The Case for God?, BBC One

Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now the heroically worldly Sunday Morning Live. General Synod noticed it earlier this year when complaints were made about the lack of religious programming.

With a flourish of faux-jeopardy, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks explained that he was going into an atheists’ lion’s den to see if he could learn more about his faith. In fact, he seemed to be going into BBC Two’s actual Dragons' Den, or at least the set. He was, of course, the Dragon. And each of the four debaters were presented as if they were pitching their world view. After each session they were given a minute to camera to say how they thought it had gone. So who were these would-be rabbi-converters? We had secular Jews, Howard Jacobson and Lisa Jardine, scientific atheist Colin Blakemore and everyone’s favourite clever-clogs, Alain de Botton.

I do always wonder when God appears on TV, which God we are talking about

The whole tone of the programme was refreshingly middle-brow, but not without its lighter moments. De Botton with his cartoonish cranium managed to elicit a moment of sublime unintended comedy. He was trying to convince the rabbi that it was OK to pick and mix the best bits from religions. The rabbi refuted this by saying that however much he liked Beethoven, Simon and Garfunkel and Miles Davis, a tune made up of all three would be a disaster.

An interesting point? Was he actually meaning that on musical grounds we need to stick to one true religion? De Botton thought not. “But, Rabbi”, he said, “this is exactly what we all love to do with literature. We read Jane Austen in the morning, Schopenhauer in the afternoon, Gibbon in the evening...” Wow, Alain: Schopenhauer and Gibbon surely must trump Garfunkel and Davis any day!

What this exchange also showed was, by editing down several hours of interview to a half-hour programme, how perfunctory and occasionally ludicrous a presumably erudite exchange could become. Of course religious leaders are used to reducing big ideas to sound-bites in sermons but I couldn’t help remembering that no one gave Jonathan Miller this treatment in his series on atheism a while back.

For the sake of making everything easy and intelligible, each of the four interlocutors was edited down to a single idea. Howard Jacobson trumpeted his credentials as a secular Jew, and said how much he disliked Jewish ritual. Moving the argument a little further forward he asked, “Rabbi, could you ever love a Jew who says I’ve had it with Jewish self-righteousness?” “Of course, I could love such a Jew,” came the reply. “Once I thought you were such a Jew.” Oy Vey!

And after the love-in was over came the serious point that maybe ritual is necessary to embed religiosity into the routine of the everyday. After all, came one of the rabbi’s irresistible metaphors, you’d never finish writing a novel if you didn’t do a little bit every day.

Colin Blakemore’s interview carried a particular burden of responsibility insofar as he seemed to represent the recent Dawkins-led industry of books and programmes that cater for an audience equally eager to feel the liberation of a universe devoid of God. Blakemore thought that science explained all, and moreover did so without leaving any space for a God hypothesis.

In rebuttal the rabbi invoked Beethoven again, saying that we might know he wrote to pay his bills but that that didn’t explain the beauty of the music. Blakemore got the point but thought it was nonsense. Science would explain everything; eventually even consciousness itself. And when it did explain concepts that draw in questions of purpose and meaning rather than explaining phenomena away it would just make them more astonishing. The rabbi agreed to disagree on this but refused to accept that there was no free will.

The last and most significant challenge to the existence of God was, we were told, the existence of suffering in the world. Lisa Jardine, whose father Jacob Bronowski made the classic Seventies documentary The Ascent of Man, questioned how God could allow the Holocaust to take place. The rabbi turned this around, saying that the Holocaust made him lose faith in secular man to do good and showed the need for God to guide man’s behaviour.

And this all raised the question, never actually addressed in the programme, of what actual God were we hearing a case for. The rabbi’s God? Presumably, but one wonders how many of the intended audience would know much about Judaism, or the rabbi’s take on it. Even if they wanted to like his God (after all, Sacks seemed pretty cuddly, and even had a beard like Rowan Williams's) they wouldn’t know anything about it.

Actually, it seemed to me that a case was being made against a Christian God, by programme-makers who feel so uncomfortable about Christianity that they preferred to dress the whole thing up as a Rosh Hashanah address. I do always wonder when God appears on TV, which God we are talking about. The rule-making God of evangelicals who has a thing about gays? The reasonable yet ineffectual God of The Vicar of Dibley? The God of everything we don’t yet understand in science?

I seem to remember hearing Nicky Campbell talking intelligently about all of this on the Big Questions one Sunday morning. I think I recall him making some excellent points. So, maybe the BBC’s middle-brow programmes don’t actually get us any further than the ones presented by ex-radio DJs. Still, at least they make us feel that the BBC is trying to take religion seriously.

• Watch The Case for God? on BBC iPlayer