I’m considering treating someone (possibly myself!) to David Attenborough’s The Life Collection: the full set of David Attenborough’s Life series, consisting of over 60 hours of some of the best nature footage in history.
As is the norm when I’m intrigued by anything, I head over to Wikipedia and read all I can on a subject. This time I was interested more in Attenborough himself, and came across the following:
In a December 2005 interview […] Attenborough stated that he considers himself an agnostic. When asked whether his observation of the natural world has given him faith in a creator, he generally responds with some version of this story:
“My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’.”
If you’re a newcomer to Attenborough, I suggest these YouTube videos, courtesy of the BBC. One not to miss is the call of the lyrebird, voted as ‘the best Attenborough moment’.
My favourite fact: Attenborough’s reputed to be the most travelled person on Earth: while filming The Trials of Life he travelled almost a quarter of a million miles in just over three and a half years.