I am thoroughly enjoying the Life series on Discovery Channel. I’ve set my TV to record them all, and all are excellent. My wife and I watch them half hour at a time during the week. Too much goes by not to stop and talk about it half way through. I laughed last night as I watched the male Darwin’s beetle that plays “King of the Mountain,” climbing 80 feet up a tree, tossing off other would-be suitors in rout, until he reaches the prize at the top, only to toss her off the tree after mating.
There is a frustrating part about the series, though I’ve gotten use to it: I’ve gotten used to it in almost every nature show, but in this series it is particularly obvious. Each show begins in the first few sentences of narrative with some statement about how all this marvelously evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and each show ends in the last few sentences with the same patronage to evolutionary theory. I suppose these bookends ensure the image of intellectually political correctness, even though the word “evolution” seldom appears between the two, and is never used to explain anything. Like where the narrator mentions how frogs have survived hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Translated that means that no matter where you look in the fossil record, frogs are frogs. There is no evidence that they have ever evolved from or to anything.
The most revealing evidence of the problem is that the series consistently personifies with such phrases as “nature has developed…” or even “plants have learned to..”
This occurs because the only way to rationally describe what is there without giving credit to a designer is to say it as if the organism or the environment should take credit for what was obviously not an accident. Personification sounds as if thought were involved without admitting it. This, too, is contrary to Darwin’s theory, but that’s OK. It doesn’t reach the level of blasphemy that attribution to a designer would hit. Even if personification is the only alternative for a semi-rational statement, it’s better than admitting the need for a Person.

This entry was posted on April 25, 2010 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Science and faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.