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Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

PBS Airdate: November 13,

NARRATOR: Dover, Pennsylvania: like much of the United States, Dover has become a town divided.

ALAN BONSELL (Dover School Board Member) : I personally don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.

ROBERT ESHBACH (Dover Science Teacher) : Saying that you don't believe in evolution is almost saying, for us, well, "We don't believe that the Civil War ever took place in the United States."

NARRATOR: Dover is split between those who accept Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and those who reject it. And that rift between science and scripture nearly destroyed the community.

Signs of trouble first appeared after a Dover High School student painted a mural showing the evolution of humans from ape-like ancestors.

BERTHA SPAHR (Dover Science Teacher) : It was a lovely piece of artwork, very well done artistically, and it did not offend me in any way.

NARRATOR: But some in Dover were offended by the idea that humans and apes are related, and that mural was removed from the classroom and destroyed.

Flames soon spread to the local school board. Angry that only Darwin's theory of evolution was being taught, the board required students hear about a controversial idea, at odds with Darwin, called "intelligent design."

BILL BUCKINGHAM (Dover School Board Member) : To just talk about Darwin to the exclusion of anything else perpetrates a fraud.

NARRATOR: But many say intelligent design is the fraud.

KENNETH R. MILLER (Brown University) : Intelligent design is a science stopper.

KEVIN PADIAN (University of California, Berkeley) : It makes people stupid.

NARRATOR: Eleven Dover residents sued their school board to keep intelligent design out of the classroom. And almost overnight, Dover was catapulted to the front pages of the nation's newspapers and the front lines in the war on evolution.

EUGENIE C. SCOTT (National Center for Science Education) : Trials tear communities apart. They set neighbor against neighbor. Nobody wants to do this; you do it when you have to.

NARRATOR: With Dover split down the middle, a federal court would decide if intelligent design is legitimate science or religion in disguise. And the verdict would have consequences that reach far beyond the classrooms of Dover.

BARBARA FORREST (Southeastern Louisiana University) : It's about religion, politics and power.

NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial .

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NARRATOR: In October, , a war broke out in the small town of Dover, Pennsylvania.

PETER JENNINGS ( ABC NEWSCAST ) : Today, the teachers in a rural Pennsylvania town became the first in the country required to tell students that evolution is not the only theory.

NARRATOR: It started when the Dover Area School Board passed a policy requiring that its high school science classes include a controversial subject called intelligent design.

Proponents of intelligent design claim that many features of living organisms are too complex to have evolved entirely through the natural process of evolution, as Charles Darwin proposed. Instead, they claim, some aspects of those organisms must have been created, fully-formed, by a so-called "intelligent designer." And advocates contend intelligent design is a bold, new scientific theory, with the power to overthrow the theory of evolution.

ROBERT MUISE (Thomas More Law Center) : It's scientists debating science based on the evidence–not any religious text or authority–and it's clearly properly the subject of a science class.

STEVE FULLER (University of Warwick) : It's, in fact, opening the path of inquiry to new ways of thinking about things.

PHILLIP JOHNSON (University of California, Berkeley School of Law) : If evolution by natural selection is a scientific doctrine, then a critique of that doctrine is a legitimate part of science as well.

NARRATOR: The Dover school board demanded that science teachers read their students a one minute statement claiming that gaps in the theory of evolution exist, and putting forward intelligent design as an alternative. The statement also directed students to an intelligent design textbook called Of Pandas and People that would be made available.

But many Dover residents and an overwhelming number of scientists throughout the country were outraged. They say intelligent design is nothing but religion in disguise, the latest front in the war on evolution.

EUGENIE C. SCOTT: The goal of intelligent design is to try to re-Christianize American society.

KEVIN PADIAN: Intelligent design is not, anywhere, a scientific concept. It's not a field of science. It's not being actively researched by anyone.

KEN MILLER: It's a violation of everything we mean and everything we understand by "science."

NARRATOR: The stage was set for a battle that would pit friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: It was like we shot somebody's dog. I mean, there was a blowup like you couldn't believe.

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES, III (U.S. District Judge) : It was like a civil war within the community, there's no question.

NARRATOR: Before it was over, this battle would land the school board in federal court.

No cameras were allowed in the courtroom, so to bring this historic showdown between evolution and intelligent design to light, NOVA has dramatized key scenes from court transcripts.

It was a six-week trial in which modern biology was Exhibit A, and hanging in the balance was not just the Dover biology curriculum. The future of science education in America, the separation of church and state, and the very nature of scientific inquiry were all on trial.

In Dover, Pennsylvania, the debate over religion and evolution has long been personal.

BERTHA SPAHR: We live in a community that has a great many fundamentalist churches.

RAY MUMMERT (Dover Pastor) : I've never appreciated the fact that my children are being taught to believe in evolution as opposed to creationism.

MALINDA FORREY: "In the beginning, God created" To me, that's all I need to know.

NARRATOR: Located in the southeastern part of the state, about 20 miles from the capital, it's a quiet, rural place, home to about 20, people, more than a dozen churches, and one high school.

One of the first people in Dover to sense that trouble was brewing was Bertha Spahr. She had been teaching science at Dover High School for almost 40 years. In the spring of , she received some disturbing news from the school district's assistant superintendent.

BERTHA SPAHR: He actually came to my classroom one evening after school and said, "Bert, I think I need to give you a heads up. There is a school board member who is talking about equal timewhether it be 50 percentbut certainly equal time for creationism. And I think you need to be aware of this." That's when the red flag went up.

Another science teacher, Bryan Rehm, heard this too.

BRYAN REHM (Dover Science Teacher) : I had actually laughed at him because I thought that was the funniest thing I'd heard. I mean, creationism was ruled out in public education and science when I was in junior high school.

NARRATOR: When Bertha Spahr asked which school board member was interested in creationism being taught alongside evolution, she was told it was a local businessman named Alan Bonsell, who had recently joined the school board.

ALAN BONSELL: My family and I have been very blessed here, and I've had family that have lived in the Dover area for years. So it was something thatto give back. And I thought that I could help to try to make Dover, you know, the school district, a better place.

NARRATOR: When Bonsell had questions about how evolution was taught at Dover High School, Bertha Spahr and her biology teachers agreed to meet with him.

ALAN BONSELL: I had a meeting with some of the science teachers in the high school just to see what they taught or didn't teach in the high school science class.

JENNIFER MILLER (Dover Science Teacher) : And creationism really didn't come up at that meeting, it was more, "how do we teach evolution?" And he seemed very satisfied. He was okay with how we taught, and we thought everything was good, and we went on our merry way.

ROBERT ESHBACH: If you'll recall, he did enlighten us, at that time, that he did notwasn't his belief that evolution is how things came about.

JENNIFER MILLER: Right. That's correct.

ROBERT ESHBACH: He felt the Earth was not much more than 4, years old.

ALAN BONSELL: I personally don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. I'm a creationist. I make no bones about that.

NARRATOR: Creationists like Bonsell reject much of modern science in favor a literal reading of the Bible. They believe the Earth is less than 10, years old, and that God created everything fully-formed, including humans, in just six days.

Although most mainstream religions made peace with evolution decades ago, many creationists still see evolution as incompatible with their faith. And both creationism and evolution are no strangers to the court. Their legal battles stretch back to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of

Dick York As Bertram T. Cates/ Clip from Inherit the Wind ) : As I told you yesterday, Darwin's theory tells us that man evolved from a lower order of animals.

NARRATOR: In that case, a high school science teacher in Tennessee, named John Scopes, was accused of violating state law by teaching evolution.

(Frederic March as Matthew Harrison Brady ): I hereby place you under arrest.

NARRATOR: Loosely portrayed in the classic film Inherit the Wind, the trial turned into a courtroom showdown between legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow

SPENCER TRACY As HENRY DRUMMOND Clip from Inherit the Wind ) : The defense wishes to place Dr. Keller on the stand so that he can explain to the gentlemen of the jury the exact meaning of the theory of evolution.

NARRATOR: and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

ELLIOT REED As PROSECUTER TOM DAVENPORT/ Clip from Inherit the Wind ) : If you had a son, Mr. Sillers, what would you think if that sweet child came home from school and told you that a godless teacher

SPENCER TRACY As HENRY DRUMMOND Clip from Inherit the Wind ) : Objection!

NARRATOR: Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, and slapped with a mere hundred-dollar fine. But the verdict would have a chilling effect on science education throughout the country for the next three decades.

EUGENIE C. SCOTT: After the Scopes trial, textbook publishers decided that evolution was just too controversial a subject, and so they just quietly removed it from the textbooks. And for most of that time, the textbook was the curriculum, and, so, if it wasn't in the textbook, it didn't get taught.

NARRATOR: The chilling effect of the Scopes trial did not thaw until the s. But as publishers slipped evolution back into their textbooks, creationists fought to teach their views in science class as well.

Over the next 30 years, the two sides battled it out in court. The fight culminated in , when the Supreme Court decided that teaching creationism in public school science classes violated the separation of church and state mandated by the constitution in the Establishment Clause, which prevents the government from promoting or prohibiting any form of religion. To this day, teaching creationism in public school science classes anywhere in the United States remains a violation of students' constitutional rights.

Another Dover school board member, Bill Buckingham, a retired policeman, was appointed by Alan Bonsell to head the curriculum committee. It was his job to review all requests for new textbooks.

