Is Intelligent Design Science or Creationism? Kitzmiller v. Dover and Its Critics

In January 2005, ninth-grade biology students in Dover, Pennsylvania, heard a statement read aloud before their evolution unit. It told them that Darwin's theory "is not a fact," that "Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence," and that a book called Of Pandas and People was available for anyone who wanted to understand intelligent design.¹ Parents sued. After a six-week trial, a federal judge ruled in December 2005 that the policy was unconstitutional and that intelligent design (ID) is not science.

Two decades later, critics of ID treat Kitzmiller v. Dover as the final word; ID's defenders call it the work of an overreaching judge who decided a question philosophers themselves cannot settle.

This site argues that the order of creation points to a Creator. Because our motto is honesty, we owe readers the strongest case against the ID movement, an equally fair account of ID's replies, and our own verdict.

In brief

On 20 December 2005, Judge John E. Jones III held that the Dover school board's policy violated the Establishment Clause. He gave three reasons for finding that ID is not science, and found that drafts of Of Pandas and People swapped creationist terms for design terms after the Supreme Court barred creation science in 1987 (one draft reads "cdesign proponentsists"). That historical finding is well documented. The philosophical finding is harder: since Larry Laudan's work in the early 1980s, many philosophers have doubted that any single rule divides science from non-science, while Robert Pennock replies that the court used only a working "ground rule" of science. Our verdict: the legal ruling is secure, the creationist lineage of the textbook is proven, and the deeper question of whether design arguments can ever be scientific remains open. The better question is whether a given design argument is true.

Thesis: Dover showed that a particular school policy was religiously motivated and that ID's best-known textbook descended from creation science, but it could not settle whether design arguments are science, so Christians should neither treat the ruling as a refutation of design nor wave it away as judicial activism.

What happened in Dover

On 18 October 2004 the Dover Area School Board voted 6 to 3 that "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design."² The biology teachers refused to read the required statement, so administrators read it instead. Parents sued in December 2004; the Thomas More Law Center defended the board. The trial ran from late September to early November 2005, spanning, in the judge's words, "twenty-one days."³

Notice who testified. The parents' first scientific witness was the Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, who told the court, "I'm a Roman Catholic," and that he saw evolution as consistent with his religious beliefs.⁴ The Catholic theologian John Haught of Georgetown also testified for the parents. The board's best-known witness, the Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box (1996), agreed that he, too, is a Catholic and that Darwin's theory is "not at all" inconsistent with his private religious beliefs.⁵ Committed Christians stood on both sides.

What the court decided

The judge ruled on whether ID is science partly "in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources" of a second trial.⁶ His central finding reads:

"We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community."⁷

The first ground is "methodological naturalism," which the opinion describes as the "self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world."⁸ The court relied on the National Academy of Sciences, quoting its statement 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."⁹ The court also found that Behe had admitted his broader definition of a scientific theory, which included ID, "would also embrace astrology."¹⁰

The second and third grounds concern evidence. Reviewing Behe's three main examples (the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade and the immune system), the judge credited Miller's testimony that peer-reviewed work had identified possible precursors and pathways. On the immune system, Behe was presented with "fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters" on its evolution and replied that this was not "good enough."¹¹ The court also relied on an exchange in cross-examination. Asked whether it was correct that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred," Behe answered, "That is correct, yes." (The words were counsel's; "detailed rigorous accounts" was the standard Behe himself had just said he applied to evolutionary explanations.)¹² The opinion concluded that ID "has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community."¹³

Two features of the opinion are often forgotten. First, the judge disclaimed any verdict on whether design is true: "while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science."¹⁴ Second, he insisted that evolution and faith in God are not enemies. He called it "utterly false" to presuppose "that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general," and wrote that ID "should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed."¹⁵ His sharpest words were for the board, not for ID scholars: he spoke of "the breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision" and found that several members "would time and again lie to cover their tracks."¹⁶ {{very-strong: The court held the Dover ID policy unconstitutional and found that board members had acted from religious motives.}}

"Cdesign proponentsists": the textbook's family tree

Of Pandas and People was published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, and the court found that its authors, Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis, were "acknowledged creationists."¹⁷ Under subpoena the publisher produced earlier drafts. The philosopher Barbara Forrest compared them for the court.

