Here’s the Daily Mail’s take:
Speaking on Desert Island Discs, the 85-year-old naturalist told how recognising the possibility that God could exist meant he was an agnostic rather than an atheist.
As the Mail’s Ben Todd for points out, Attenborough has spoken out about this kind of thing over the years, but seemed more certain now that he isn’t am atheist.
A friend of Uncommon Descent forwards this link, saying,
Attenborough was a weekly voice into our homes through his nature TV programs. He was huge in my acceptance of evolutionary theory as a youth…
In “Evolutionist David Attenborough Says God May Exist” (The Christian Post, January 30, 2012), Matthew Cortina reports,
David Attenborough – British broadcaster, naturalist and evolution theorist – said on a BBC broadcast on Sunday that he is now agnostic and believes that faith in God does not preclude belief in evolution.
Attenborough, who has narrated dozens of nature films including the acclaimed BBC series “Life,” has said that belief in God and belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive.
Channelling Antony Flew who renounced atheism – after 50 years as a prominent spokesman, – because of design in the universe? See his book, “There IS a God.”
Deism didn’t preclude Flew assuming that evolution happened either, but it certainly precluded his believing in undirected evolution ( = Darwin’s mainstream evolution theory).
“People write to me that evolution is only a theory. Well, it is not a theory. Evolution is as solid a historical fact as you could conceive,” Attenborough told the BBC in 2009.
“What is a theory is whether natural selection is the mechanism and the only mechanism. That is a theory. But the historical reality that dinosaurs led to birds and mammals produced whales, that’s not theory,” he added.
Yes, and the real divide between the majority Darwinists teaching at universities today and the growing minority of alternative evolution theorists (including ID theorists) is precisely that point.
Here are some sourced things he has said over the years, on related topics. Stay tuned.
See also: Darwinist admits: Growing number of gene scientists unconvinced by Darwinism
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