The 9th grade biology teachers had asked for a widely used book, co-authored by biologists Ken Miller and Joe Levine. But Buckingham did not like what he saw.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: In looking at the biology book the teachers wanted, I noticed that it was laced with Darwinism. I think I listed somewhere between 12 and 15 instances where it talked about Darwin's theory of evolution. It wasn't on every page of the book, but, like, every couple of chapters, there was Darwin, in your face again. And it was to the exclusion of any other theory.

NARRATOR: And at a school board meeting in the summer of , Buckingham made it clear he wasn't comfortable approving that book. The school board put the purchase on hold.

So what was it about Charles Darwin's theory that Buckingham objected to?

Darwin published his theory of evolution in , in a book called On the Origin of Species , and it has been sparking controversy ever since. It was the culmination of work Darwin started more than two decades earlier, after sailing around the world on a ship called the Beagle.

On that expedition, Darwin collected thousands of plants and animals that were unlike any he had ever seen before. And when he returned home to England, he became particularly fascinated by the many different birds he had found on a remote chain of islands off the coast of South America called the Galapagos.

KENNETH R. MILLER: There was a bird that looked to him like a warbler, and another one that looked to him like a woodpecker, and another one that looked like a finch, and so forth. And he wasn't sure what these birds were. But they were all clearly adapted for very different ways of life. Some ate insects. Some, for example, picked up small seeds. Some could crush the large seeds of certain plants which were found on the Galapagos. So they had different appearances, different beaks, different styles of life

NARRATOR: When Darwin asked for help identifying these birds, he was in for a surprise.

KENNETH R. MILLER: He was floored. He was stunned to discover that the expert ornithologists in Great Britain told him, "They're all finches. That's not a woodpecker, it's a finch. That's not a warbler, it's a finch."

NARRATOR: But why, in this small chain of islands, had he found finches with such different characteristics?

Darwin reasoned: in nature, individual organisms compete for limited resources like food. If, for example, a bird is born with a slightly larger beak than the other members of the population, that might give it an advantage on an island where large seeds are more common.

Over many generations, birds with large beaks would be more likely to survive and reproduce, handing down this advantageous beak shape to greater numbers of offspring than those with smaller beaks.

Darwin called this process "natural selection," because the forces of nature, such as the environment of an individual island in the Galapagos, select those organisms best suited to that environment. And he believed that, over time, this could give rise to new species.

KENNETH R. MILLER: What Darwin pointed out was a general principle, which is easily observed in nature: species are not fixed, that with natural selection pushing or pulling or splitting, species can change over time.

NARRATOR: Darwin thought all the different kinds of plants and animals we see around us today, including humans, could have arisen by this process.

He called the gradual evolution of new species from old "descent with modification," and he pictured the relatedness of all living things as a great tree of life, with each twig a different species ultimately springing from a common ancestor.

NEIL SHUBIN (University of Chicago/The Field Museum) : As you follow the family tree farther and farther back, say, from our twig, which–we're just one twig on this vast tree–what you see our similarities with apes; and going further down, our similarities with other mammals; further down, our similarities with reptiles; further down, our similarities with amphibians, fish, all the way down to worms, and jellyfish and so forth. What you see is a continuity of life on the planet, because we're not exceptional in any great degree, we're just a twig on a giant evolutionary tree that includes everything.

NARRATOR: The common ancestry of all forms of life was one of Darwin's great insights. But he recognized disturbing implications in the idea that humans had evolved from ape-like ancestors.

KENNETH R. MILLER: In the eyes of a lot of people, once Charles Darwin had proposed that natural processes could have produced every species on this planet, including us, they felt that took God out of the picture.

NARRATOR: And about a century and a half later, many people in Dover, like the United States as a whole, agree. To this day, somewhere between a third and half the U.S. population does not accept evolution.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: I find it personally offensive, because I'm a Christian. I believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and that the Book of Genesis tells it like it is as to how we came into being. God didn't create monkey and then take man from a monkey. He created man.

NARRATOR: In Dover, hostility to the theory of evolution had already erupted in vandalism after a student at the high school painted a foot mural depicting the evolution of humans from ape-like ancestors. The mural was on display in a science classroom, when someone removed it from the school and burned it.

Now, as Bill Buckingham continued fighting the purchase of the biology book at school board meetings, the science teachers began to suspect that he had been involved.

BERTHA SPAHR: This idea of man and monkey came into the conversation, and I immediately remember saying to him "Does this have anything to do with that mural that disappeared?"

ROBERT ESHBACH: And that's when he made the remark that he gleefully watched it burn.

JENNIFER MILLER: Right, sort of under his breath, though we heard what he said.

NARRATOR: Though Buckingham denied any involvement in the incident, when he reportedly announced he was searching for a biology book that included evolution and creationism, the school board meeting erupted in chaos.

CHRISTY REHM (Dover English Teacher) : Typically, a school board meeting is a very dry thing, couple of people show up because they have a certain issue they want to discuss. But these meetings would be hundreds of people, and it would be hot, and people would be upset, and it was a zoo. It was just an absolute madhouse.

TAMMY KITZMILLER (Dover Parent) : Ludicrous, bizarrethere's many adjectives I could use. They were disrespectful to the public, disrespectful to the teachers. They didn't want to listen to anybody. They were just on their own agenda.

ALAN BONSELL: Sometimes in a democracy, and when you have nine different personalities together, and you have a controversial issue, in the heat of the moment, somebody might say something they wish, 10 minutes from now, they wouldn't have said.

NARRATOR: The controversy engulfing the school board caught the attention of local newspaper reporters, including Lauri Lebo, who grew up in the area.

LAURI LEBO (Journalist) : From the first time I heard school board members were talking about creationism, I thought this could become a big issue. I didn't realize how big, but I certainly knew I was intrigued by it.

NARRATOR: Lebo began reporting on the controversy. But her interest in the issue was not just professional, it was also personal. Lauri's father had been the owner of a local radio station, but the oldies format wasn't paying the bills, and the electric company was about to put him off the air.

LAURI LEBO: The next day a gentleman came in who belonged to a local churchwanted to lease programming on the radio station and offered to pay a decent sum of money. And overnight the radio station became Christian radio station. My father became born again.

NARRATOR: In her articles, Lebo would write about the Supreme Court ruling that would keep Buckingham from introducing any creationist text into biology class. In the meantime, Buckingham was in touch with two organizations known for questioning Darwin.

One was a public interest law firm in Michigan called the Thomas More Law Center. Headed by former public prosecutor Richard Thompson, famous for his efforts to convict assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, the firm bills itself as "the sword and shield for people of faith."

RICHARD THOMPSON (Thomas More Law Center) : Bill Buckingham contacted me as a private citizen, and also as someone who was concerned that the biology textbook presented only one side. And he thought there should be other alternative theories involved. And that's when I introduced him to the theory of intelligent design and indicated that I thought that that theory could be taught alongside the theory of evolution and pass constitutional muster.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: I asked, you know, if there were any reference books out there, and they gave me the title of the book Of Pandas and People .

NARRATOR: He also found a conservative think tank in Seattle, named the Discovery Institute, which calls itself "the nation's leading intelligent design proponent."

They sent Buckingham a DVD and other material on intelligent design. In these materials, Buckingham found a view that did not seem to conflict with his own. For example, according to the book Of Pandas and People, "Intelligent Design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact: fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, et cetera."

And in the DVD he got from the Discovery Institute, Buckingham found more support for intelligent design.

NARRATOR, DISCOVERY INSTITUTE DVD : One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin transformed science with his theory of natural selection. Today, that theory faces a formidable challenge. Intelligent design has sparked both discovery and intense debate over the origin of life on Earth. And, for a growing number of scientists, it represents a paradigm, an idea with the power to once again redefine the foundations of scientific thought.

NARRATOR: Both the DVD and book use the same example to illustrate intelligent design's central tenet, explained here by proponent Steve Fuller.

STEVE FULLER: One way to get into the concept of intelligent design is by imagining what it would be like to run across something like this on the beach: "John Loves Mary." I mean, this is the sort of design that's very unlikely just to have assembled itself just from sand blowing randomly over even a very long period of time. Rather, it shows a sign of some sort of intelligence that's behind it.

NARRATOR: And just as those words on the beach are clearly the product of an intelligent being, the claim is that some aspects of life itself must be the product of a designer.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: Intelligent design, in my way of thinking, states that life is too complex to happened at random, that there had to be a designer, something to shape how things went, so to speak. In the Book of Genesis, the designer would be God.

NARRATOR: But in the materials Buckingham received, God is never mentioned. The mysterious designer is called an "intelligent cause" or "intelligent agent."

Championed by a law professor named Phillip Johnson, intelligent design began to emerge in the s.

PHILLIP JOHNSON: This whole Darwinian story, it seems to me, has been very much oversold. Everybody is told that it's absolutely certain and certainly true. And because it's called science, it has been proved again and again by absolutely unquestionable procedures. But this is not true. It's an imaginative story that has been spun on the basis of very little evidence.

NARRATOR: An emeritus professor at the U.C. Berkeley law school, Johnson wrote a book called Darwin on Trial , in which he laid the groundwork for the intelligent design movement.

For years, he's been making the claim that evolution may produce small-scale changes–like the different finch beaks Darwin observed–but for humans to come about requires the intervention of some kind of intelligence.

PHILLIP JOHNSON: That is the basic intelligent design proposition: that the unintelligent causes, by themselves, can't do the whole job. An intelligent cause had to be involved.

NARRATOR: Armed with information on intelligent design, Bill Buckingham returned to the school board.