In 1987 the Supreme Court, in Edwards v. Aguillard, struck down a Louisiana law requiring "creation science" to be taught alongside evolution.¹⁸ The court in Dover found that in the Pandas drafts, the definition of creation science in early drafts was "identical to the definition of ID," and that "cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID," shortly after Edwards.¹⁹ In one 1987 draft the replacement was done imperfectly. A sentence that had read "creationists accept the latter view" came out as "cdesign proponentsists accept the latter view," with part of the old word still showing around the new one.²⁰ The judge called the overall evidence "compelling" support for the claim "that ID is creationism re-labeled."²¹

The publisher argued, in the court's summary, that by dropping the words "creation" and "creationism" it had "expressly rejected creationism in Pandas." The court disagreed, finding "a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content." ID's defenders answer that a pre-Edwards draft already said "observable instances of information cannot tell us if the intellect behind them is natural or supernatural," so the drafts' "creation" was never the supernatural creationism the Supreme Court struck down.²² The court also cited the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document," whose stated goals included to "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."²³ {{strong: Drafts of Of Pandas and People show that "creationist" language was systematically replaced with "design" language after the 1987 Edwards ruling.}}

One caution. The Pandas evidence shows the history of one textbook and the aims of a movement's founders. It does not show that every design argument is creationism, any more than the irreligious motives of some evolutionists would make evolution false. Motive and lineage were decisive in an Establishment Clause case, where purpose matters. For the question of whether an argument is any good, they are not.

The philosophers' problem: can anyone define science?

Dover had a precedent. In McLean v. Arkansas (1982), Judge William Overton struck down an Arkansas creation-science law. Citing the philosopher Michael Ruse "and other science witnesses," he listed "essential characteristics of science": that it is guided by and explanatory by reference to natural law, testable against the empirical world, tentative in its conclusions, and falsifiable.²⁴

The philosopher of science Larry Laudan agreed with the result but attacked the reasoning. In a 1982 commentary he argued that creation science does make testable claims, about the age of the earth or a worldwide flood, and that those claims have been tested and have failed. In his view, declaring creationism untestable gave away the strongest argument against it, which is that it is false. His summary, as reproduced by later writers on both sides: "bad philosophy makes for bad law."²⁵ The next year, in "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem," he went further. He wrote that "it may just be that there are no epistemic features which all and only the disciplines we accept as 'scientific' share in common," and that words like "unscientific" are "hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us."²⁶

Pennock notes that ID's defenders ("creationists," in his terms) cite Laudan, among others, to argue that science and religion cannot legitimately be told apart.²⁷ The atheist philosopher Bradley Monton argued in Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (2009), as his reviewer summarizes the book, that the Dover opinion was flawed insofar as it relied on a sharp line between science and non-science, and that whether ID is true matters more than whether it is science. That reviewer, Sahotra Sarkar, was sharply critical of the book and noted that Monton was "not original in pointing out the problems with relying on a demarcation criterion," since Monton himself quotes Laudan for making the point first. Thomas Nagel, also an atheist, wrote in 2008 that he does not regard divine intervention as a possibility, but that this rests on "an aspect of my overall worldview," and that a believer with serious scientific reasons to doubt evolution "can quite reasonably conclude that the hypothesis of design should be taken seriously."²⁸

The reply from the other side is serious too. Robert Pennock, the parents' expert in the philosophy of science at Dover, argued in Synthese that "The Kitzmiller case did not rely on a strict demarcation criterion, but appealed only to a 'ballpark' demarcation that identifies methodological naturalism (MN) as a 'ground rule' of science." He also argued that Laudan "focused too narrowly on the problem of demarcation as Popper defined it," and that methodological naturalism is a real feature of scientific practice.²⁹ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's current entry on pseudoscience, by Sven Ove Hansson, surveys efforts since Laudan to describe science by several criteria at once rather than one. It is blunt about ID: it says creationism and "its skeletal version 'intelligent design'" were "constructed to support a fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis," and that creationism today is "predominantly a form of science denialism."³⁰ That entry also lists the "nature and justification of methodological naturalism" as an open philosophical question.³¹

