.
- Thank you.
TRANSLATION: When my father died, I was told that because there is no money in the family now, you can't study any more.
At that time I was very sad because I had this dream from the start, I have to study.
Like Hori Lal, Mahendra is a Dalit.
His father died when he was 14 years old, leaving the family penniless.
Mahendra spent the next four years working as a bonded labourer, weaving saris.
But, unlike Sisyphus, Mahendra defied the gods and threw his boulder away.
TRANSLATION: I had to face so much discrimination in the society for being a Dalit that I felt education could be a good medium to get out of the system.
A lot of people in your position would probably have given up.
I hugely admire you for not giving up, but what drove you at that time? TRANSLATION: I had always felt that I have to become a part of the mainstream society.
And that is why I have this thing that I have to study a lot and earn money so that I can reach mainstream society.
Today, Mahendra is studying for a master's degree and wants to fight the Dalit cause - help other boulder-rollers break free from their struggle.
It is wonderful to see how an individual can bring himself out of poverty and downtrodden-ness.
With Mahendra, we come closer to finding at least one worthwhile meaning of life.
He is creating his own meaning, but it has a deeper purpose, making a difference to others as well.
We can find meaning in struggle, but we have to define our own meaning in our own struggle, not one dictated by the gods, by authority or by accident of birth.
So I think meaning is subjective, something personal we may not all agree on.
But that shouldn't be an invitation to egotism or self-absorption.
Here in northern India, Westerners still come in droves in the hope of finding some deeper meaning in Eastern mysticism.
People go up mountains for refreshment, they go up mountains for wisdom.
Moses went up Mount Sinai and came down with the tablets of traditional Hebrew wisdom.
There are lots of people who come from all over the world to a place like this, up a mountain like this, where there's a Tibetan monastery, seeking what they would call "spiritual wisdom".
Geshe Lhakdor is a Master of Tibetan Buddhism.
He's the Dalai Lama's official translator and archivist.
The complete teaching of the Buddha is aimed towards transforming your mental outlook because the ultimate purpose is to remove all kinds of problems and sufferings.
And problems and sufferings and disturbances cannot be removed by relying on external forces or external material sources, or your relatives and friends.
At the end of the day, the real source of long-lasting peace and happiness has to come from within.
For a Buddhist, what matters is accepting that reality will always change.
To be happy in this changing reality, Buddhists teach that we must eliminate our attachments to people and possessions.
I sort of half understand that.
They try to get that sense of direction or happiness from material accumulation, from marriage, from wealth, from name, but in all these cases here or there, they get a lot of problems, a lot of difficulties.
So do you think that we, in the West, are too materialistic in our way of life? I think so.
To be honest, I think so.
I think I would agree with you that one doesn't want to devote one's life to accumulating material, hedonistic happiness I'm not sure that I would look inward though.
I think I would I might get happiness from music and from science.
Exactly.
Then you do something that is creative, something that really satisfies your inner arts, you know.
Yes, but meditating and looking inwards doesn't sound to me as though that's really doing that.
Perhaps it helps Of course, of course.
The peace and happiness, the tranquillity that you get when you know how to stay alone and go within cannot be measured by anything else.
While I agree that an unhealthy consumerism dominates our lives today, how convincing is it that we should detach ourselves from the real world through meditation? The great minds we've looked at, Tolstoy, Greene and Camus, all stood out in deeply religious times.
But we are now at a point in history, in the West at least, when more people than ever are atheist.
So if we are finally shaking off the influence of God, how nowadays do we find meaning? I'm going to talk to an outspoken satirist of modern life.
That's that.
No.
That's that.
Religion is that "nooooo!" We've seen that there isn't a simple, single answer to the meaning of life in a world without God.
Meaning is something we need to carve out for ourselves.
We have to find our own meaning from the opportunities and challenges that life throws our way, even if that does mean defying convention sometimes.
I'm going to meet a man who has definitely defined his own way and made a huge success of it, but he has ruffled quite a few feathers in doing so.
Thanks to everyone in the room for being good sports.
Thanks to NBC.
Thanks to Hollywood Foreign Press.
Um, thank you for watching at home.
And thank you to God for making me an atheist.
When I signed off the Golden Globes by saying and thanked God for making me an atheist, now, clearly, that was a play on words.
Um, it was a little bit of a redressing the balance to everyone who thanks God for winning an award.
I've never seen so much outrage as thanking God for making me an atheist.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
If God exists, He did make me an atheist, didn't he? Didn't He? Why did He do that? I read about that.
It was astonishing.
I mean, it really did cause outrage, did it? You usually have to murder and eat someone to get that much publicity in America.
How funny.
Yeah.
- How very funny.
- Yeah.
When did you first realise that you didn't believe in God? My next brother, Bob, when I was about eight He was 11 years older than me so he was about 19.
And I was drawing a picture of Jesus for Bible studies and he, er He came in and he looked at it and he went, "Why do you believe in God?" And my mum went "Bob!" And I knew from body language.
Why didn't she even want the question? Oh.
She was hiding something from me.
And I thought about it and it all made sense.