LAURI LEBO: He had been told that intelligent design was a good compromise between his religious beliefs, is what he told me. And Alan Bonsell told me that, too–and what the courts will allow. They were both very clear on that, that this is their compromise even though they believe in creationism. This would, this would, sort of, bridge the gap for them.

NARRATOR: But the science teachers were not convinced.

BRYAN REHM: The first reading of it, "an intelligent agent created life." That's creationism. It's Biblical creationism, you know? All I have to do is take out "intelligent agent" and put in "God," and, voila! We have the story of Genesis. So there is no question in my mind what intelligent design was.

NARRATOR: Now Buckingham was ready to take a stand.

ROBERT ESHBACH: He came up with the ultimatum that the only way that they would vote for the textbooks was that we adopted the book Of Pandas and People as a sister or companion textbook.

NARRATOR: But when he put it before the school board, he came up two votes short. The board chose to purchase only the standard biology book co-authored by Ken Miller. Pandas was shelved.

That might have been the end of the story, but a few weeks later, 60 copies of Pandas turned up in Bertha's Spahr's department, a gift to the school from an anonymous donor.

Then, without consulting the teachers, members of Buckingham's curriculum committee drafted the outlines of what became a bold new policy for the science department. It was brought before the full school board for a vote, and after a heated debate, it passed, six to three.

In its final form, the policy mandated that all students in ninth grade biology be read a one minute statement telling them that Darwin's theory is not a fact and that it contains gaps. Suggesting intelligent design as an alternative, it directed students to the 60 copies of Pandas that would be available as a reference.

The school board members who voted against Buckingham's proposal resigned in protest.

Tammy Kitzmiller is the mother of a 9th grade student who would be read the one minute statement at Dover High. She called the A.C.L.U. to see what could be done.

TAMMY KITZMILLER: I just didn't agree with what they were doing. I did not like how they were trying to mix religion and science.

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK (American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania) : We had parents, we had students, we had teachers, all calling us and saying "Hey, there's a problem here. Can you help us?" And we said, "Sure, we'll help you."

NARRATOR: On December 14, , 11 parents of Dover school students, including Tammy Kitzmiller and Bryan and Christy Rehm, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Pennsylvania, alleging the Dover school board was violating their constitutional rights by introducing religion into science class. They would be represented by the A.C.L.U., which had joined forces with the organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton.

STEPHEN HARVEY (Pepper Hamilton, LLP) : Eric said at the time, "This is the case I been waiting for my entire career."

NARRATOR: The School Board would be represented by the Thomas More Law Center, the firm that had told Bill Buckingham about the Pandas book.

A court date was set. And as depositions were being taken, the science teachers took a stand of their own against reading the intelligent design statement.

JENNIFER MILLER: We stepped up and said, "We're not going to read it."

BERTHA SPAHR: We met together and agreed that as a unit we would stand together.

ROBERT ESHBACH: I mean, I have principles and standards of my own, and there was no way that I was going to go into a science classroom of mine and make a statement about this so-called intelligent design, knowing full well that it was not science.

NARRATOR: They notified the board of their refusal in a memo that proclaimed, "Intelligent design is not science. Intelligent design is not biology. Intelligent design is not an accepted scientific theory."

With the teachers refusing to read the one minute statement, Dover's assistant superintendent walked into ninth grade biology class on January 18, and read:

Assistant Superintendent, Dover, Pennsylvania School District : The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's theory of evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.

NARRATOR: On September 26, , almost exactly a year after the school board devised the intelligent design policy, six weeks of testimony in the case of Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School District got underway in federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES, III (Dramatization) : Good morning to all of you. Are you prepared to open?

ERIC ROTHSCHILD (Pepper Hamilton, LLP/Dramatization) : Yes, I am.

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES, III (Dramatization) : You may do so.

ERIC ROTHSCHILD (Dramatization) : My co-counsel and I represent 11 parents who are challenging the Dover Area School District's change to its biology curriculum.

Dover School Board members announced their interest in the topic of evolution in starkly religious terms. They looked for a book that could provide a religious alternative to evolution, and they found one here in Of Pandas and People .

They did everything you would do if you wanted to incorporate a religious topic in a science class and cared nothing about its scientific validity.

PATRICK T. GILLEN (Thomas More Law Center/Dramatization) : Patrick Gillen, your Honor, on behalf of the defendants in this action, the Dover Area School District and its board of directors. The board believed that intelligent design was not creationism. They knew what that was, the Book of Genesis. They believed it was a legitimate educational goal to make students aware of the existence of another scientific theory.

Defendants' experts will show this Court that intelligent design theory is science, it is not religion. This expert testimony will also demonstrate that making students aware of gaps and problems in evolutionary theory is good science education. It's good liberal education.

NARRATOR: By the time the trial started, challenges to the teaching of evolution had cropped up in dozens of other states. And intelligent design was attracting some heavy hitters.

Rick Santorum, then Pennsylvania senator, had commended the school district for its intelligent design policy. And President Bush had thrown his support behind intelligent design, saying, "Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about."

Now, the eyes of the nation were on Dover, the latest battleground in the war on evolution.

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK: I don't want to sound melodramatic, but I actually think very important things were at stake. One is the future of science education in this country.

STEPHEN HARVEY: If the school board can do this, what would prevent them from doing more things like this in other classes? Presenting pseudo-science or pseudo-math or pseudo-history in promotion of one particular religious view? It's wrong.

PATRICK T. GILLEN: Does science education have to be so narrow, so technical, so deferential to the existing paradigm that we can't even introduce students to what may be the next great theory?

NARRATOR: Presiding over the case would be Judge John E. Jones, III.

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES, III: I could never have imagined, in August of , when I took my seat, that I would be presiding over a case that would attract, literally, worldwide attention.

NARRATOR: Jones had been recommended for his position on the bench by Senator Santorum and appointed by George W. Bush. Before becoming a judge, Jones was head of Pennsylvania's liquor control board, where he banned the sale of Bad Frog beer because it showed a cartoon frog making an offensive gesture.

ERIC ROTHSCHILD: Initially, you find out you've got a judge that's been appointed by President Bush, who has come out himself in favor of intelligent design, and that makes you a little nervous.

NARRATOR: Members of the defense, however, were optimistic about their chances in Jones's courtroom.

STEVE FULLER: What the Dover school board had donethey weren't requiring that intelligent design be taught, and they weren't removing evolution from the classroom. So, it seemed to me this was pretty modest. And so I did think it had a pretty good chance, if it was presented properly, of being accepted.

RICHARD THOMPSON: We didn't have to show that, you know, one theory was better than the other, merely that it was a credible theory, and that the students would gain something by understanding the controversy surrounding the theory of evolution and the origin of species.

NARRATOR: The parents who opposed intelligent design, or plaintiffs, had launched the lawsuit, so the burden of proof was on them.

And because the parents were asking for the teaching of intelligent design to be halted, an order that only a judge can render, there would be no jury. Instead, the jury box was packed with reporters and writers from around the globe, including one with a surprising connection to the case.

MATTHEW CHAPMAN (Charles Darwin's Great-Great-Grandson) : I think of myself as being a sort of living disproof of evolution, because my great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin, who obviously wrote one of the most important books of the last 2, years, and I'm a screenwriter. This is not evolution in the right direction.

NARRATOR: To win, the plaintiffs' lawyers would have to show the judge that the Dover School Board's one minute statement promoted religion or that board members had religious motivation.

In addition, both sides asked the judge to rule on a fundamental question: "Is intelligent design science or not?"

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK: In order to show that intelligent design is not science we had to talk about, well, "What is science?"

NARRATOR: For help, the plaintiffs turned to researcher Nick Matzke and his colleagues at an organization called the National Center for Science Education, which tracks challenges to evolution in public schools.

NICK MATZKE (National Center for Science Education) : The last time any lawyer took biology was probably in 9th grade. And I spent months and months on e-mail, at meetings, explaining science, explaining evolution to the lawyers.

NARRATOR: To make their case before a judge who had no particular scientific training, the lawyers for the parents assembled a team of expert witnesses.

And as their first witness they called biologist Ken Miller, co-author of the textbook that Bill Buckingham had called "laced with Darwinism."

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK (Dramatization) : Dr. Miller, what is evolution?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : Most biologists would describe evolution as "the process of change over time that characterizes the natural history of life on this planet."

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK (Dramatization) : And what was Darwin's contribution to evolution?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : Darwin pointed out there's a struggle for existence, whether we like to admit it or not. He realized that those organisms that had the characteristics that suited them best in that struggle, those were the ones that would hand those characteristics down to the next generation, and that, therefore, the average characteristics of a population could change in one direction or another and they could change quite dramatically. And that's the essential idea of natural selection.

NARRATOR: Starting with Ken Miller, the plaintiffs walked Judge Jones through the conflict at the heart of this case.

Miller testified how Darwin's theory pictures the history of life as a tree, with species gradually evolving into others over millions of years, producing new branches and twigs, a process that gives rise to all the variety of life, from bacteria to Darwin's finches to ourselves.

But intelligent design takes a different view, as the movement's own literature shows. Intelligent design teaches a history of life in which organisms appear abruptly, are unrelated, and linked only by their designer.

NICK MATZKE: What's really being advocated is the idea that organisms poofed into existence through the miraculous act of an intelligent designer, i.e., God. That's the view that intelligent design promotes.

NARRATOR: So how can scientists be so sure Darwin's tree accurately represents the history of life on Earth?

As it turned out, the latest in a large body of evidence to refute intelligent design and support evolution was coming to light just as this case was unfolding.

NEIL SHUBIN: I remember thinking to myself, when all this was going on, "Wait'll they get a look at this, because it's just so beautiful."

