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At his home, among the modular sofas, tribal masks, plaster skulls, and three huge, painted animals from an old fairground ride, Dawkins is smiling and persuasive, his arguments clipped and accurate, no breath wasted. He is no elbow-patched, tweedy academic; his spotted socks and shoes are rather cutting edge, and he looks much younger than his 67 years. By contrast, on television he becomes almost a messianic teacher, his statements framed in the language of his true religion – science. At times, in the winds of Chesil Beach unearthing fossils, his glasses glinting, he suddenly has the choleric look of a 19th-century vicar; almost Trollopian.

Dawkins has long been nicknamed “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, a reference to the Victorian biologist T.H. Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for advocating natural selection and sensationally debated the cause, in 1860, against the Bishop of Oxford.

That was then and this is now, yet what has changed? “In a Gallup poll 44 per cent of the American people said that they believe the world is less than 10,000 years old,” Dawkins says. “It’s a massive error. I’ve likened it to believing that the width of America from New York to San Francisco is 7.8 yards – that’s the equivalent error if you scale it up to the true age of the Earth, which is something like 4.6 billion years.”

For Dawkins, there is a tree of life; not the one featuring Adam and Eve, but the one tantalisingly sketched by Darwin with the two words “I think” written above, showing how different species branch slowly off from each other over millions of years, until fish are on one branch, and apes on the opposite. If creationism falls, so, logically for Dawkins, does the rest of religion piled upon it.

The life of Darwin

It has been said with truth that we must go back to Newton before we meet with Darwin's peer

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“There is something very, very odd about American fundamentalism, and it’s spreading to this country. I am frequently hearing of science teachers who have problems teaching evolution, mostly to Muslim students.” At this point, Dawkins lapses into a “let’s-not-go-there” silence. In The God Delusion, he mostly mauls Christianity. “I said something about Islam, but not as much. I regarded the book as attacking all religion, especially the three monotheistic religions – Islam, Judaism and Christianity. There’s no particular emphasis on any of them; I know more about Christianity, so I emphasised it.”

He claims the television film is not about Christianity but Darwinism, and that he tried to steer clear of religion, which he covered in an earlier two-part series for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil?. There is much about Darwin’s five-year journey on HMS Beagle and about the Galapagos Islands, and there are scenes shot in Kenya, where Dawkins was born in 1941. The savannah scenes amply demonstrate the survival of the fittest, and the suffering, starving, struggling and death of the natural world. There is also an oddly touching moment when Dawkins holds specimens of racing pigeons that Darwin used to study the domestic breeding of animals. The label on each bird is handwritten by the great man. How did Dawkins feel, holding these artefacts? “Quite tearful, really… It is sort of moving to see his own handwriting on these labels he must have handled and examined many times.”

Again he lapses into silence, but I now know to sit out these Pinteresque moments rather than interrupt – while most interviewees are floundering, Dawkins is thinking. “There’s a very important misunderstanding of the relationship between Hitler and Darwin, which is relevant to this,” he resumes. “A lot of people think that Hitler sort of was a Darwinian, which he absolutely wasn’t. What Hitler did was to take the principle of domestic breeding of animals and apply it to humans. What Darwin did was to take the principle of the domestic breeding of animals and apply it to nature. It’s all done by nature, by who as a matter of fact survives.”

In 2006 Dawkins used his book royalties – and some donations from Silicon Valley – to set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, a charity on both sides of the Atlantic that supports the teaching of science and evolution. His own website is labelled “a clear-thinking oasis”. It contains articles, a chatroom, an online shop that sells “RDF” mugs for $10, and “A-for-Atheist” T-shirts for $20. There’s even a hoodie.

Although Dawkins is facing mandatory retirement from his chair at Oxford University, he will remain active on the web and through his writing, lecturing (at the Edinburgh Book Festival next) and television programmes. His recent tours of America, speaking alongside co-thinkers such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, have met with standing ovations from packed audiences. “I think that there is something happening in America. I think it is revulsion against Bush, and revulsion against militant Islam,” Dawkins says.

He is also a member of the Brights, a group who out themselves as atheists. But he is not too keen on the name. “The word Brights gets a lot of ridicule. A lot of Americans think it’s arrogant, that it’s saying non-religious people are cleverer than religious people. On average they probably are, but you’re not allowed to say that.” He grins.

Television has proved a powerful part of his arsenal. When he was first asked to present a Horizon programme based on The Selfish Gene, he refused. “I was too shy.” They found another presenter. But Dawkins does have one of those early posh BBC accents, and his slightly geeky enthusiasm and erudition works on screen. “Yes, I do quite enjoy doing it now. I don’t like speaking rehearsed lines to camera – and it’s quite trying when a plane goes over and we have to do a retake. I like it when it’s spontaneous and natural.”

I tell him it’s a relief to learn something from the television in these dark times, especially when he shares a channel with Big Brother, surely the ultimate cultural meme of the moment. (A meme is an idea that replicates across society, the cultural equivalent of a gene, and another one of Dawkins’s inventions.)

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