A response to Attenborough’s Guardian comments on God and evolution.

A recent Guardian online article spoke of Sir David Attenborough receiving hate mail for not crediting God for the appearance of beauty in nature. I certainty don’t think that Sir David Attenborough should be getting hate mail, however I felt compelled to address Attenborough’s rather pompous tone.

Firstly, prominent theists do not deny that evolution exists; they deny a particular understanding, that man evolved from ape like species. This distinction has been referred to as Micro and Macro evolution.

Secondly, Attenborough regards evolution a “fact”. Well, that’s surprising because many scientists do not view evolution in this way. A credible hypothesis maybe, but not a “fact” as it were. Many scientists view inconsistencies in the theory that need to be resolved before such bold claims can be made. One such inconsistency emerges from the very process of evolution. If man did evolve from apes, J.D. Barrow and F.J Tipler suggest that there would have to be ten steps in this evolution of Homosapiens However, the process would take so long that before the process could even come close to what we look like now, the Sun would have disintegrated.

Thirdly, if evolution is true, the most it can substantiate is that the biblical/Qur’anic accounts of creation are untrue, it does nothing to achieve an atheistic position, that is to say that one can know that God does not exist.

Fourthly, he alluded to that fact that belief in God was ridiculous. Whilst listening to a sermon by his ‘believing’ headmaster, he notes his surprise that someone so extremely clever could possibly believe in God, he states: “he can't really believe all that, can he? How incredible!”

Attenborough’s arrogance is a product of the bygone generation of scientism that is ignorant of the revolution that is taking place on the topic of the existence God. That generation's cultural high point came on April 8, 1966, when Time magazine carried a lead story "Is God Dead?" The story described the "death of God" movement. However, the notion that God is intellectually indefensible is rapidly vanishing. According to Dr W. L. Craig, in the 1940s and '50s, many philosophers believed in verficationsim, a view that all matters which cannot be empirically verified are deemed meaningless. Consequently, the question, ‘does God exist?’ since it is not verifiable, is reduced to a meaningless and nonsensical question. This verificationism finally collapsed, due to being self referentially incoherent. That is to say, the principle itself could not be verified empirically. The collapse of verificationism was the most important philosophical event of the 20th century. Its downfall meant that philosophers were free once again to tackle traditional problems of philosophy that verificationism had once buried. Quentin Smith from University of Western Michigan complains about "Intelligent and talented theists entering academia today…" Concluding, "God is not 'dead' in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”

Moreover, a remarkable series of discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics over the last century have revitalized arguments for the existence of God. We now have strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past, but had an absolute beginning about 13 - 15 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang.

In 2003 cosmologists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin who are to the highest degree respected in the scientific community, were able to prove that any universe that is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion must have had an absolute beginning. It follows then that there must be a transcendent cause that brought the universe into being. Why would it be a preposterous claim that this transcendent cause is God? By virtue of these discoveries it’s not surprising that “extremely clever” individuals believe in God be it academics, scientists or philosophers.

 Being fully aware of these points whilst reading Attenborough’s comments, I thought to myself “he obviously is very clever, surely he can’t believe that God doesn’t exist”.

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