NARRATOR: Darwin believed that evidence for his idea of common ancestry would be unearthed in the form of transitional fossils. For example, if, over millions of years, fish gave rise to land animals, as evolutionary theory predicts, we should find fossils of extinct creatures that are part fish and part land animal.

In , paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues set out to find just such a creature.

NEIL SHUBIN: What evolution enables us to do is to make specific predictions about what we should find in the fossil record. The prediction in this case is clear-cut. That is, if we go to rocks of the right age, and the rocks of the right type, we should find transitions between two great forms of life, between fish and amphibian.

NARRATOR: Many scientists think life began in the water, at least three and a half billion years ago. More recently, about million years ago, the tree of life branched as primitive fish evolved into amphibians, such as today's frogs and salamanders, which live part of their lives on land.

Armed with this prediction, Shubin and his colleagues organized an expedition to one of the most desolate places on Earth, the Canadian Arctic, about miles from the North Pole, where rocks of just the right age are exposed. Here, they hoped to fill a gap in the branch of the evolutionary tree that leads from primitive fish to animals with four limbs, or "tetrapods," by finding a fossil of an animal that shared characteristics of both.

But after three summers of digging through hundreds of tons of rock in this harsh environment, they had found little of interest. They returned the next year for one last try.

NEIL SHUBIN: Money was running out. This was it. We were told this was our last year up there. And then, in , in the third day of the season, a colleague of mine was removing rock and discovered a little snout sticking out the side of the cliff, just exactly like this. And he removed more rock and more rock and more rock, and it became clear this was a snout of a flat-headed animal. And that's when we knew. Flat-headed animal at million years old? This is going to be something interesting.

NARRATOR: They called it Tiktaalik, which means "large, fresh water fish," in the language of the local Inuit people. And it's one of the most vivid transitional fossils ever discovered, showing how land animals evolved from primitive fish.

NEIL SHUBIN: Over here you have a fish of about million years old. And, just like any good fish, it has scales on its back and fins. You compare that to an amphibian, and you find a creature that doesn't have scales, and it's modified the fins to become limbs, arms and legs. And the head's very different. It has a flat head with eyes on top and a neck.

What we see when we look at the fossil record, at rocks of just the right age, is a creature like Tiktaalik. Just like a fish, it has scales on its back, and fins. You can see the fin webbing here. Yet when we look at the head, you see something very different. You see a very amphibian-like thing, with a flat head, with eyes on top. It gets even better when we take the fin apart. When we look inside the fin, as in this cast here, what you'll see is bones that compare to our shoulder, elbow, even parts of the wrist–bone for bone. So you have a fish, at just the right time in the history of life, that has characteristics of amphibians and primitive fish. It's a mix.

NARRATOR: And just as evolutionary theory predicts, Tiktaalik suggests a tree of life, with one species giving rise to another over millions of years.

The discovery of Tiktaalik was still being written up at the time of the trial, so it couldn't be used as evidence. But Shubin's colleague, paleontologist Kevin Padian, showed the judge examples of other fossils with transitional features that support Darwin's tree of life.

KEVIN PADIAN: My testimony in the trial was basically taking a day and showing the judge how we do our work and what the evidence is.

NARRATOR: How dinosaurs evolved into birds, as seen in creatures like Archaeopteryx which has a long tail and teeth like a dinosaur, but feathers just like a modern bird. How ancestors of modern reptiles evolved into creatures now extinct that share a common ancestor with mammals. And, how, surprisingly, whales evolved from large land animals that returned to the water.

KEVIN PADIAN: And where the Pandas book says we can't go from A to B, there are no fossils and we don't know how to study them, actually, we've gone from A to B and to C, D, E, F and G. We have the fossils; we have the transitional features; we have the ways of analyzing them with many different lines of evidence. And we're looking for the picture that accounts for the most lines of objective evidence.

NARRATOR: With each fossil, Padian refuted Pandas claim that different life forms appear suddenly, by showing how fossils of extinct organisms bridge the gaps between species, resulting in a picture of gradual evolution, just as Darwin proposed.

KEVIN PADIAN: The reporters in the courtroom were just amazed that we knew all this stuff. And how come they hadn't learned about this stuff before? And the reason is it's not in textbooks because the creationists fight so hard to keep it out. That's been a big influence.

ERIC ROTHSCHILD: The court took a break. And I remember the judge saying something like, you know, "biology class adjourned," you know, "for lunch." And he was, you know, smiling. And it was clear that we had the judge interested in science.

NARRATOR: Lawyers for the parents may have impressed the judge and reporters. But many in Dover wondered, "Why is evolution taught as fact if it's 'just a theory?'"

ALAN BONSELL: Maybe Darwinism is the prevalent theory out there today, but it is a theory. It isn't a law of science. It isn't, you know, a fact. It is a theory.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: We just wanted alternative views talked about, too. We weren't, we weren't saying, "Don't talk about Darwin." Talk about Darwin, it's a theory. But that's what it is, it's not Darwin's law, it's not Darwin's fact, it's Darwin's theory.

ROBERT ESHBACH: To say it's just a theory is really a bit insulting to science because in science, a theory holds more weight than just a fact does.

KEVIN PADIAN (Dramatization) : And here I think the term "theory" needs to be looked at the way scientists consider it. A theory is not just something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep. That's an idea. A theory, in science, means a large body of information that's withstood a lot of testing. It probably consists of a number of different hypotheses and many different lines of evidence. Gravitation is a theory that's unlikely to be falsified, even if we saw something fall up. It might make us wonder, but we'd try to figure out what was happening rather than immediately just dismiss gravitation.

KEVIN PADIAN: Facts are just the minutiae of science. By themselves, they can be right or wrong. But a theory is something that has been tested and tested over and over again, built on, revised. It continues to be reworked and revised.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Dr. Miller, would you agree that Darwin's theory of evolution is not an absolute truth?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : Well, I certainly would, for the very simple reason that no theory in science, no theory, is ever regarded as absolute truth. We don't regard atomic theory as truth. We don't regard the germ theory of disease as truth. We don't regard the theory of friction as truth. We regard all of these theories as well-supported, testable explanations that provide natural explanations for natural phenomena.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Should we regard Darwin's theory of evolution as tentative?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : We should regard all scientific explanations as being tentative, and that includes the theory of evolution.

NEIL SHUBIN: Science is about discovering the unknown, what we don't know. I don't focus on what we know as a scientist. I want to find new things that tell me about what I don't know.

NARRATOR: As the plaintiffs testified, that quest to investigate the unknown has led to the discovery of some of the strongest evidence for evolution.

Darwin was convinced that species evolve over time, through natural selection acting on inherited traits. But he had no idea how those traits arose or how they were passed from generation to generation.

When 20th century scientists discovered the role DNA plays in heredity, they founded a new science, called "genetics," that put Darwin's theory to the test.

Virtually every cell in every living thing contains chromosomes, which are made of densely packed strands of DNA that function as a blueprint of the individual organism's characteristics. During reproduction, chromosomes from each parent replicate and shuffle their parts to produce new chromosomes. Then, each parent passes chromosomes to offspring. But the process is imperfect. Along the way, DNA is subject to random mutations, or mistakes, giving each offspring its own unique blueprint. Sometimes this produces characteristics in offspring that are benign. Other times it produces harmful characteristics, like a misshapen wing. But occasionally, the process gives rise to a beneficial trait. For example, a butterfly whose coloration mimics another species of butterfly that tastes bad to birds.

About a hundred years after Darwin proposed that natural selection acts on new traits appearing in a population, genetics revealed the biological mechanism that gives rise to those traits in the first place.

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : And therefore you could say that when modern genetics came into being, everything in Darwin's theory was at risk, could have been overturned if it turned out to contradict the essential elements of evolutionary theory, but it didn't contradict them, it confirmed them in great detail.

NARRATOR: And, as Miller would testify, a genetics paper published less than a year before the trial had confirmed what has long been the most inflammatory part of Darwin's theory, the common ancestry of humans and apes.

That paper explored a curious discrepancy in our chromosomes. The cells of all great apes, like chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, contain 24 pairs of chromosomes. If humans share a common ancestor with apes, you'd expect us to have the same number. But surprisingly, human cells contain only 23 pairs.

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : The question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go? Well, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is that somewhere in the human genome, we ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes, so that our 24 pairstwo of them were pasted together to form just And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken. Next slide.

NARRATOR: To solve this riddle for the court, Miller would show how scientists discovered traces of our evolutionary past buried in the very structure of a chromosome carried by all humans.

Typically, on the ends of every chromosome, you should find special genetic markers, or sequences of DNA called "telomeres." And in their middles, you should find different genetic markers called "centromeres." But if a mutation occurred in the past, causing two pairs of chromosomes to fuse, we should find evidence in those genetic markers: telomeres not only at the ends of the new chromosome, but also at their middles, and not one, but two centromeres. Finding a structure like this in our chromosomes would explain why humans have one pair fewer than the great apes.

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : And if we can't find that, then evolution is in trouble. Next slide.

Lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. All of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.

So the case is closed in a most beautiful way. And that is the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead pipe evidence that you see here, in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and it has passed.

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK (Dramatization) : So modern genetics and molecular biology actually support evolutionary theory?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : They support it in great detail. And the closer we can get to looking at the details of the human genome, the more powerful the evidence has become.

NEIL SHUBIN: Darwin didn't even know about molecular biology and DNA, yet that's where some of the most profound evidence is being uncovered today. Think about that. That somebody in the s made predictions that are being confirmed in molecular biology labs today. That's a very profound statement of a very successful theory.

