Last week the news that Sir David Atten­bor­ough receives hate mail for fail­ing to credit God in his doc­u­men­taries was every­where you looked. If you would like a recap, I pre­vi­ously dis­cussed Attenborough’s rather graphic rea­son for dis­be­liev­ing in a deity in Atten­bor­ough on Cre­ation­ism back in November.

One thing has come to light since, how­ever: Charles Darwin’s eerily sim­i­lar rea­sons for not explic­itly believ­ing in a Cre­ator, as men­tioned in a let­ter to Asa Gray in 1860:

There seems to me too much mis­ery in the world. I can­not per­suade myself that a benef­i­cent & omnipo­tent God would have designedly cre­ated the Ich­neu­monidæ with the express inten­tion of their feed­ing within the liv­ing bod­ies of cater­pil­lars, or that a cat should play with mice.