Through the Wormhole

Ancient evidence suggests humans have practiced religion

since they first walked the planet.

But is God being worshiped

in the other worlds across the cosmos?

The answers might be buried here on earth...

...in animals that mourn their dead,

in robots who learn to experience spirituality,

and in an equation so powerful,

it could one day kill the idea of God.

Is earth the universe's only home for religion...

...or is God an alien concept?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

For thousands of years,

humans have gazed up at the heavens

and contemplated the divine.

But today, we also wonder

what other forms of life might be out there.

It's possible that some of those points of light

are home to advanced civilizations.

What do the aliens think when they look up at their skies?

Perhaps they pray to a higher power like we do.

Is the concept of God truly universal?

Growing up, I was told

the Bible could help answer questions that baffled my mind,

questions like, "why am I here?"

It made me wonder if I was the only one pondering these things.

What if there are aliens somewhere in the universe?

Are they looking to God for answers, too?

Are all creatures born asking the same burning question?

Why?

Why?

Why?

Deb Kelemen is a renowned child psychologist

at Boston university's child cognition lab.

She deals with clients who demand answers.

Around 3 or 4 years of age, as any parent will tell you,

your kid starts to ask you lots of "why?" Questions.

Why do we have ears?

Why does a pig roll in mud?

It seems constant, the "why, why, why, why, why?"

Why do numbers never stop?

Some of that's just to kind of get a conversation started,

but a lot of it is because children have these really strong explanatory urges.

We've been interested in the kinds of explanations

children seem to naturally generate for themselves

and which kinds of explanations they find palatable.

Most religious texts, including the Bible,

teach that a divine mind

created everything around us for a purpose.

Deb designed a study to see if our brains

innately think of the world in that way.

Hey, Gabrielle. You ready?

All right.

All around the country,

there were these pointy kinds of rocks,

rocks with points on the top.

Why do you think the rocks were so pointy?

One person thought they were pointy

because little bits of stuff piled up on top of one another over a very long time.

Another person thought they were pointy

so animals could scratch on them when they got itchy.

Which answer makes more sense to you?

The one with the scratch.

Okay. So they could scr...

Animals. Okay.

Gabrielle prefers to believe

that pointy rocks were created for a purpose...

to scratch those hard-to-reach places on animals.

Deb poses questions like this to kids of all ages,

and most of them favor the same purpose-based answers.

There were these ponds that never had any waves.

One person thought they were still

so that animals could cool off in the them

without getting washed away.

Another person thought they were still

because no moving water ever ran into them.

Which answer? So they could be cool.

So they could be cool. Okay.

On balance what we found from about 4 years of age

and it gets stronger by about 7 or 8 years of age

is that children prefer purpose-based explanations

for all kinds of natural phenomena.

What they are seeming to show signs of is something

that we see recurrently across the religions of the world,

is this kind... this idea that there is some purpose,

that things exist for a purpose potentially

because of some intentional agent's purpose.

Once we are taught how nature works,

we learn that rocks are not concerned with itchy animals.

Rather, they go through geological cycles

and become pointy.

Our purpose-based explanations seem to go away.

But is there a part of our brain that still believes them?

To find out, Deb designed a pointy-rock test for adults.

In some cases, very highly scientifically educated adults

who have a very strong bias against purpose-based explanations

of natural phenomena,

and what we did was to ask them to look at

a series of purpose-based explanations

under conditions of speed, so they had to respond very quickly

based on their gut reactions.

Deb has found that most adults, when pressed for time,

tend to prefer purpose-based explanations.

One thing that we're really phenomenal at as human beings

is reasoning about purposes and thinking about

intentionally designed or intentionally caused things

comes very easily to us.

And so the kinds of explanations that you see in religions

tap very much into very core aspects of human intelligence.

Many adults consciously reject creationist explanations,

but at our core, we appear prone to believe

all things were created for a reason.

If there are intelligent aliens out there,

would they have the same instincts that we do?

Would they see divine forces at work wherever they look?

If they have something that's equivalent to a human evolutionary pathway

but also something similar to a human cultural context,

that they would be generating purpose-based explanations

and potentially even religious explanations.

Do aliens believe in God?

We might be more inclined to think so

if we knew that other animals on earth

shared our innate need to believe.

Joshua plotnik is a comparative psychologist

in Northern Thailand.

He has come to this remote jungle

to learn about the brains of a non-human species.

I've set up a research center here

where we're able to study elephant intelligence

using the 26 elephants that are based here.

Joshua's research group,

think elephants international, is a proving ground

for the finer points of elephant psychology.

I would say that they are certainly

one of the most intelligent species in the animal kingdom.

The more we learn about elephant cognition,

the more we learn about the evolution

of behavior and intelligence in general.

Joshua wants to find out if there are parallels

between elephant intelligence and our intelligence.

Oh, okay.

He's interested in a behavior that we humans do every day...

take a look at ourselves in a mirror.

Humans take this for granted, right?

We wake up in the morning, we brush our teeth,

we groom ourselves,

but we don't really think about the fact

that actually that ability to recognize yourself in the mirror

may be a complex cognitive capacity

that we call self-awareness.

Is self-awareness something only humans are capable of,

or do elephants also have this sophisticated ability?

Come on.

To find out, Joshua has set up an experiment

that requires one mammoth mirror.

This is Sum Ji. He's one of our males.

He's 20 years old, and this is actually his very first day

looking at himself in front of the mirror.

When an animal is first presented to the mirror,

they initially, usually, think it's another animal.

So they might reach out and touch the mirror.

They might try and get behind it, above it, underneath it.

Many creatures on earth

completely ignore their reflections.

Others forever think it's another animal

staring back at them.

But Sum Ji moves on to do something quite remarkable.

And the elephant starts to do things

that we as humans would do in front of the mirror.

They might lift up their feet.

They might look inside their mouths.

They might put their trunks inside their mouths.

Again, using the mirror to inspect themselves.

Several of the elephants Joshua test react just like Sum Ji.

They use the mirror to study themselves

and look at parts of their bodies they can't otherwise see.

It's a behavior that suggests they are self-aware.

They see themselves as separate from other elephants.

To Joshua, this is a sign

they have an ability called theory of mind.

It is a term psychologists use to explain the capacity

to see the world from someone else's point of view.

They believe it is a basic ingredient

for religious behavior,

because in order to imagine the mind of God,

you must have a theory of mind.

Could elephants have this mental tool

that underpins spirituality?

Joshua thought of a way to find out.

It's a test to see if elephants

can think about the minds of other elephants.

This green table is holding two bowls of tasty elephant snacks.

A single rope is thread through and around the table,

the idea being that it's kind of like a pulley system,

so if one end is picked up by one elephant and pulled,

the other end becomes unthreaded from the table and the table doesn't move.

The elephant has to learn to wait for his partner

before he pulls the rope.

Once his partner arrives,