KENNETH R. MILLER: Not a single observation, not a single experimental result, has ever emerged in years that contradicts the general outlines of the theory of evolution. Any theory that can stand up to years of contentious testing is a pretty darn good theory, and that's what evolution is.

NARRATOR: And the deep understanding of evolution as proposed by Darwin has, with genetics, unlocked many of the secrets of life.

ROBERT PENNOCK (Michigan State University) : It's an explanatory framework within which all the rest of biology fits. It's something that we use in practical biological applications: medicine, agriculture, industry. When you're getting a flu vaccine–that really depended upon evolutionary knowledge. In many, many specific ways, evolution makes a practical difference. It's not just something that happened in the past, evolution's happening now.

NARRATOR: So if evolution has stood up to all this scrutiny, what about intelligent design? Does it play by the same rules?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : If you invoke a non-natural cause, a spirit force or something like that, in your research, I have no way to test it.

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK (Dramatization) : So supernatural causation is not considered part of science?

KENNETH R. MILLER (Dramatization) : Yeah. I hesitate to beg the patience of the Court with this, but being a Boston Red Sox fan, I can't resist it. One might say, for example, that the reason the Boston Red Sox were able to come back from three games down against the New York Yankees was because God was tired of George Steinbrenner and wanted to see the Red Sox win. In my part of the country, you'd be surprised how many people think that's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened last year. And you know what? It could be true, but it certainly wouldn't be science. It's not scientific, and it's certainly not something we can test.

EUGENIE C. SCOTT: The fundamental problem with intelligent design is that you can't use it to explain the natural world. It's essentially a negative argument. It says, "Evolution doesn't work, therefore the designer did it. Evolution doesn't work, therefore we win by default."

But when you ask them, "What does intelligent design tell you about nature? Does it tell you what the designer did? Does it tell you what the designer used to design something with? Does it tell you what purpose the designer had for designing something? Does it tell you when the designer did it? Why the designer did it?" It doesn't tell you anything like that. Basically, it's a negative argument. And you can't build a science on a negative argument.

NARRATOR: After three weeks of testimony on the nature of science, the evidence for evolution and the failings of intelligent design, the plaintiffs had presented their case.

MATTHEW CHAPMAN: To watch the whole thing, you got an education in what evolution was, where evolution stands as a theory now in the 21st century. If you concentrated, you would get sucked into this thing, and the day would go by. And you'd come out, and you'd think, "That was amazing, what I heard here. These eloquent people," you know, "with these incredible educations." And it was fantastic.

LAURI LEBO: The plaintiffs' attorneys had put on an amazing case. But there was this idea, especially among those who weren't sitting in the trial every day, that when the defense started, you know, then we'll see some pretty interesting stuff, too, on the other side.

NARRATOR: The question now was, "Could the defense prove that intelligent design is a scientific theory? What evidence could they muster to support this claim?"

While the battle in federal court heated up, the atmosphere in Dover had gone from divisive to dangerous. Tammy Kitzmiller, the lead plaintiff in the case, who had a daughter in ninth grade biology class at Dover High School, had been receiving hate mail since the start of the trial.

TAMMY KITZMILLER: One letter was pretty disturbing. I think this was the one with the passage thatthe last sentence especially: "Madeline Murray was found murdered for taking prayer and Bible reading out of schools, so watch out for a bullet." This was a letter that I made sure my lawyers got a copy of, and it was forwarded to the FBI.

ROBERT ESHBACH: Anywhere you turned we were getting attacked. I mean, the people in the community were attacking us in the newspapers, people in our own profession were attacking us saying, you know, "What are you guys doing in Dover? Why are you letting this happen?" People in the community were calling us atheists, which was a bit offensive to two of us in the department, because two of us happened to be sons and daughters of ministers.

BILL BUCKINGHAM: I fail to understand how teachers can call themselves Christians, go to church, talk about God, talk about Christ, and then go to chschool five days a week and talk about Darwin, and teach it as if it's fact, not a theory, but that's how it happened. I don't understand it. To me that's talking out of both sides of your mouth.

NARRATOR: Having ignited much of the controversy that resulted in the lawsuit, Bill Buckingham had made a surprise announcement. Citing poor health and struggles with Oxycontin as a result of surgery, he resigned from the school board and moved out of state.

A school board election was only months away, and now eight of the nine seats would be up for grabs, putting intelligent design on trial in the voting booth as well as the courtroom.

Dover science teacher Bryan Rehm, who had already moved on to another school system, had thrown his hat in the ring.

BRYAN REHM: I couldn't work for a board that was going to mandate we teach religious ideas in the science classroom. I've got kids in the district, and that's not the kind of district I want my kids going to school in. So the choice was either move the whole family or try and fix the district that we live in. And we chose to fix it.

NARRATOR: But when he hit the campaign trail, Bryan found himself again in the line of fire in the war on evolution.

BRYAN REHM: The problems that I ran into in the campaign, being out door to door, where people just wouldn't listen to you and just automatically judged you in advance that, "You're this kind of person, and we're good Christians. We'd never vote for you." And they'd slam the door in your face, forgetting their windows were open, and call you an f-ing a-hole or tell you you're just a damned atheist.

NARRATOR: For the Rehms, this was particularly hurtful. Both are active in their church and run a summer Bible school program.

CHRISTY REHM: We have a neighbor, actually, who was appointed to the school board and was in support of intelligent design, and he was out campaigning and saying very negative things about our family, how we're atheists, and, "if you vote for those atheists, well, then, God is not going to be happy with you."

NARRATOR: To make the case for intelligent design, the defense had lined up eight expert witnesses, including several members of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle organization that promotes intelligent design. But of those eight witnesses, five never testified.

EUGENIE C. SCOTT: Witnesses started dropping like flies.

NICK MATZKE: We still haven't heard a complete explanation of why this happened, but there was some dispute going on between the Discovery Institute and the Thomas More Law Center over how the case would be run.

NARRATOR: NOVA made repeated requests to interview members of the Discovery Institute to talk about this and other issues, but the institute set conditions that were inconsistent with normal journalistic practice.

For the defense to win, however, did not require a large number of witnesses.

RICHARD THOMPSON: Our aim was not really to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution. Our aim was to merely show that there are credible scientists who believed that the empirical data was supportive of intelligent design. That's all we had to show.

STEPHEN HARVEY: It was our thinking, if they could prove that there was a scientific basis for intelligent design, that it would be possible that the court could conclude that there was a valid secular purpose for teaching intelligent design.

WITOLD "VIC" WALCZAK: I think everybody was waiting to see whether or not the intelligent design folks had a case, but by the time we finished presenting our case, I think it was pretty clear that everything rested on Michael Behe's testimony.

NARRATOR: A scientist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, Michael Behe is the author of the popular intelligent design book, Darwin's Black Box and dozens of papers, unrelated to intelligent design, published in peer-reviewed science journals.

Behe refused multiple invitations from NOVA to be interviewed for this program, though he went on record in the trial.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Dr. Behe, what is your profession?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization) : I am a professor in the department of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : And you're a biochemist?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization) : That's correct, yes.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : How long have you taught at the college level?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization): For 23 years.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Sir, what is intelligent design?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization): Intelligent design is a scientific theory that proposes that some aspects of life are best explained as the result of design, and that the strong appearance of design in life is real and not just apparent.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Is intelligent design based on any religious beliefs or convictions?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization): No, it isn't.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : What is it based on?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization) : It is based entirely on observable, empirical, physical evidence from nature, plus logical inferences.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Now when you use the term design, what do you mean?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization) : Well, I discussed this in my book, Darwin's Black Box , and a short description of design is shown in this quotation from Chapter 9: "What is design? Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts. When we perceive that parts have been arranged to fulfill a purpose, that's when we infer design."

NARRATOR: Part of the defense strategy would be to show the judge examples of biological systems they claimed were too complex to have evolved by natural selection and therefore must have been the product of a designer.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Can you give us a biochemical example of design, Dr. Behe?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization) : Yes, that's on the next slide. I think the best, well, the most visually striking example of design is something called the bacterial flagellum. Now, this is a figure of a bacterial flagellum taken from a textbook, which is widely used in colleges and universities around the country. The bacterial flagellum is, quite literally, an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim. And in order to accomplish that function, it has a number of parts which are ordered to that effect. Now, this part here, which is labeled the filament, is actually the propeller of the bacterial flagellum. The motor is actually a rotary motor.

Most people who see this and have the function explained to them quickly realize that these parts are ordered for a purpose and, therefore, bespeak design.

NARRATOR: Under the microscope, bacteria powered by flagella seem almost acrobatic. They tumble, corkscrew and pirouette, thanks to that whip-like filament.

Driving this propeller is a tiny motor, part of a complex structure made of about 40 different kinds of proteins.

MATTHEW CHAPMAN: The bacterial flagellum looks like a, sort of a Jules Verne notion of what the future looks like. It has a strange sort of mechanical quality to it, these sort of cogs and waving tails and stuff.

NARRATOR: And according to Behe, if any one of these parts is missing from the system, the motor can't function. Behe calls systems like this "irreducibly complex," a term he coined. And he argues such systems could not have evolved naturally.

STEVE FULLER: The idea is that there are certain aspects of life, perhaps organisms or organs or even cells that, in a sense, could only have come about as a whole. In other words, it was very unlikely they could have come about through just a kind of contingent combination of parts over even millions or billions of years, but, rather, in a sense, has to be created whole cloth, all together, at once, because everything fits together so well that to remove one part, the thing wouldn't function.

