So here is a starter video list—meant less as a syllabus than as an invitation to curiosity:
1. A very approachable place to start is simply to watch nature documentaries. David Attenborough is, in my view, among the greatest nature documentarians in history. One can see that Attenborough is also a great human being—gentle, wise, kind, caring—and almost everyone, whatever their religious or political leanings, would warm to him. The BBC Planet Earth series is a good gateway:
• Planet Earth
• Planet Earth II
• Planet Earth III
And separately (not BBC): David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020).
These films can begin with simple appreciation of the wonder of the natural world—then, if you’re willing, they also confront something darker: predation, starvation, disease, and the high baseline suffering in wild ecosystems. A world arranged by a benevolent designer for the good of its creatures would not, one imagines, have planned for parasites, famine, and the slow death of the weak. The age of the Earth’s rocks unsettles only the literalist; the sheer quantity of undeserved suffering in nature is the deeper challenge to any account of a benevolent design. These documentaries are also a good background for understanding evolution as the process that has shaped the history of life—rather than the work of a designing hand. Increasingly, they point to the scale of human-caused ecological damage too—habitat loss, pollution, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity.
For people raised in literalist traditions, geology is often where the age of the Earth becomes impossible to set aside: it is old—billions of years old. A clear and enjoyable entry point is the work of geologist Iain Stewart, who has presented excellent television introductions to Earth’s history and processes, for example his five-part BBC series Earth: The Power of the Planet (2007), broadcast in the United States the following year as Earth: The Biography. This matters here because many forms of dogmatic faith make specific claims about origins and timescales—such as a young Earth only a few thousand years old—that are very hard to reconcile with the geological record.
2. Cosmos—the original series with Carl Sagan (1980), and the modern reboot with Neil deGrasse Tyson (Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey)—is a beautiful introduction to astronomy and to the history of scientific discovery. The central lesson isn’t that “science has all the answers.” It’s that science has developed methods for correcting itself, revising its claims when new evidence arrives, and building an increasingly coherent picture of nature—methods that look very different from dogma.
3. Alice Roberts’ 2009 documentary The Incredible Human Journey is a vivid, evidence-focused account of human origins and migration. It tells the story of humans emerging in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then spreading across the world over long stretches of time. It’s “hands on” in the best way: bones, artifacts, genetics, geography—real evidence you can actually reason about. A similar more recent documentary, produced in 2025, is Human, a five-part series hosted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi; it argues that a defining feature of humanity is the capacity for communicating abstract thought, and it invites reflection on how symbolic practices—including religion and sacrifice—became important elements in the development of human culture.
4. The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has made accessible historical work available in lecture/documentary form, especially in his series The Story of Europe, beginning with “Origins and Identity.” Some of this can be found on YouTube. I recommend serious history partly because it complicates the tidier stories that religious apologetics sometimes tell. Every major religion has sometimes been entangled with education, social organization, and cultural development. But history also forces us to look directly at atrocities, wars, persecutions, and massacres carried out under religious banners—including conflicts between rival branches of the same religion.
5. PBS’s Evolution (2001), narrated by Liam Neeson, is a solid place to begin learning about evolutionary science. This documentary is dated now in production style, and much of evolutionary biology has advanced dramatically since 2001—especially with the explosion of genetic evidence. But it still introduces the central logic clearly, and it’s hard to overstate how overwhelmingly strong the evidence is. Understanding evolution does not have to “dampen morale” any more than understanding that the earth revolves around the sun. It’s simply a lucid way of seeing how biological systems actually work.
A very good follow-up here is PBS’s Your Inner Fish (2014), based on Neil Shubin’s work. It is especially good because it links fossils, embryology, genetics, and the odd quirks of human anatomy in a vivid, understandable way. The basic theme is that many parts of the human body—our limbs, necks, lungs, and even aspects of our hands—make much more sense when you see them as products of deep evolutionary history rather than as pristine design.
A small rhetorical critique, though: documentaries sometimes lapse into personification—phrases like “nature wants” or “evolution tinkers.” This is just figurative language, but it can confuse a literal-minded viewer into imagining a conscious agent. Evolution is not a being; it is a process. Nature doesn’t “decide.” Things happen because systems have certain constraints, causal mechanisms, and regularities—and those regularities can be studied.
6. Documentaries such as Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking (2010) are an accessible entry point into questions about the origins and fate of the universe. If you’re drawn in, it becomes worth learning at least the basic conceptual outlines of cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics—not to become a physicist, but to appreciate what modern science has learned about time, matter, and causation.