Then I started reading and, um, I've, er I've been an atheist for 40 years.
I love that some people mistake atheists for Satanists.
Oh, yes.
I go, "No, I don't believe in him either.
" He's just as ludicrous.
I don't believe in him.
Why can't God sort out Satan? Why can't he? He's all-powerful.
What's he doing? What's he doing? 'So, why does a 21st-century British atheist get up in the morning?' I think you have to have worth.
I think you have to feel in yourself you have worth.
Friends, family, a loving relationship Um Just because we're human and that's how we're built.
And for me personally, something creative.
It doesn't have to be painting the Sistine Chapel.
It can be gardening, but I think you have to do something and enjoy it and fill you free time and stand back and think, "I did that.
" These are all reasons to stay around for as long as you can.
I would agree with all that, and I think I would add "understanding" as well.
Religious believers tell me they're puzzled that non-believers like Ricky Gervais and me can find any meaning or purpose in a godless existence.
But, for me, the world teems with meaning.
It is up to each of us to give our own lives meaning through our work, our relationships, and passions, and, I think, through one other thing - understanding who we are, and trying to understand why we're here.
That has been the mission of Western science, the most important tool I believe mankind has ever invented.
For centuries, human eyes could see clearly no further than only a few miles.
Telescopes enabled our eyes to leap outwards, and see distant stars millions of miles away.
Even better than that, a telescope is a kind of time machine.
Because it takes light so long to reach us from a distant star, when you look at a distant star you're looking backwards in time, maybe hundreds of millions of years.
And if you look at a distant galaxy, you may be looking at the origin of the universe itself.
You're looking at the very beginning of space and time - the Big Bang.
Humanity's gaze has also turned towards inner space.
Microscopes have unlocked our understanding of the cells that make up all living things and revealed the world of the smallest and simplest organisms around us and in us.
The new science of genetics has unexpectedly completely revolutionised and unified our understanding of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, physics has discovered particles smaller by far even than the atom.
And at laboratories like CERN, scientists studying the collisions of these particles are on the cusp of understanding how the universe got started in the first place.
The poet John Keats voiced what many people fear about science - .
.
that, in explaining the world, it makes it less amazing, less extraordinary, somehow banal.
"Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, "Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine - "Unweave a rainbow.
" Keats could not have been more wrong.
Isaac Newton's unweaving of the rainbow led directly to a massive deepening and widening of our understanding of the universe.
It led to James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and from there to Einstein's special theory of relativity.
If you think the rainbow has poetic mystery, you should try relativity.
Science does the opposite of making things banal.
It's about unleashing curiosity and uncovering more mysteries to solve.
We take so much for granted, we've become anaesthetised by our familiarity with what's around us.
Science shakes off the anaesthetic and we look again with new and clearer eyes.
If you found a bramble in your garden, you'd probably think it an annoying weed.
But like every other plant and every other animal, it is an astonishing piece of natural engineering.
A leaf is a chemical factory.
It's a flat-roofed factory and on the flat roof are solar panels gathering sunlight to drive the machinery of the factory.
There are wheels, almost literally wheels going round and round, biochemical wheels, driven by the energy from the sun and manufacturing food for the plant - sugars.
And the sugars are then piped in this, what almost looks like a river system, into the central stem and into the rest of the plant.
That's where all the food for the plant comes from and even OUR food comes from that because we eat plants, or we eat animals that eat plants, and so the energy that drives our bodies, every one of our trillions of cells comes ultimately from the sun and it flows down a river system like this, ultimately into us.
It gets even better - the genetic code that's used by this plant is the same as the one that's used by you.
Even 50% of the genes are the same.
This plant is your cousin.
Just a weed? 'Some people would say that the scientific view 'is rather bleak and cold.
Do you find it bleak?' There's no God-fearing person of any religion who feels as much awe as me as when I see a mountain or a tree.
Or the stars.
Or the stars.
Or, um anything in science and nature and art.
And you and I are privileged to be here to enjoy it, even if for a short time.
That's a wonderful thought.
We cherish this life.
It's sacred so enjoy it.
This is all we've got and it's brilliant.
Make the most of it.
- Make the most of it.
- It's brilliant! It's amazing! We are lucky to be born.
We win the lottery just in being here at all.
Your unique identity is the result of one sperm amongst hundreds of millions fertilising one particular egg in one particular sexual exchange.
And the same lucky break had to favour your ancestors in every generation back to the very beginning of life.
And we are luckier still as individuals to have been born NOW.
We have so much available to us - possible only through the understanding that science has already given us.
Just look how far we've come in my lifetime - we've got life-saving medicine, super-computers, the internet.
We can travel further and faster, higher and deeper than ever before.
We constantly push at the frontiers of possibility.
Imagine what's still to come! We are made by the laws of physics working through four billion years of evolution.
We have a brief window of life through which to see the universe and understand how we came to be in it.
The truth may not always be comforting in the face of suffering, but it has a majesty of its own.
That's what I tell people when they ask me, "Why do you bother to get up in the mornings?" Red Bee Media Ltd