Sir David Attenborough on Creationism

This is several years old, but it deserves repeating. Sir David Attenborough is the voice of natural history on the BBC and, via the Discovery Channel's Hi Def Planet Earth series, to the world. I just ran across this quote from a 2003 interview with him:

"It is something I get frequent letters about," he says. "They always start with sweet reasonableness, you know, 'We love your programs, isn't nature marvellous', and so on. But they always go on to say, 'We do wonder why it is that you don't give credit to the almighty God who created each one of these species individually.'

"My response," he says, "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'."