The Entire Universe in 60 Minutes: Idle, Cox, Religion and Science

The BBC is showing something tonight that I am very much looking forward to: Eric Idle's The Entire Universe. Quite whether you'll see it in the US at any stage is another question. It is a Christmas musical with a whole bunch of science in it - no surprise, since Brian Cox and Monty Python's Eric Idle are friends. The Radio Times has a fascinating article on it (and the sad demise of Terry Jones with his dementia):

Welcome to The Entire Universe– the story of our universe, all 100 trillion years of it from start to finish – told in 60 minutes. Who said the licence fee wasn’t value for money?...

Idle says it’s a subject he’s always been fascinated by. “We don’t really know much about it. We don’t know how or why the universe came into existence, but we know when – and that all the energy everywhere, and everything that exists, was packed into this tiny, dense pinprick of time and moment.”

Is there, I ask, a God who made this all happen?

Idle is emphatic. “No, don’t be stupid. That’s insane. You don’t have to invent anything new to explain what you’re understanding.”

He quotes Pierre-Simon Laplace, the 18th-century French physicist, “who was once asked by the king: ‘Where is God in all this?’ and he replied: ‘Sire, I have no need of that concept.’ You don’t need to have an inventor to have things evolve. Evolution doesn’t need an inventor.”

In any case, Idle says, Richard Dawkins correctly pointed out that if you needed a grand designer to design the universe, wouldn’t you also – by the same logic – need a designer to design that very designer? And so on, for ever...

“The thing I love about science is everything is testable. What we’re saying in the show has been measured, tested and backed up by thousands of scientists – and, thanks to things like the Hubble telescope, our knowledge of the universe has increased so much, since even the 1990s. There’s no need to go into fiction.”

So why do so many people think God answers their questions about the universe?

“Because they need a father. They’re insecure and they want somebody to look after them.” He says that religion “is more human than it is divine. I think man created God in his own image.”

That said, Idle – who shies away from the term “atheist” (“I don’t like that word, it implies that there’s a God not to believe in”) – isn’t on a mission to persuade people out of their faith. “I think people can absolutely believe what the hell they want. It’s like believing in Tottenham Hotspur if you want to. Go ahead.”

God or no God, Idle knows as much as anybody that we’re not all dealt the same set of cards in life. As he lives out a sunny life in Los Angeles, his old friend and Monty Python colleague Terry Jones faces a gloomy future back home in the UK.

Jones let it be known earlier this year that he is suffering from a rare form of dementia, one that begins by attacking the patient’s ability to use language and gets progressively worse.

Read the whole article for more info.