Judge's stinging decision against intelligent design may have broad impact

Compelling biology teachers to present intelligent design as an alternative explanation to evolution violates the Constitution, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, saying the concept is "an interesting theological argument, but ... not science."

The ruling came after federal District Judge John E. Jones heard 21 days of testimony during a six-week trial that pitted a group of parents against the school board in the small town of Dover, Pa.

In October 2004, the board required school officials to read a statement to ninth-graders that declared that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "a theory ... not a fact" and that "gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence."

"Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view," the statement said.

Backers of intelligent design argue that biological systems are so complex they could not have arisen by a series of random changes. The complexity of life implies an intelligent designer, they assert. Most of the movement's public spokesmen take care not to say publicly whether the designer they have in mind is God. On that basis, they argue that their concept is scientific, not religious.

Jones, a churchgoing conservative jurist appointed to the federal bench by President Bush in 2002, used much of his 139-page ruling to dissect those claims, rejecting them at every turn as a violation of the separation of church and state.

Legal experts described the ruling as a sharp defeat for the intelligent-design movement, one likely to have considerable influence with other judges, although it has binding legal force only in one section of Pennsylvania.

The Dover Area School District will not appeal the ruling, said Patricia Dapp, who was elected to the school board last month. Eight of the nine board members who approved the policy that prompted the lawsuit were voted out of office in November, and their replacements said they do not support teaching intelligent design in science class.

At the trial, held in Harrisburg, the state capital, Jones heard testimony from leading advocates of intelligent design and experts on evolutionary theory.

The "overwhelming evidence" established that intelligent design "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," he wrote.

The public statements of school-board members, he said, made clear they adopted the statement to ninth-graders to advance specific religious views.

Testimony included statements that at one board meeting, one backer of the intelligent-design statement had "said words to the effect of '2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?' " the judge noted.

"Although proponents of the [intelligent-design movement] occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members" of the movement, including expert witnesses who testified, Jones wrote.

Statements by the board members that they had only secular purposes in mind — to improve science teaching and foster open debate — were a "sham" and a "pretext for the board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote.

Jones, anticipating attacks by the religious right over his ruling, answered that question in his opinion.

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge," he wrote. "If so they have erred as this is manifestly not an activist court."

Legal experts said such a statement anticipating an attack is an unusual — but in this case, wise — move.

"He anticipated an attack on him," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "I have a lot of respect for a judge who, presented with a difficult decision, admits it's going to be tough. He has discharged his oath."

The judge excoriated school-board officials for lying in their testimony and for not bothering to understand what intelligent design was about before making their decision. He rebuked what he called the "breathtaking inanity of the board's decision."

The Dover trial was one of several battlegrounds for intelligent design in the past year.

Last January, a U.S. district judge in Georgia ruled that the school system in Cobb County, outside Atlanta, had violated the Constitution by requiring stickers on biology textbooks that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

Earlier this month, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta considered arguments in that case, with at least one judge expressing strong doubts about the lower-court ruling.

In Kansas, the state Board of Education has changed the definition of science to permit supernatural explanations.

That reliance on the supernatural was key to Jones' rejection of the Dover school board's position.

Intelligent-design arguments "may be true, a proposition on which this court takes no position," he wrote, but it "is not science."

"The centuries-old ground rules of science" make clear that a scientific theory must rely solely on natural explanations that can be tested, he wrote.

Supporters of intelligent design denounced Jones' ruling along the lines the judge had predicted.

Richard Thompson, of the Thomas More Law Center, the lead lawyer for the board members, called the ruling an "ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God."

"The founders of this country would be astonished at the thought that this simple curriculum change [was] in violation of the Constitution that they drafted," he said.

But Lee Strang, a constitutional-law professor at Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, Mich., which advocates a greater role for religion in public life, said that given Supreme Court precedents and the evidence that the Dover school-board members had religious goals in mind, Jones' ruling was inevitable.

The Supreme Court in 1987 barred the teaching of a concept that backers called "creation science" in public schools. Intelligent design emerged after that ruling, Jones noted in his ruling.

Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas Law School said the ruling was likely to have considerable influence because it came after a trial in which "both sides brought in their top guns" to testify. The judge's detailed ruling "will be quite persuasive to other judges and lawyers thinking about provoking a similar case elsewhere," he said.

Lead plaintiff Tammy Kitzmiller, an office manager and mother of two, said she was heartened to know that 11 ordinary citizens could "step forward and make a difference."

"Intelligent design is about religion, and this ruling makes it clear."

Material from Knight Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.