Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

No subject stirs up more fear and opposition among a lot of conservative and fundamentalist Christians than science and faith. And nothing stirred up passions, at least in recent years, quite like the famous Dover (PA) court case regarding the school board's mandate to teach Intelligent Design (ID) alongside of evolution. In 2004 the school board ordered teachers of science to read a statement to their high school biology students about an ID alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.

For those who do not know the term Intelligent Design (ID) is the argument that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and thus there must be an intelligent agent behind the forces of nature. In Dover a textbook was donated to the school district, a book that taught ID. This prompted the teachers to sue the school board. The town was deeply and bitterly divided and the rage and emotional tempest reached a boiling point that finally impacted people and school boards all across the nation. The court case played itself out in a place where there was no jury. A lone judge, who was appointed by President Bush and was a man with a conservative judicial philosophy, heard the arguments and wrote the ruling.

The celebrated case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District produced arguments advanced by expert lawyers, scientists and witnesses for both sides in the debate. Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is the television program that just aired on Public Broadcast (PBS), and is now available on DVD. (The link in the previous sentence will take you to the site where the entire presentation is discussed and argued.) This documentary, in my estimation, is both riveting and well done. …