01-29-2009, 07:17 PM
To avoid interfering with another thread I'll post this one here.
One occasionally hears stories about scientists who have a religious faith having that faith borrowed by others as some kind of evidence that god exists. While Einstein and others have had to endure the ignominy of having their words twisted for these ends I was interested to read this news about David Attenborough on the the Orange website today.
One occasionally hears stories about scientists who have a religious faith having that faith borrowed by others as some kind of evidence that god exists. While Einstein and others have had to endure the ignominy of having their words twisted for these ends I was interested to read this news about David Attenborough on the the Orange website today.
Quote:[B]Sir David Attenborough may be one of TV’s more harmless broadcasters. But the wildlife presenter has revealed he receives hate mail – from hardcore Christians who are angry that he doesn’t credit God for the beauty of nature.
“They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance,” the 82-year-old star told the Radio Times, adding that the less threatening letters criticise him for not “giving credit” to God. “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, who presents natural selection documentary Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life on BBC1 this week, has said he considers himself an agnostic and opposes the teaching of creationism in schools alongside evolution, as if they were equally valid viewpoints.
“It never really occurred to me to believe in God - and I had nothing to rebel against, my parents told me nothing whatsoever,” he explained. “But I do remember looking at my headmaster delivering a sermon, a classicist, extremely clever... and thinking, ‘he can't really believe all that, can he? How incredible!’”
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