This list is not meant to “replace” religion with documentaries. It’s meant to give readers a way to encounter the natural world and human history directly—through disciplines that are constrained by evidence, and that openly correct themselves when they’re wrong. If my broader argument is that dogma cannot bear close scrutiny, then the honest next step is to offer people good places to do that scrutiny.
References
Al-Shamahi, E. (Host). (2025). Human [TV series]. BBC Studios; PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/human
A five-part science series for BBC Two, produced by the BBC Studios Science Unit in co-production with PBS and broadcast in the United States within the NOVA strand. It traces the story of Homo sapiensfrom their African origins—one of at least seven human species then alive—using new fossil evidence and DNA sequencing. It is useful here because it treats symbolic thought, cooperation, and belief as evolved features of the human story rather than as gifts from outside it.
Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2006). Planet Earth [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(2006_TV_series)
Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2016). Planet Earth II [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_II
Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2023). Planet Earth III [TV series]. BBC Studios Natural History Unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_III
The landmark BBC trilogy narrated by David Attenborough: the original (Planet Earth, eleven episodes, 2006), the six-part Planet Earth II (2016), and the eight-part Planet Earth III (2023). Beyond their visual achievement, the series increasingly foreground predation, scarcity, and the scale of human ecological damage—the darker material this chapter draws on.
Clark, C. (Host). (2017). The story of Europe [TV series]. ZDF. https://www.zdf-studios.com/en/program-catalog/international/unscripted/history-biographies/story-europe
A six-part documentary series presented by Christopher Clark, professor of modern European history at Cambridge, taking one aspect of Europe’s development in each episode—origins and identity, beliefs and ideas, ambitions and conquests, and so on. A ZDF production with later English-language release, it supports the point that serious history resists tidy origin narratives, religious ones included.
Fothergill, A., Hughes, J., & Scholey, K. (Directors). (2020). David Attenborough: A life on our planet [Film]. Silverback Films; Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
A 2020 feature documentary narrated by David Attenborough and released on Netflix, framed as his “witness statement” on the state of the planet and humanity’s impact on nature. The most personal and elegiac of the Attenborough films, and the one that most directly confronts biodiversity loss.
Hawking, S. (Writer & Host). (2010). Into the universe with Stephen Hawking [TV series]. Darlow Smithson Productions. https://www.discovery.com/shows/into-the-universe-with-stephen-hawking
A three-episode 2010 series written by Stephen Hawking, made for the Discovery Channel, with voice-over narration in character as Hawking by the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Its parts cover the possibility of alien life, time travel, and the life cycle of the universe. An accessible entry to cosmology, though the first two episodes lean speculative and the third is the more rigorous primer.
Hutton, R. (Executive Producer). (2001). Evolution [TV series]. WGBH/NOVA; Clear Blue Sky Productions. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/
A seven-part series produced for public television by the WGBH/NOVA Science Unit and Clear Blue Sky Productions, narrated by Liam Neeson. Dated in production style and predating two decades of genetic evidence, it nonetheless introduces the central logic clearly. Its final episode, “What About God?”, engages religious responses to evolution directly.
Roberts, A. (Host). (2009). The incredible human journey [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Human_Journey
A five-episode BBC Two series presented by Alice Roberts, based on her book of the same name. It follows the spread of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and across the globe, built from bones, artifacts, genetics, and geography—evidence a viewer can reason about directly.
Sagan, C. (Host). (1980). Cosmos: A personal voyage [TV series]. Public Broadcasting Service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage
The original thirteen-part 1980 series presented by Carl Sagan on PBS, co-created with Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, and widely regarded as a milestone for scientific documentaries. It is the model for this chapter’s better instinct: persuasion by wonder rather than confrontation.
Shubin, N. (Host). (2014). Your inner fish [TV series]. Tangled Bank Studios; PBS. https://www.pbs.org/show/your-inner-fish-program
A three-part PBS series hosted by the paleobiologist Neil Shubin, based on his 2008 book. It links fossils, embryos, and genes to show how the human body is the legacy of ancient fish, reptiles, and primates—the clearest popular treatment of why our anatomy makes sense as deep history rather than design.
Stewart, I. (Host). (2007). Earth: The power of the planet [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth:_The_Power_of_the_Planet
A five-part BBC Two series presented by the geologist Iain Stewart, broadcast in the United States the following year on the National Geographic Channel under the title Earth: The Biography. An enjoyable route into deep time and the forces—volcanism, atmosphere, ice, oceans—that shaped the planet.
Tyson, N. deG. (Host). (2014). Cosmos: A spacetime odyssey [TV series]. Fox; National Geographic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey
A thirteen-part 2014 follow-up to Sagan’s series, presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson and written by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter. Its recurring theme—that science’s distinguishing feature is its capacity for self-correction—maps directly onto this chapter’s contrast between method and dogma.
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