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.