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’.
