Whose story?

Professor Robert Winston, medical scientist and a leading voice in the debate on genetic engineering, is no stranger to our television screens.

Programmes such as Making Babies, The Human Body and Child of our Time have made him a household name. In his new series The Story of God, Robert Winston shifts gear and turns his scientific gaze to the question of religion.

His purpose, both in the series and in the book that accompanies it, is to explore what he terms ‘The Divine Idea’. Admitting that science is evolving and does not provide all the answers about who we are and where we come from, he points out that the concept that has endured throughout human history is that of a belief in something beyond our human life, an idea of the existence of some sort of supernatural presence, whether it be one God or many. Stating at the start of the first programme in the series that ‘there is a god-shaped hole at the centre of our universe’, he sets out to show how humans throughout history have attempted to fill that hole and ‘imagine the unimaginable’.

The programmes

The first of the three programmes, shown on Sunday December 4, examined what he calls in his book ‘Religion’s Roots’. Aware that his view of the world, being scientific and Darwinian, will offend many, Robert Winston explores prehistoric man’s possible belief in the supernatural. Beginning his study in a cave in France, he questions whether cave dwellers’ handprints might have been an attempt to communicate with animal spirits. From here he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of many beliefs and continents, including a Zoroastrian temple in Iran, human sacrifice in Mexico and a Hindu temple in India. In the second programme, Professor Winston focuses on monotheism and in particular, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and how each faith has different ideas about who God is and what he expects of us. Finally, in the third programme, he takes us to the modern day and what it is man now worships in today’s scientific age.

Problems

In an increasingly secular world, it is encouraging to see someone so respected take on such an important subject. However, both the programme and book have huge problems, the main one being that they are totally man-centred. He admits that ‘in telling the story of God we are also telling our own story’. It’s not so much about finding out what the true and living God is like as finding out what ideas humankind has come up with about him. The vast array of religions and beliefs on offer are laid out as though all are legitimate choices, thus undermining the concept that there is any absolute truth at all. This is exacerbated by the way he lists for us in his book the benefits of religion to a society: mental and physical health, an explanation of the meaning of life, a feeling of control, albeit illusory, over life’s events and a sense of unity and identity among people. While all this may well be true, it adds to the sense that Professor Lord Winston is propagating the belief that God is merely the construct of man’s imagination, created as a prop in the face of a cruel world.

The Story of God was written in just five months, a fact which inevitably means that some of the material has not been sufficiently researched. John Cornwell, reviewing the book in The Sunday Times wrote: ‘The Story of God is what happens when a garrulous media scientist writes a book about religion, assuming that it is not just so much fantasy, but fantasy unworthy of even cursory fact-checking.’

However, when it comes to Christianity, lack of research is only part of the problem: Professor Winston completely revises several central Christian claims. For instance, he writes that Jesus never explicitly claimed to be God but that he came to be regarded as divine due to ‘Paul’s mythologising and popularising of the cult’. Secondly, he claims that Paul ‘modified the message’ to give it a universal appeal, rather than it being something directed purely at Jews. Thirdly, Paul also apparently was the one who first introduced the idea that Jesus’s death provided the means of dealing with sin.

Jesus

Even a cursory reading of the gospels shows that Professor Winston’s arguments do not stand up. Firstly, Jesus not only demonstrated he was God in his life and miracles, he also talked as one who had authority over life and death, the kingdom of God and the judgement to come. When the high priest tore his clothes over Jesus’s pronouncement, ‘I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven’, it wasn’t because Jesus wasn’t being explicit enough!

No, as you read the gospels, Jesus’s astounding claims of divinity are obvious. To deny them is blindness.

Secondly, in terms of Paul making Christianity more other-nations friendly, again it was Jesus who instigated this. It was he who told the disciples to go ‘into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation’. Thirdly and finally, when Jesus spoke about his own death, he certainly talked of it as the means of gaining acceptance with God. Verses such as John 3.15,18,36, 11.26, 12.32 proclaim forcibly that Jesus himself knew and taught that it was trusting in his death that would bring us forgiveness from sin and a relationship with God.

Subjective

Another big problem with Professor Winston’s work is that it is inevitably subjective. At the start of the book he says that he is not attempting to enquire into the existence of God and yet admits that it might seem to readers that this is precisely what he is doing — ‘discussing and evaluating the various arguments for supernatural beliefs in a bid to find out which, if any, is the most persuasive’. He is right that this is exactly what he appears to do in the book — and as he does so, there are many times you perceive that Professor Winston’s own views and background have coloured his evaluation of other religions. For instance, as a practising Jew, he has a natural dislike for Jesus and Christianity. He reports on many other faiths — even polytheistic ones — with kind moderation. However, when it comes to Jesus, his research becomes less balanced. In the book he claims that the gospels were ‘doctored’ to demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah the Old Testament pointed towards, and that, rather, Jesus was actually a Pharisee who led people astray. This is a reworking of old liberal claims to know ‘the real Jesus’ behind the gospels but it receives no evidence to support it. We simply aren’t told how Professor Winston knows more about Jesus than the writers of the gospels. For myself, the fact we have four accounts of Jesus, written by different people at different times, speaking of the same events with the same understanding of them, all with strong manuscript support, gives us good reason to accept Jesus as presented to us in the New Testament.

We also see his bias in the people he chooses to represent Christianity. In both the programme and the book, all the examples of Christians are far from mainstream. In the second programme we see Eastern Christians converging on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In an annual ceremony they hold candles aloft, waiting for them to be ignited to prove that the promise of Christ’s resurrection still holds true. Before the candles are lit, the scenes in the church bear more resemblance to an unruly football match than that of a religious gathering. In the book, too, the story is the same: examples of Christians include snake-handlers and telly evangelists. Never does he describe the average Christian congregation, calm and in their right mind, gathering to hear God’s Word, to praise him in song and to pray.

Distaste for certainty

A repercussion of Professor Winston’s Judaism is his distaste for any sort of certainty. In his interview with Lynn Barber of The Observer, he said that he remained a Jew because ‘Judaism is one of the few religions which makes no demands on faith’. His take on the world — scientific, and yet coloured with a religion that has now become, according to Professor Winston, non-proselytising and dependent on reason — means that a faith like Christianity is total anathema to him. Our confidence in the unique work of Jesus and desire to share this certain hope with others is something Professor Winston actively dislikes and is unable to grasp.

The best summary of Professor Winston’s work comes from a most unlikely source. A friend described to me the scientist’s interview on Channel 4’s afternoon chat show, Richard and Judy. The conversation went something like this.

Richard: So what you’re saying is that we’ve made God in our own image?
Robert Winston: Yes.
Richard: And what do you think God feels about that?
Robert Winston: long pause...

Well said, Richard. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Investigating a new BBC TV series

The programmes

Problems

Jesus

Subjective

Distaste for certainty

Elisa Beynon

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