It is unlikely that you will have missed that Sir David Attenborough is now 100; the BBC have been celebrating this for the last month. He has combined his passion of natural history and his skills as a TV presenter to shape the way nature documentaries are shown on the television. He has very largely shaped the national conversation on the environment and polls consistently show him as one of the most trusted figures.
Some look at the natural world and see in it evidence for a loving, creator God. Attenborough is not one of these. He often speaks of the examples of parasitic worms, that debilitate their (sometimes human) hosts in order to live; he can see little evidence from these of a loving creator . From my perspective as a professional biologist, I admire the beauty of the natural world; I know this from staring at cells through a microscope. I can praise God for the beauty. However, I am aware that this is a consequence of evolution by natural selection, driven by random changes to our genes. This process does not need an intelligent creator to drive it; indeed it relies on chance and does lead to suffering as well as progress. But I would agree with those who say that this shows that if God has chosen to “create” through natural selection, then this is inevitable. If God has given the universe the freedom to progress by this mechanism, their must be pain. But the glory and the love are shown in what God knew all along; the wonder of nature that Sir David has spent his life revealing.
Rev David Poyner