From Attenborough to Alain de Botton, the faithless are rejecting the shrill atheism of Dawkins
There's something divine in the air. Agnostics and atheists are beginning to nod respectfully in the direction of the Almighty, while still, of course, maintaining that He's not there.

Just before he died, Christopher Hitchens expressed some generous sympathy for the Christian worldview, much to the evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins. Then philosopher Alain "I'm not pretending to be an atheist" de Botton had his own transfiguration moment the other day when he proposed a "temple to atheism", because (I think) he acknowledges a human capacity for transcendance.

Now the venerable, agnostic natural historian Sir David Attenborough has confessed to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that there might, after all, be a God: "I don't think an understanding and an acceptance of the four billion-year-long history of life is any way inconsistent with a belief in a supreme being."

Paul wrote:

Ironclad wrote:When asked if he believed in god, David Battenburg replied, when I see parasitic worms eating the eyes of the poorest children in the poorest of lands, one is inclined to doubt.
Something like that.

According to wikiqoute it's from the BBC documentary Life on Air (2002)

I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.

Scot Dutchy wrote:It is in the video above as well.

DoctorE wrote:

From Attenborough to Alain de Botton, the faithless are rejecting the shrill atheism of Dawkins
There's something divine in the air. Agnostics and atheists are beginning to nod respectfully in the direction of the Almighty, while still, of course, maintaining that He's not there.

Just before he died, Christopher Hitchens expressed some generous sympathy for the Christian worldview, much to the evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins. Then philosopher Alain "I'm not pretending to be an atheist" de Botton had his own transfiguration moment the other day when he proposed a "temple to atheism", because (I think) he acknowledges a human capacity for transcendance.

Now the venerable, agnostic natural historian Sir David Attenborough has confessed to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that there might, after all, be a God: "I don't think an understanding and an acceptance of the four billion-year-long history of life is any way inconsistent with a belief in a supreme being."

Continues: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... z1kx3EfLlP