ROBERT MUISE (Dramatization) : Have other scientists acknowledged these design features of the flagellum?

MICHAEL BEHE (Dramatization) : Yes, they have. And if you advance to the next slide

In , a man named David DeRosier wrote an article in the journal Cell , which is a very prestigious scientific journal, entitled "The Turn of the Screw, The Bacterial Flagellar Motor." David DeRosier is a professor of biology at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, and has worked on the bacterial flagellar motor for most of his career. In that article, he makes the statement, "More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human." So David DeRosier also recognizes that the structure of the flagellum appears designed.

DAVID DEROSIER (Brandeis University) : What I wrote was, "This is a machine that looks like it was designed by a human." But that doesn't mean that it was designed, that is the product of intelligent design. Indeed, this, more, has all the earmarks of something that arose by evolution.

NARRATOR: Using an electron microscope, DeRosier produces ghostly pictures like this one, revealing the inner workings of what's been called the world's most efficient motor.

DAVID DEROSIER: This is the drive shaft. This transmits this torque generated by the motor that would then turn the propeller, which would push the bacterial cell through the fluid.

NARRATOR: Michael Behe has argued that the flagellum could not have evolved, since its parts have no function for natural selection to act on until they are fully assembled.

But evidence that refutes Behe's claim of irreducible complexity comes from a tiny syringe that injects poison, found in some of the nastiest of all bacteria.

DAVID DEROSIER: This is a structure found, for example, in Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the Bubonic plague. Look at the similarities. Now, this structure doesn't rotate, but it still has to extend this structure, which is equivalent to the rod, the driveshaft here. It has to extend that, because it needs this little channel. It's like, sort of like a syringe. So the virulence factors that are made inside the cell, which is down here, can be exported, pushed up into this hole and exported out through this long, kind of, needle, perhaps into a cell in your body or mine, and thereby create misery.

NARRATOR: And it turns out the two structures look similar for a reason. The syringe on the right is made of a subset of the very same protein types found in the base of the flagellum on the left, though the syringe is missing proteins found in the motor and, therefore, can't produce rotary motion. It functions perfectly as an apparatus for transmitting disease.

DAVID DEROSIER:

Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."^[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.^[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.^{[n 1]}

Though the phrase intelligent design had featured previously in theological discussions of the argument from design,^[10] its first publication in its present use as an alternative term for creationism was in Of Pandas and People,^[11][12] a creationist textbook intended for high school biology classes. The term was substituted into drafts of the book, directly replacing references to creation science and creationism, after the Supreme Court's Edwards v. Aguillard decision barred the teaching of creation science in public schools on constitutional grounds.^[13] From the mids, the intelligent design movement (IDM), supported by the Discovery Institute,^[14] advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula.^[7] This led to the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which found that intelligent design was not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents," and that the public school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[15]

ID presents two main arguments against evolutionary explanations: irreducible complexity and specified complexity, asserting that certain biological and informational features of living things are too complex to be the result of natural selection. Detailed scientific examination has rebutted several examples for which evolutionary explanations are claimed to be impossible.

ID seeks to challenge the methodological naturalism inherent in modern science,^[2][16] though proponents concede that they have yet to produce a scientific theory.^[17] As a positive argument against evolution, ID proposes an analogy between natural systems and human artifacts, a version of the theological argument from design for the existence of God.^{[1][n 2]} ID proponents then conclude by analogy that the complex features, as defined by ID, are evidence of design.^{[18][n 3]} Critics of ID find a false dichotomy in the premise that evidence against evolution constitutes evidence for design.^[19][20]

History

Origin of the concept

In , evolution was not a topic of major religious controversy in America, but in the s, the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy in theology resulted in Fundamentalist Christian opposition to teaching evolution, and the origins of modern creationism.^[21] Teaching of evolution was effectively suspended in U.S. public schools until the s, and when evolution was then reintroduced into the curriculum, there was a series of court cases in which attempts were made to get creationism taught alongside evolution in science classes. Young Earth creationists (YEC) promoted creation science as "an alternative scientific explanation of the world in which we live". This frequently invoked the argument from design to explain complexity in nature as demonstrating the existence of God.^[18]

The argument from design, also known as the teleological argument or "argument from intelligent design", has been advanced in theology for centuries.^[22] It can be summarised briefly as "Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer." Thomas Aquinas presented it in his fifth proof of God's existence as a syllogism.^{[n 2]} In , William Paley's Natural Theology presented examples of intricate purpose in organisms. His version of the watchmaker analogy argued that, in the same way that a watch has evidently been designed by a craftsman, complexity and adaptation seen in nature must have been designed, and the perfection and diversity of these designs shows the designer to be omnipotent, the Christian God.^[23] Like creation science, intelligent design centers on Paley's religious argument from design,^[18] but while Paley's natural theology was open to deistic design through God-given laws, intelligent design seeks scientific confirmation of repeated miraculous interventions in the history of life.^[21] Creation science prefigured the intelligent design arguments of irreducible complexity, even featuring the bacterial flagellum. In the United States, attempts to introduce creation science in schools led to court rulings that it is religious in nature, and thus cannot be taught in public school science classrooms. Intelligent design is also presented as science, and shares other arguments with creation science but avoids literal Biblical references to such things as the Flood story from the Book of Genesis or using Bible verses to age the Earth.^[18]

Barbara Forrest writes that the intelligent design movement began in with the book The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, co-written by creationist Charles B. Thaxton, a chemist, with two other authors, and published by Jon A. Buell's Foundation for Thought and Ethics.^[24]

In March , Stephen C. Meyer published a review of the book, discussing how information theory could suggest that messages transmitted by DNA in the cell show "specified complexity" specified by intelligence, and must have originated with an intelligent agent.^[25] He also argued that science is based upon "foundational assumptions" of naturalism which were as much a matter of faith as those of "creation theory".^[26] In November of that year, Thaxton described his reasoning as a more sophisticated form of Paley's argument from design.^[27] At the "Sources of Information Content in DNA" conference which Thaxton held in , he said that his intelligent cause view was compatible with both metaphysical naturalism and supernaturalism.^[28]

Intelligent design avoids identifying or naming the intelligent designer—it merely states that one (or more) must exist—but leaders of the movement have said the designer is the Christian God.^{[29][n 4][n 5]} Whether this lack of specificity about the designer's identity in public discussions is a genuine feature of the concept, or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from the teaching of science, has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case.

Origin of the term

Since the Middle Ages, discussion of the religious "argument from design" or "teleological argument" in theology, with its concept of "intelligent design", has persistently referred to the theistic Creator God. Although ID proponents chose this provocative label for their proposed alternative to evolutionary explanations, they have de-emphasized their religious antecedents and denied that ID is natural theology, while still presenting ID as supporting the argument for the existence of God.^[10][30]

While intelligent design proponents have pointed out past examples of the phrase intelligent design that they said were not creationist and faith-based, they have failed to show that these usages had any influence on those who introduced the label in the intelligent design movement.^[30][31][32]

Variations on the phrase appeared in Young Earth creationist publications: a book co-written by Percival Davis referred to "design according to which basic organisms were created". In , A. E. Wilder-Smith published The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution which defended Paley's design argument with computer calculations of the improbability of genetic sequences, which he said could not be explained by evolution but required "the abhorred necessity of divine intelligent activity behind nature", and that "the same problem would be expected to beset the relationship between the designer behind nature and the intelligently designed part of nature known as man." In a article as well as in his affidavit to Edwards v. Aguillard, Dean H. Kenyon defended creation science by stating that "biomolecular systems require intelligent design and engineering know-how", citing Wilder-Smith. Creationist Richard B. Bliss used the phrase "creative design" in Origins: Two Models: Evolution, Creation (), and in Origins: Creation or Evolution () wrote that "while evolutionists are trying to find non-intelligent ways for life to occur, the creationist insists that an intelligent design must have been there in the first place."^[33][34] The first systematic use of the term, defined in a glossary and claimed to be other than creationism, was in Of Pandas and People, co-authored by Davis and Kenyon.^[31]

Of Pandas and People

Use of the terms "creationism" versus "intelligent design" in sequential drafts of the book Of Pandas and People.^[11]

The most common modern use of the words "intelligent design" as a term intended to describe a field of inquiry began after the United States Supreme Court ruled in June in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard that it is unconstitutional for a state to require the teaching of creationism in public school science curricula.^[11]

A Discovery Institute report says that Charles B. Thaxton, editor of Pandas, had picked the phrase up from a NASA scientist, and thought, "That's just what I need, it's a good engineering term."^[35] In two successive drafts of the book, over one hundred uses of the root word "creation", such as "creationism" and "Creation Science", were changed, almost without exception, to "intelligent design",^[12] while "creationists" was changed to "design proponents" or, in one instance, "cdesign proponentsists" [sic].^[11] In June , Thaxton held a conference titled "Sources of Information Content in DNA" in Tacoma, Washington.^[28] Stephen C. Meyer was at the conference, and later recalled that "The term intelligent design came up"^[36] In December Thaxton decided to use the label "intelligent design" for his new creationist movement.^[24]

Of Pandas and People was published in , and in addition to including all the current arguments for ID, was the first book to make systematic use of the terms "intelligent design" and "design proponents" as well as the phrase "design theory", defining the term intelligent design in a glossary and representing it as not being creationism. It thus represents the start of the modern intelligent design movement.^[11][31][37] "Intelligent design" was the most prominent of around fifteen new terms it introduced as a new lexicon of creationist terminology to oppose evolution without using religious language.^[38] It was the first place where the phrase "intelligent design" appeared in its primary present use, as stated both by its publisher Jon A. Buell,^[18][39] and by William A. Dembski in his expert witness report for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.^[40]

