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David Attenborough gets hate mail

Possibly the last person in Britain you’d expect to be getting hate mail is David Attenborough but it seems there are creationists out there who can’t leave him alone.

In an article in the Radio Times, reported in The Guardian, Attenborough reveals that he gets hate mail from creationists who are annoyed that he doesn’t credit God in his nature programmes. He says that they usually mean that he doesn’t credit God for beautiful things such as hummingbirds. His response is normally to say that he thinks of a child in Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball which is something he finds hard to reconcile with the idea of a benign and benevolent creator. Nice one, David. My feelings are the same as yours. He doesn’t reveal what the creationists’ response is to this but, if they have one, they’d probably blame it on the gays or single mothers or just the general Moral Collapse of Society.

I wouldn’t worry too much though. For one thing these people are barking mad and, in any case, I wonder whether it’s occurred to him that at least some of them may simply be jealous. There’s probably no one alive at the moment, and possibly no one who has ever lived, who knows this planet as well as David Attenborough. If, against all the odds, I do get the opportunity to be reborn then I wouldn’t mind at all being someone like him.

Posted 27 January 2009, 23:00
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