From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the record as being opposed to the concept of creationism. Why do you feel so strongly about it?
I feel so strongly about it because I think that it is in a quite simple historical factual way wrong. Um the arguments I would ah put forward ah now that we are um more knowledgeable about the world as a whole, we know that every single society has want has found it necessary to get some explanation as to how human beings came into existence and Australian Aboriginal societies and or some sections of it think it was a great sort of rainbow serpent that arches up in the sky and which vomited up the first human being from a water hole ah and there are people in South East Asia who think that the world started as a sea of milk in which there was a great snake and demons were pulling at one end and ah and another lot at the other and they churned it and it turned into coagulations which human beings and there was a there was a people 3,000 years ago wandering around the Middle East ah who thought that ah, the, what happened there was a garden and ah a man from the sky created, m-m-made, moulded out of mud, blew into it and then and that was the first man and then in order to make the the woman he took a rib out of its side. Now all those things can't be right. How do you ah decide which you're going to believe or are you simply going to accept what it was your mother told you or your father told you? Ah well there are good historical clues to be found and they're found all over the everywhere and they're all the same everywhere. I mean the truth about our own bodies, about the shape of our own bodies and what they look like, ah the ah looking at fossils and the ground, looking at the rest of animal creation and so on ah and if you do that which is the same everywhere and if you no matter what nationality of people who look at that you come to the same conclusions which is that all life has evolved over a very long period of time and you can plot the course and the range in which it works so um simply from a taking an objective point of view ah the answer is that that life has evolved on this planet.
ANDREW DENTON: But of course not everybody does to come that conclusion and there are plenty of people who would say to you all very well David but God did that.
SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: The idea that that when people say why don't you give God the credit for all these wonderful things. When people say that ah they nearly always want to ah as take the example of butterflies or hummingbirds or orchids or something, lovely. Um and I'm or I write back because they write to me on ah on this and say yes well it's all very well ah but of course um I think of a little boy sitting on a bank of the river in West Africa with a worm that's boring through his eyeball and which will certainly turn him blind ah within a few years. Now this God that you so-, that created every single species, he must presumably have created that worm. Now are you telling me that this is a Christian God who um has compassion and mercy for every individual one of us and that he did it he did it did it deliberately put a, in, ah make a worm and put it in the eye of this child. I, ah, this worm can't exist anywhere else. Well I don't find that compatible with the notion of a of there being a a merciful creator, God. If you're a creationist do you actually believe that this worm together with tape worms and everything else actually were created at the same time as Adam and that God said OK I'll make Adam and I'll give him, I'll kick him out with every, every one of these little animal parasites. Did he do that? And if he didn't do that, then what had happened presumably is that these worms related to other worms in the Garden of Eden and eventually moved into the ... in which case they then changed and so they couldn't live anywhere else as the condition is now. They've evolved. Dear me, there's a rude word.
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I think, like many people David Attenborough was an essential part of my education in the best sense possible.
Found the following at Wikipedia:
In a BBC Four interview with Mark Lawson, Attenborough was asked if he at any time had any religious faith. He replied simply, "No."
That were quick John...
It was posted mid-broadcast, within two minutes of the segment. The ABC helpfully had the transcript up already, bless 'em.
It would have been nicer if the editor of the original had trimmed out the "ums" and "ahs". Yes, the official record of something might find that important, but unless you've heard him conversationally, it's hard to hear his natural voice in your head (as opposed to his narrative voice) and as such, reading that transcript was damn near impossible.
We can adapt our perception to hear past such sounds, but it is impossible to read through them when they're on the printed page.
Like the dinosaurs and lions, parasites used to be vegetarians in the Garden...For God so hated the plants that He commanded every beast to eat them, their bodies and their infant children, yea, even their roots.
@Joe: trimming out the 'ums and 'ahs' would (honestly) require ellipses, which might generate a suspicion of quote-mining...
What sacrilege - the blessed ABC doesn't quote-mine!
Great that you drew attention to this interview, John.
Later in the interview, the great A got onto Hox genes, and I wish he'd had a chance to say more about them - but the main point he made was that in his lifetime a vast array of amazing discoveries had been made, especially in genetics.
It is this sort of thing that turned me in recent years from an indifferent ignoramus to a reasonably knowledgeable dilettante, starting when I stumbled on a book by Dawkins in an American bookshop - the sense of excitement and wonder at the string of extraordinary discoveries in the past 50 or even 20 years - encapsulated in books like "Endless Forms Most Wonderful", and "The Ancestor's Tale", which I am now rereading.