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has criticized the book for presenting all of the basic arguments of intelligent design proponents and being actively promoted for use in public schools before any research had been done to support these arguments.^[37] Although presented as a scientific textbook, philosopher of science Michael Ruse considers the contents "worthless and dishonest".^[41] An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer described it as a political tool aimed at students who did not "know science or understand the controversy over evolution and creationism". One of the authors of the science framework used by California schools, Kevin Padian, condemned it for its "sub-text", "intolerance for honest science" and "incompetence".^[42]

Concepts

Irreducible complexity

The term "irreducible complexity" was introduced by biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box, though he had already described the concept in his contributions to the revised edition of Of Pandas and People.^[37] Behe defines it as "a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning".^[43]

Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap to illustrate this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces—the base, the catch, the spring and the hammer—all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. Removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Intelligent design advocates assert that natural selection could not create irreducibly complex systems, because the selectable function is present only when all parts are assembled. Behe argued that irreducibly complex biological mechanisms include the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.^[44][45]

Critics point out that the irreducible complexity argument assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary and therefore could not have been added sequentially.^[20] They argue that something that is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary as other components change. Furthermore, they argue, evolution often proceeds by altering preexisting parts or by removing them from a system, rather than by adding them. This is sometimes called the "scaffolding objection" by an analogy with scaffolding, which can support an "irreducibly complex" building until it is complete and able to stand on its own.^{[n 6]} Behe has acknowledged using "sloppy prose", and that his "argument against Darwinism does not add up to a logical proof."^{[n 7]} Irreducible complexity has remained a popular argument among advocates of intelligent design; in the Dover trial, the court held that "Professor Behe's claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large."^[19]

Specified complexity

In , Charles B. Thaxton, a physical chemist and creationist, used the term "specified complexity" from information theory when claiming that messages transmitted by DNA in the cell were specified by intelligence, and must have originated with an intelligent agent.^[25] The intelligent design concept of "specified complexity" was developed in the s by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William A. Dembski.^[46] Dembski states that when something exhibits specified complexity (i.e., is both complex and "specified", simultaneously), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes. He provides the following examples: "A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified."^[47] He states that details of living things can be similarly characterized, especially the "patterns" of molecular sequences in functional biological molecules such as DNA.

Dembski defines complex specified information (CSI) as anything with a less than 1 in 10 chance of occurring by (natural) chance. Critics say that this renders the argument a tautology: complex specified information cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature.^{[49][n 8][50]}

The conceptual soundness of Dembski's specified complexity/CSI argument has been discredited in the scientific and mathematical communities.^[51][52] Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields, as Dembski asserts. John Wilkins and Wesley R. Elsberry characterize Dembski's "explanatory filter" as eliminative because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions.^[53]

Richard Dawkins, another critic of intelligent design, argues in The God Delusion () that allowing for an intelligent designer to account for unlikely complexity only postpones the problem, as such a designer would need to be at least as complex.^[54] Other scientists have argued that evolution through selection is better able to explain the observed complexity, as is evident from the use of selective evolution to design certain electronic, aeronautic and automotive systems that are considered problems too complex for human "intelligent designers".^[55]

Fine-tuned universe

Intelligent design proponents have also occasionally appealed to broader teleological arguments outside of biology, most notably an argument based on the fine-tuning of universal constants that make matter and life possible and which are argued not to be solely attributable to chance. These include the values of fundamental physical constants, the relative strength of nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity between fundamental particles, as well as the ratios of masses of such particles. Intelligent design proponent and Center for Science and Culture fellow Guillermo Gonzalez argues that if any of these values were even slightly different, the universe would be dramatically different, making it impossible for many chemical elements and features of the Universe, such as galaxies, to form.^[56] Thus, proponents argue, an intelligent designer of life was needed to ensure that the requisite features were present to achieve that particular outcome.

Scientists have generally responded that these arguments are poorly supported by existing evidence.^[57][58]Victor J. Stenger and other critics say both intelligent design and the weak form of the anthropic principle are essentially a tautology; in his view, these arguments amount to the claim that life is able to exist because the Universe is able to support life.^[59][60][61] The claim of the improbability of a life-supporting universe has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible. Life as we know it might not exist if things were different, but a different sort of life might exist in its place. A number of critics also suggest that many of the stated variables appear to be interconnected and that calculations made by mathematicians and physicists suggest that the emergence of a universe similar to ours is quite probable.^[62]

Intelligent designer

The contemporary intelligent design movement formulates its arguments in secular terms and intentionally avoids identifying the intelligent agent (or agents) they posit. Although they do not state that God is the designer, the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened in a way that only a god could intervene. Dembski, in The Design Inference (), speculates that an alien culture could fulfill these requirements. Of Pandas and People proposes that SETI illustrates an appeal to intelligent design in science. In , philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock suggested the RaëlianUFO religion as a real-life example of an extraterrestrial intelligent designer view that "make[s] many of the same bad arguments against evolutionary theory as creationists".^[63] The authoritative description of intelligent design,^[6] however, explicitly states that the Universe displays features of having been designed. Acknowledging the paradox, Dembski concludes that "no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life."^[64] The leading proponents have made statements to their supporters that they believe the designer to be the Christian God, to the exclusion of all other religions.^[29]

Beyond the debate over whether intelligent design is scientific, a number of critics argue that existing evidence makes the design hypothesis appear unlikely, irrespective of its status in the world of science. For example, Jerry Coyne asks why a designer would "give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes" (see pseudogene) and why a designer would not "stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species". Coyne also points to the fact that "the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different" as evidence that species were not placed there by a designer.^[65] Previously, in Darwin's Black Box, Behe had argued that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer's motives, so such questions cannot be answered definitively. Odd designs could, for example, "have been placed there by the designer for a reason—for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as-yet-undetected practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason—or they might not."^[66] Coyne responds that in light of the evidence, "either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved."^[65]

Intelligent design proponents such as Paul Nelson avoid the problem of poor design in nature by insisting that we have simply failed to understand the perfection of the design. Behe cites Paley as his inspiration, but he differs from Paley's expectation of a perfect Creation and proposes that designers do not necessarily produce the best design they can. Behe suggests that, like a parent not wanting to spoil a child with extravagant toys, the designer can have multiple motives for not giving priority to excellence in engineering. He says that "Another problem with the argument from imperfection is that it critically depends on a psychoanalysis of the unidentified designer. Yet the reasons that a designer would or would not do anything are virtually impossible to know unless the designer tells you specifically what those reasons are."^[66] This reliance on inexplicable motives of the designer makes intelligent design scientifically untestable. Retired UC Berkeley law professor, author and intelligent design advocate Phillip E. Johnson puts forward a core definition that the designer creates for a purpose, giving the example that in his view AIDS was created to punish immorality and is not caused by HIV, but such motives cannot be tested by scientific methods.^[67]

Asserting the need for a designer of complexity also raises the question "What designed the designer?"^[68] Intelligent design proponents say that the question is irrelevant to or outside the scope of intelligent design.^{[n 9]} Richard Wein counters that "scientific explanations often create new unanswered questions. But, in assessing the value of an explanation, these questions are not irrelevant. They must be balanced against the improvements in our understanding which the explanation provides. Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging. The new question raised by the explanation is as problematic as the question which the explanation purports to answer."^[50]Richard Dawkins sees the assertion that the designer does not need to be explained as a thought-terminating cliché.^[69][70] In the absence of observable, measurable evidence, the very question "What designed the designer?" leads to an infinite regression from which intelligent design proponents can only escape by resorting to religious creationism or logical contradiction.^[71]

Movement

The intelligent design movement is a direct outgrowth of the creationism of the s.^[7] The scientific and academic communities, along with a U.S. federal court, view intelligent design as either a form of creationism or as a direct descendant that is closely intertwined with traditional creationism;^{[73][74][75][76][77][78]} and several authors explicitly refer to it as "intelligent design creationism".^{[7][79][n 10][80][81]}

The movement is headquartered in the Center for Science and Culture, established in as the creationist wing of the Discovery Institute to promote a religious agenda^{[n 11]} calling for broad social, academic and political changes. The Discovery Institute's intelligent design campaigns have been staged primarily in the United States, although efforts have been made in other countries to promote intelligent design. Leaders of the movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and of the secular philosophy of naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science should not be limited to naturalism and should not demand the adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses out-of-hand any explanation that includes a supernatural cause. The overall goal of the movement is to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions".^{[n 11]}

Phillip E. Johnson stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept.^{[n 4][n 12]} All leading intelligent design proponents are fellows or staff of the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture.^[82] Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of the Discovery Institute, which guides the movement and follows its wedge strategy while conducting its "Teach the Controversy" campaign and their other related programs.

Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent design. In statements directed at the general public, they say intelligent design is not religious; when addressing conservative Christian supporters, they state that intelligent design has its foundation in the Bible.^{[n 12]} Recognizing the need for support, the Institute affirms its Christian, evangelistic orientation:

Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture.^{[n 11]}

Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute's obfuscating its agenda as a matter of policy. She has written that the movement's "activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious worldview that undergirds it."^[83]

Religion and leading proponents

Although arguments for intelligent design by the intelligent design movement are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer,^{[n 13]} the majority of principal intelligent design advocates are publicly religious Christians who have stated that, in their view, the designer proposed in intelligent design is the Christian conception of God. Stuart Burgess, Phillip E. Johnson, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer are evangelical Protestants; Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic; Paul Nelson supports young Earth creationism; and Jonathan Wells is a member of the Unification Church. Non-Christian proponents include David Klinghoffer, who is Jewish,^[84]Michael Denton and David Berlinski, who are agnostic,^[85][86][87] and Muzaffar Iqbal, a Pakistani-CanadianMuslim.^[88][89] Phillip E. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments that are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. Johnson explicitly calls for intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations so as to avoid having intelligent design identified "as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message."^{[n 14]} Johnson emphasizes that "the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact."^[90]

The strategy of deliberately disguising the religious intent of intelligent design has been described by William A. Dembski in The Design Inference.^[91] In this work, Dembski lists a god or an "alien life force" as two possible options for the identity of the designer; however, in his book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (), Dembski states:

Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ.^[92]

Dembski also stated, "ID is part of God's general revelation [] Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology [ materialism ], which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ."^[93] Both Johnson and Dembski cite the Bible's Gospel of John as the foundation of intelligent design.^{[29][n 12]}

Barbara Forrest contends such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent design as essentially religious in nature, not merely a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide.^{[n 15]} She writes that the leading proponents of intelligent design are closely allied with the ultra-conservative Christian Reconstructionism movement. She lists connections of (current and former) Discovery Institute Fellows Phillip E. Johnson, Charles B. Thaxton, Michael Behe, Richard Weikart, Jonathan Wells and Francis J. Beckwith to leading Christian Reconstructionist organizations, and the extent of the funding provided the Institute by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., a leading figure in the Reconstructionist movement.^[7]

Reaction from other creationist groups

Not all creationist organizations have embraced the intelligent design movement. According to Thomas Dixon, "Religious leaders have come out against ID too. An open letter affirming the compatibility of Christian faith and the teaching of evolution, first produced in response to controversies in Wisconsin in , has now been signed by over ten thousand clergy from different Christian denominations across America."^[94]Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, a proponent of Old Earth creationism, believes that the efforts of intelligent design proponents to divorce the concept from Biblical Christianity make its hypothesis too vague. In , he wrote: "Winning the argument for design without identifying the designer yields, at best, a sketchy origins model. Such a model makes little if any positive impact on the community of scientists and other scholars. [] the time is right for a direct approach, a single leap into the origins fray. Introducing a biblically based, scientifically verifiable creation model represents such a leap."^[95]

Likewise, two of the most prominent YEC organizations in the world have attempted to distinguish their views from those of the intelligent design movement. Henry M. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) wrote, in , that ID, "even if well-meaning and effectively articulated, will not work! It has often been tried in the past and has failed, and it will fail today. The reason it won't work is because it is not the Biblical method." According to Morris: "The evidence of intelligent design must be either followed by or accompanied by a sound presentation of true Biblical creationism if it is to be meaningful and lasting."^[96] In , Carl Wieland, then of Answers in Genesis (AiG), criticized design advocates who, though well-intentioned, "'left the Bible out of it'" and thereby unwittingly aided and abetted the modern rejection of the Bible. Wieland explained that "AiG's major 'strategy' is to boldly, but humbly, call the church back to its Biblical foundations [so] we neither count ourselves a part of this movement nor campaign against it."^[97]

Reaction from the scientific community

The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science and has no place in a science curriculum.^[8] The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."^[98] The U.S. National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience.^[74] Others in the scientific community have denounced its tactics, accusing the ID movement of manufacturing false attacks against evolution, of engaging in misinformation and misrepresentation about science, and marginalizing those who teach it.^[99] More recently, in September , Bill Nye warned that creationist views threaten science education and innovations in the United States.^[][]

In , the Discovery Institute published advertisements under the heading "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism", with the claim that listed scientists had signed this statement expressing skepticism:

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.^[]

The ambiguous statement did not exclude other known evolutionary mechanisms, and most signatories were not scientists in relevant fields, but starting in the Institute claimed the increasing number of signatures indicated mounting doubts about evolution among scientists.^[] The statement formed a key component of Discovery Institute campaigns to present intelligent design as scientifically valid by claiming that evolution lacks broad scientific support,^[][] with Institute members continued to cite the list through at least ^[] As part of a strategy to counter these claims, scientists organised Project Steve, which gained more signatories named Steve (or variants) than the Institute's petition, and a counter-petition, "A Scientific Support for Darwinism", which quickly gained similar numbers of signatories.

Polls

Several surveys were conducted prior to the December decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, which sought to determine the level of support for intelligent design among certain groups. According to a Harris poll, 10% of adults in the United States viewed human beings as "so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them."^[] Although Zogby polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls suffer from considerable flaws, such as having a very low response rate ( out of 16,), being conducted on behalf of an organization with an expressed interest in the outcome of the poll, and containing leading questions.^[][][]

The Gallup creationism survey found that 38% of adults in the United States hold the view that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10, years" when asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings, which was noted as being at the lowest level in 35 years.^[] Previously, a series of Gallup polls in the United States from through on "Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design" found support for "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced formed of life, but God guided the process" of between 31% and 40%, support for "God created human beings in pretty much their present form at one time within the last 10, years or so" varied from 40% to 47%, and support for "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process" varied from 9% to 19%. The polls also noted answers to a series of more detailed questions.^[]

Allegations of discrimination against ID proponents

There have been allegations that ID proponents have met discrimination, such as being refused tenure or being harshly criticized on the Internet. In the documentary filmExpelled: No Intelligence Allowed, released in , host Ben Stein presents five such cases. The film contends that the mainstream science establishment, in a "scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms", suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design in nature or criticize evidence of evolution.^[][] Investigation into these allegations turned up alternative explanations for perceived persecution.^{[n 16]}

The film portrays intelligent design as motivated by science, rather than religion, though it does not give a detailed definition of the phrase or attempt to explain it on a scientific level. Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity, Expelled examines it as a political issue.^[][] The scientific theory of evolution is portrayed by the film as contributing to fascism, the Holocaust, communism, atheism, and eugenics.^[][]

Expelled has been used in private screenings to legislators as part of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign for Academic Freedom bills.^[] Review screenings were restricted to churches and Christian groups, and at a special pre-release showing, one of the interviewees, PZ Myers, was refused admission. The American Association for the Advancement of Science describes the film as dishonest and divisive propaganda aimed at introducing religious ideas into public school science classrooms,^[] and the Anti-Defamation League has denounced the film's allegation that evolutionary theory influenced the Holocaust.^[][] The film includes interviews with scientists and academics who were misled into taking part by misrepresentation of the topic and title of the film. Skeptic Michael Shermer describes his experience of being repeatedly asked the same question without context as "surreal".^[]

Criticism

Scientific criticism

Advocates of intelligent design seek to keep God and the Bible out of the discussion, and present intelligent design in the language of science as though it were a scientific hypothesis.^{[n 13][90]} For a theory to qualify as scientific,^{[n 17][][n 18]} it is expected to be:

• Consistent
• Parsimonious (sparing in its proposed entities or explanations; see Occam's razor)
• Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena, and can be used in a predictive manner)
• Empirically testable and falsifiable (potentially confirmable or disprovable by experiment or observation)
• Based on multiple observations (often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments)
• Correctable and dynamic (modified in the light of observations that do not support it)
• Progressive (refines previous theories)
• Provisional or tentative (is open to experimental checking, and does not assert certainty)

For any theory, hypothesis, or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, and ideally all, of these criteria. The fewer criteria are met, the less scientific it is; if it meets only a few or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word. Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency,^[] violates the principle of parsimony,^{[n 19]} is not scientifically useful,^{[n 20]} is not falsifiable,^{[n 21]} is not empirically testable,^{[n 22]} and is not correctable, dynamic, progressive, or provisional.^{[n 23][n 24][n 25]}

Intelligent design proponents seek to change this fundamental basis of science^[] by eliminating "methodological naturalism" from science^[] and replacing it with what the leader of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Johnson, calls "theistic realism".^{[n 26]} Intelligent design proponents argue that naturalistic explanations fail to explain certain phenomena and that supernatural explanations provide a very simple and intuitive explanation for the origins of life and the universe.^{[n 27]} Many intelligent design followers believe that "scientism" is itself a religion that promotes secularism and materialism in an attempt to erase theism from public life, and they view their work in the promotion of intelligent design as a way to return religion to a central role in education and other public spheres.

It has been argued that methodological naturalism is not an assumption of science, but a result of science well done: the God explanation is the least parsimonious, so according to Occam's razor, it cannot be a scientific explanation.^[]

The failure to follow the procedures of scientific discourse and the failure to submit work to the scientific community that withstands scrutiny have weighed against intelligent design being accepted as valid science.^[] The intelligent design movement has not published a properly peer-reviewed article supporting ID in a scientific journal, and has failed to publish supporting peer-reviewed research or data.^[] The only article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that made a case for intelligent design was quickly withdrawn by the publisher for having circumvented the journal's peer-review standards.^[] The Discovery Institute says that a number of intelligent design articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals,^[] but critics, largely members of the scientific community, reject this claim and state intelligent design proponents have set up their own journals with peer review that lack impartiality and rigor,^{[n 28]} consisting entirely of intelligent design supporters.^{[n 29]}

Further criticism stems from the fact that the phrase intelligent design makes use of an assumption of the quality of an observable intelligence, a concept that has no scientific consensus