As promised,
here is my response to Derren Brown’s ‘Faith’ show. The shows are still on 4oD
if you wish to watch them.
In this
programme Derren Brown demonstrates how a ‘religious experience’ can be induced
on someone, in this case a stem-cell scientist and a strong atheist. It was a
fascinating show because Derren was not presenting full conclusive evidence for
the non-existence of God(s) but exploring that the belief in God could stem
from our humanistic needs and is hard-wired into us.
The concept
of a God was always going to be applied by humans to explain the world no
matter whether it was true or not, centuries ago humans knew very little about
the world around them and the need to be able to explain the world was
essential to the basics of living. As Derren showed in this programme we are
all susceptible to suggestions of a supernatural presence, in essence it is
hard wired into every one of us. He used several experiments on members of his
audience to demonstrate this. He performed a satanic ritual where the person
read out a satanic rite declaring their allegiance to Satan, out of an audience
consisting of mainly atheists, agnostics and skeptics only a few were willing
to perform it- 11 out of 160. As Derren after this said “we are all born with
an inbuilt hardwired tendency to believe,” and it was that niggling doubt in
the back of their minds that made them not decide to partake.
He also put
non-believers in a complete darkened underground tunnel and most of them
reported supernatural feelings, believing they were seeing figures, and outlines
of people. One of members, the stem-cell scientist was not bothered by this at
all and whilst the others were very distressed she quite humorously not
bothered by the darkness made a passing comment about the trains above them. He
gave her a ‘religious experience’ without the mention of God in his discussion,
soon after the discussion she was hit by a sudden flood of love. Derren showed
that a religious experience can be induced through using psychological techniques
and that this could explain all supernatural experiences.
This
programme incorporated a wealth of experiments and explorations into the belief
in God that I have had to miss out many aspects of it. For example, he demonstrated
that humans see meaning even when there is none; he told a volunteer that his
team working on the project would intervene in her life through a series of
incidents. After the project she reported numerous incidents in that week,
however Derren did not intervene at all and she was simply applying meaning to
events which were utterly random.
I thoroughly
enjoyed this insightful look at the belief in God and I thought Derren Brown
approached it in a beautifully crafted way, without the clear cut statements
that God is non-existent but subtly suggesting it through his work.
No comments:
Post a Comment