Attenborough on Creationism

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Attenborough went further in his opposition to creationism, saying it was "terrible" when it was taught alongside evolution as an alternative perspective. "It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five … Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066."

[Riazat Butt, "Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God", Guardian [UK], 27 January 2009.]

Posted on March 12, 2009 at 19.01 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science

2 Responses

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  1. Written by Wayne
    on Friday, 13 March 2009 at 14.02
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    Oh yes, those beautiful hummingbirds, fighting violently with each other as they viciously maintain their territories.

    Nostalgically, I believe it was you, Jeff, who cleared up for me the semantic tangles of falsification and the Popperian view of how science is done. That was back in the day, wasn't it, when everyone had their first encounter with a USENET .sig file announcing the rare "home page" on the "World Wide Web!" Good times!

    Fact, theory, and belief – each cycle of my students has such difficulty with these concepts.

  2. Written by jns
    on Thursday, 26 March 2009 at 11.26
    Permalink

    I'm glad to hear, Wayne, that my credential in science hermeneutics extend further back than I'd realized!

    This, of course, is just another plug for Ars Hermeneutica, where I believe that increasing science literacy means helping people untangled the innumerable wrong beliefs they have about how science works, replacing that system with a clearer understanding of scientific process that can improve their own relationship with reality.

    I'll have to keep "fact, theory, and belief" in mind as a useful motto about what gets sorted out.

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