The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 9: Video Recommendations

To explore the evidence behind my main thesis, I have to defer to people who are masters of their respective fields. I’m not a specialist in genetics, geology, astronomy, physics, or history—and I don’t want to pose as one. Still, with many complex topics it helps to have some working understanding across multiple domains, because reality doesn’t come neatly divided into academic departments.

So here is a starter video list—meant less as a syllabus than as an invitation to curiosity:

1. A very approachable place to start is simply to watch nature documentaries. David Attenborough is, in my view, among the greatest nature documentarians in history. The BBC Planet Earth series is a good gateway:

Planet Earth
Planet Earth II
Planet Earth III

And separately (not BBC): David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020).

These films can begin with simple appreciation of the wonder of the natural world—then, if you’re willing, they also confront something darker: predation, starvation, disease, and the high baseline suffering in wild ecosystems. Increasingly, they also point to the scale of human-caused ecological damage—habitat loss, pollution, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity.

2. For people raised in literalist traditions, geology is often the first immovable wall of evidence: the Earth is old—billions of years old. A clear and enjoyable entry point is the work of geologist Iain Stewart, who has presented excellent television introductions to Earth’s history and processes. for example, his BBC geology series such as Earth: The Biography (2008). This matters here because many forms of dogmatic faith make specific claims about origins and timescales that simply do not survive contact with the evidence.

3. Cosmos—the original series with Carl Sagan (1980), and the modern reboot with Neil deGrasse Tyson (Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey)—is a beautiful introduction to astronomy and to the history of scientific discovery. The central lesson isn’t that “science has all the answers.” It’s that science has developed methods for correcting itself, revising its claims when new evidence arrives, and building an increasingly coherent picture of nature—methods that look very different from dogma.

4. Alice Roberts’ The Incredible Human Journey is a vivid, evidence-focused account of human origins and migration. It tells the story of humans emerging in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then spreading across the world over long stretches of time. It’s “hands on” in the best way: bones, artifacts, genetics, geography—real evidence you can actually reason about.

5. The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has made accessible historical work available in lecture/documentary form, including material on European history and identity. Some of this can be found on YouTube. I recommend watching serious history partly because it inoculates against simplistic religious apologetics. Every major religion has sometimes been entangled with education, social organization, and cultural development. But history also forces us to look directly at atrocities, wars, persecutions, and massacres carried out under religious banners—including conflicts between rival branches of the same religion.

6. PBS’s Evolution (2001), narrated by Liam Neeson, is a solid place to begin learning about evolutionary science. This documentary is dated now in production style, and much of evolutionary biology has advanced dramatically since 2001—especially with the explosion of genetic evidence. But it still introduces the central logic clearly, and it’s hard to overstate how overwhelmingly strong the evidence is. Understanding evolution does not have to “dampen morale” any more than understanding heliocentrism does. It’s simply a lucid way of seeing how biological systems actually work.

A small rhetorical critique, though: documentaries sometimes lapse into personification—phrases like “nature wants” or “evolution tinkers.” This is just figurative language, but it can confuse a literal-minded viewer into imagining a conscious agent. Evolution is not a being; it is a process. Nature doesn’t “decide.” Things happen because systems have certain constraints and regularities—and those regularities can be studied.

7. Documentaries such as Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking (2010) are an accessible entry point into questions about the origins and fate of the universe. If you’re drawn in, it becomes worth learning at least the basic conceptual outlines of relativity and quantum mechanics—not to become a physicist, but to appreciate what modern science has learned about time, matter, and causation.

This list is not meant to “replace” religion with documentaries. It’s meant to give readers a way to encounter the natural world and human history directly—through disciplines that are constrained by evidence, and that openly correct themselves when they’re wrong. If my broader argument is that dogma fails under scrutiny, then the honest next step is to offer people good places to do that scrutiny.