In my previous post I sought to evaluate the scientific accuracy of the section about LUCA and the origin of life in the first episode of the new BBC series on Evolution. In this post I want to consider the how well the coverage of this topic serves the diverse audience of the BBC. I will argue that Chris Packham does not seem to: (1) engage with arguments that people who disagree with him might make, or (2) consider how different views about God could lead people to draw different conclusions from the evidence he presents.
As mentioned in my first post, less than half of the UK population agree with Packham’s view that God played no part in our origins, and the rest either believe that God played a role, or they are undecided, or have no view, or a different view.
To this very mixed audience, Packham declares his view that “we weren’t made” as if it were a simple objective fact, scientifically proven, that everyone – whatever their worldview – should agree with. In doing so, he fails to engage with arguments that people who disagree with him might make.
Many theists see the origin of life as one of the most compelling cases for a creative event in the biological world. This is because the atheist alternative involves an unbelievably large amount of luck. For many theists, God is a more compelling explanation for the origin of life than blind chance.
In 2014 Pope Francis said:
evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve
in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Similarly, within the last decade, Michel-Yves Bolloré, Olivier Bonnassies, John Lennox and Stephen Meyer have argued that the origin of life points to God, in books that have had wide circulation.
For Packham to pass over the mystery of the origin of life as if it were trivial, or something that can be taken for granted, represents a failure to engage with one of the strongest arguments put forward by those who disagree with him.
A failure to engage with one of the strongest arguments put forward by those who disagree with him
The series seems to fail to consider how a different views about God could lead people to draw different conclusions from the evidence. For theists who take the view that a divine Maker was involved in the origin of life, things that seem to be necessarily true for an atheist are not necessarily true for them.
For example, I mentioned in the previous blog that Packham is making a good point when he says that:
because all living things have DNA and use the same genetic code, we know there must be a shared origin.
This is the strongest argument for LUCA that he presents and it works well in an atheist context. However, for a theist whose God has power over matter and energy, that shared origin does not have to be LUCA. The shared origin could simply be the mind of God. The same genetic code in all life could be evidence for a single Maker rather than many makers – thus an argument for monotheism rather than polytheism. It could also be evidence of sophisticated design as a shared system allows interactions between different kingdoms of life via short RNA molecules (helping plants overcome their microbial pathogens, for example). Different views about God make a big difference to what people may conclude from evidence. Packham’s reasoning may be convincing in an atheistic universe, but less so in a theistic one.
The theist simply has more possibilities open to them
The theist simply has more possibilities open to them when it comes to explaining something as amazing as the origin of life.
John Lennox puts it like this:
What, then, does a theist have to say? She can be more open than her materialist colleague and can admit, even welcome, the involvement of natural processes. But she is not committed to excluding processes that are not part of a closed cause and effect system. Indeed she can be fully open to the possibility that the universe is an open system. This strikes me as a much more open-minded approach and therefore more in accord with the spirit of science. (p. 201, Cosmic Chemistry, 2021)
This open mindedness means that on some issues a theist will need a lot more evidence than an atheist does before coming to a firm conclusion. The evidence that Packham presents for the origin of life and LUCA may be sufficient to convince an atheist, but a not necessarily a theist. Simply presenting these as facts does not take into account the different worldviews that his audience may have.
In conclusion, whether you agree with Packham’s atheism or not, I think you could agree that the BBC does an inadequate job of addressing a diverse audience. If you agree with Packham and want everyone to be convinced by him that “we weren’t made”, then his failure to address the key arguments of his opponents, or put himself in their shoes, may be disappointing. Or if you disagree with him, and think the evidence points to a Maker, then you may be disappointed that he does not take your worldview more seriously.
In my next post, I discuss the sections on “The Evidence” shown at the end of several episodes.
Featured image: Still from BBC Evolution series 2026