Sex, death and the meaning of life. Part 2, Life after death.

This three-part documentary looks at the meaning of life in the modern world. Throughout the series, presenter Richard Dawkins attempts to uncover reasons why an atheist, such as himself, should get out of bed in the morning. In order to answer this question, Dawkins asks whether science has the capacity to take the place of religion; to inspire as well as to guide our lives and whether or not science can bring understanding to death without belief in an afterlife. In the second-part of this three-part documentary, Dawkins attempts to assess the importance of death within the meaning of life. In order to do this he explores the idea of the human soul and attempts to answer the question of whether or not there really is life after death. Dawkins first talks to several Christians about their ideas of where we go when we die: for Richard Chell, a Christian dying of motor-neuron-disease, not believing in an afterlife is like eating only half a meal; it leaves the body dissatisfied. Similarly, Lee and Rurae Rhoad, who had recently lost their new born daughter were unwaveringly convinced that one day they would be reunited with her in heaven. On travelling to Varanasi, India, whose main industry is death Dawkins finds the belief in the after-life is just as strong for Hindus. One million Hindus bring with them some 40,000 dead to be cremated on the banks of the Ganges every year. Here Dawkins finds that for Hindus the flesh ceases to be important, rather, the significance of the event is the releasing of the soul from the body. For Dawkins, playing on the fear of the living is religions strongest card; religions deny the reality of death, offering instead the prospect of eternal life. From here Dawkins begins to undermine the belief of immortality with science. He interviews a psychologist at the University of Bristol who found that children from a very young age are programmed to believe that human beings are made up of more than our physical bodies, in essence that every person has their own soul. There is however no scientific fact to base this upon. Dawkins argues that instead of thinking of death as an obstacle to overcome, we should view it merely as a part of life. Bangor University found that by looking at death through a gene’s eye point-of-view we are able to see our bodies as survival machines for genes; that as long as we can continue to copy our genes into a new generation, our bodies will remain alive. Dr Nir Barzilai, of the Institute of Ageing at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine corroborates this explanation; he interviewed 500 centenarian Ashkenazi Jews living in New York, and found that 1/3 of them were childless, they were more likely to have less children than the average and those that had children often did so later in life. Barzilai concludes; genes trade reproduction for a long life. At the end of the program Dawkins considers this; if the sole purpose of life is to pass on our genes then the only part of us that is immortal is our genome passed on from generation to generation.