David Malone's 3-part series Testing God is available for the first time in DVD format . Testing God re-examines the relationship between science and religion and asks: is science’s claim to victory premature?

 

Programme 1: Killing the Creator examines whether science has foreclosed on the possibility of a creator God and, if not, whether it can.  The answer on both counts is no.  Science is actually having to grapple with the fact that our universe, far from being explicable as a logical or mathematical necessity, is a highly unlikely place.  Is this evidence that the laws of nature are a product of design?  If so, surely this is indisputable evidence for God.  The alternative explanation, that ours is one of an infinite number of universes, poses more problems for science than it solves.  Contributors to the programme include: Professor Sir Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Neil Turok and Frank Tipler.

 

Programme Two:  Darwin and the Divine asks what piece of work is a man?  Is the overwhelming evidence that we are a product of evolution final evidence that God does not exist?  Does this in turn mean that we are little more than beasts, that morality and spirituality are mere illusions?  On all counts, the answer is no.  Programme two shows that a god who wanted his creations to have free-will - and therefore moral responsibility - would have to have used a process like evolution.  The death of the "argument by design" is not the death of god.  Contributors to the programme include: Richard Dawkins, John Sulston, Geoffrey Miller, Denis Alexander, Steven Mithen and Jurgen Moltmann

 

Programme Three: Credo Ergo Sum looks at the human brain and the human mind.  Are our minds based purely on binary logic, or is there something irrational  - something subjective - at the root of reason?  We look at ideas in physics, neurology and psychology and suggest that, whatever you think about the existence of God, the ability to believe is a crucial part of living in a fundamentally uncertain world. If we deny this in a quest for rational "certainty", might we be denying the very thing that makes us human?

 

Contributors include: George Steiner, Andy Clark, Peter Fenwick, Brian Goodwin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Bart Kosko and Andrew Newberg.

 

Nominated for the Royal Television Society Programme  Awards in 2001, Testing God was described by the Financial Times as television of 'breathtaking ambition'; by The Independent on Sunday as "the most articulate terrestrial programme on at the moment" and by the London Times as "moving and startling - as close to poetry as television gets."

 

In 2003 Testing God picked up a bronze award from the Sandford St Martin Trust.

 

Brought to DVD by Eastern State Ltd 2005

 

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS DVD IS IN REGION 0 (NEUTRAL) PAL FORMAT. US CUSTOMERS SHOULD CHECK COMPATIBILITY WITH THIER DVD RECORDER.