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It is a triumph, however, for those whose mission in life is to get rid of a designer. Darwin became a bitter antagonist of Christianity. "He didn't desire to cast disparagement on anyone's religious convictions," Gould says here. "He regarded it as a private matter." But in his autobiography Darwin wrote that Christianity, if true, was a "damnable doctrine," because it consigned his nonbelieving father and grandfather to the flames.

Ken Miller of Brown University—biologist, good Darwinian, and author of Finding Darwin's God—is shown attending Mass, receiving communion and preaching Darwinism. He is one of the talking heads for the PBS series, which is eager to reassure us that "belief in evolution does not challenge religious beliefs." Religion and science "can coexist side by side," an internal PBS memo on the series says. "But they speak to entirely different questions: one to the How?, the other to the Why?"

This is misleading, surely. If design can occur "from the bottom up," as Dennett says here—and of course evolution as a blind, mechanical process is intended to demonstrate just that—then we can understand why evolution is "unsettling" or "disturbing." Reassuring us that the blind evolution of all life can coexist with a designer strikes me as an attempt to pacify religious folk. In his 1996 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett more provocatively said that Darwinism was a "universal acid," eating through "just about every traditional concept," and leaving in its wake "a revolutionized worldview."

If Darwinism is true, this is correct, surely. What need is there for a designer if molecules in motion can do the designing on their own? If the answer to the "how" question is "by a blind mechanical process," the "why" question becomes meaningless. Dennett understands this, but the PBS producers evidently wanted something more fuzzy. Nothing so unsettling as his "universal acid" comment is included.

The important question is whether Darwinism is true, not whether it can coexist with other worldviews. The key defect of the series—and this is where it resembles propaganda—is that no scientific doubts are raised at all. A smokescreen of DNA talk, fossils, microscopes, and Indiana Jones specimen-hunters in the field masks the truth that virtually no scientific evidence for evolution exists. Yet those who appear on the screen either treat it as uncontroversially true or, if they are disbelievers, are isolated in the disreputable camp of fundamentalism. Ken Ham's followers sing their arguments—with guitars. Those who criticize evolution from a scientific perspective are not included. The PBS memo dismisses the Intelligent Design movement, which includes many scientists, as "a belief system, not a field of scientific inquiry."

In the final episode ("What About God?") we are shown students confronting "troubling questions." Most of these students attend Wheaton College, which is "committed to exposing its students to the discoveries of science," we are told. Some of these students evidently feel "threatened" when they "confront ways of thinking without precedent in the world from which they came."

We are reminded, often, that religion is okay, as long as it stays in its place, but that place is not the science classroom. What this series demonstrates, however, is that the students studying evolution are being indoctrinated every bit as much as they were at home. One authoritarian system is being replaced by another. Evolutionist dogma is clothed in the terminology of science but lacks its substance. Science, of course, is not supposed to be authoritarian. It is about repeatable experiments and falsifiable theories, and skepticism is of its essence. But when we look at these reconstructed life histories (consisting of guesses), these omnipresent genes (unobserved), and the deus ex machina of natural selection (said to "favor" whatever outcome is observed), we realize that every conceivable outcome in nature is "explained" in a way that sounds scientific but is in fact vacuous.

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September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11