David Attenborough May Just Be God

“You must have noticed,” says Adrian Gill in the Sunday Times this week (8 Feb08), “there’s an awful lot of Darwin about at the moment.” With some humour Gill says that some people believe “Darwin is plainly an act of God. They point out that if you found the great naturalist sitting on top of a Galapagos tortoise, weaving beetles into his beard in the ready-meal aisle of Tesco, he would inescapably remind you that he had been designed and therefore there must be a grand designer and that that cosmic architect could only be God - or David Attenborough, as we more commonly know him.”
Continues Gill, “In Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, David, honour and blessings be on his name, came down to television to describe for us, once again, why natural selection works and what survival of the fittest really means. He did this by showing a film of himself in previous incarnations. Here was divine proof that life began with Attenborough. From the smallest curly ammonite to the leviathans of the deep, none could exist for us if it weren’t for the omnipresent, timeless explainer. What was mystical was that while the ages of the world rose and fell, forests grew and receded, seas came and went and the miracle of stop-frame photography could make eras pass in a breath, the blessed David’s trousers remain unchanged. He was as fresh of face and waspish of waist then as he is now. The circle of life applies to all living things, but apparently not to Attenborough or his safari suit.”
Says Gill, “Attenborough’s run through the story of natural selection has been by far the best of all the offerings to date, but we’re only just into February of the bicentenary.” Then he says something that I found interesting and unusual for a newspaper columnist, because generally we see a resistance to this suggestion. Said Gill, “It would be nice to see the argument for intelligent design given a separate programme that isn’t set up as religious combat, to see someone really try to make the “invisible watchmaker” argument believable. Not least because we should examine and remember things and ideas that are on the edge of extinction.” Now I think that is a remark that could be taken seriously - but would the strong evolution lobby respect the beliefs of such a large minority of the British population and allow a ‘democratic’ airing of a strongly held alternative world view?