Laudan's critique cuts both ways: it weakens the claim that ID is ruled out by definition, but moves the fight onto the evidence, where Laudan thought creationism lost. It says that irreducible complexity, as "only a negative argument against evolution, ... is refutable and accordingly testable," while the positive design claim is not.³² Even granting that distinction, the court's strongest findings concerned evidence, not definitions. {{debated: That any principled definition of science excludes all design arguments in advance.}}

How ID's defenders answered

The institute did not ask for this policy. The Discovery Institute, the main ID think tank, did not endorse Dover's requirement. The Associated Press reported that the board's mandate was "an approach the Discovery Institute disagreed with." The institute's John West said, "We're not heartbroken about the policy being struck down," but the institute called the ruling a "futile attempt to censor science education," and West added, "This is an activist judge who has delusions of grandeur."³³ The opinion anticipated that charge, saying that those who disagree "will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge," but that the case arose from "an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID."³⁴

The judge copied the plaintiffs. In December 2006 West and the law professor David DeWolf released a study claiming that the judge "copied verbatim or virtually verbatim 90.9%" of his 6,004-word section on whether ID is science from the plaintiffs' proposed findings of fact.³⁵ Critics answered that judges are expected to adopt the proposed findings they accept, and that the opinion reworded them; the institute itself said it was not alleging "plagiarism."³⁶ Even if the figure is right, it says nothing about whether those findings were accurate, so this objection carries little weight.

The court overreached. In the Montana Law Review (2007), DeWolf, West and Casey Luskin argued that "Intelligent Design Will Survive" the ruling. They wrote that "one federal district court judge cannot, and should not presume to settle a contested scientific issue for all other courts," and noted the judge's own acknowledgment that the opinion has "no precedential value outside the Middle District [of Pennsylvania]." They also called the peer-review finding "flatly wrong," pointing to Stephen Meyer's 2004 article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington and to Behe's paper with David Snoke in Protein Science. In fairness to the court, the society behind that journal said after publication that Meyer's article had appeared contrary to its usual editorial practice (a statement the authors call misleading), and the opinion noted that the Behe and Snoke article "does not mention either irreducible complexity or ID." The same issue carried a reply by Peter Irons and their rebuttal.³⁷ The judge had said that no tribunal was "in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area"; the institute's book-length reply, Traipsing into Evolution (2006), echoes that line in its title.³⁸ This reply has more substance than the copying charge, because it rests on the demarcation debate.

The astrology line lacks context. Behe defined a theory as "a proposed explanation which focuses or points to physical, observable data and logical inferences," and explained that in this sense "a sense of the word 'theory' does not include the theory being true." Astrology, he said, would count in that historical sense, "and so is the ether theory of the propagation of light."³⁹ He was describing historical usage, not endorsing astrology. Still, so broad a definition does little to show that ID belongs in a modern biology class.

Weighing these replies: the point about the Discovery Institute's stance is fair, and the demarcation point has real force. Neither touches the court's findings about the board's motives or the Pandas drafts, and in our judgment the peer-review dispute shows a thin record in 2005, not a hidden one. What is most open to challenge is the ruling's philosophical framing, not its record of evidence.

An Orthodox reading

We know of no conciliar or synodal Orthodox statement on intelligent design as such. What the Church has is a long habit of reading creation as a witness to its Maker. The Wisdom of Solomon, part of the Septuagint the Church received, says: "For by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionably the maker of them is seen" (Wisdom 13:5, Brenton). St Paul says God's "invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Romans 1:20, NKJV).⁴⁰ St Athanasius says that "Creation, as though in written characters, declares in a loud voice, by its order and harmony, its own Lord and Creator," and that "often the artist even when not seen is known by his works."⁴¹ St Basil calls the world "the school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God."⁴²

The Fathers point to the order, beauty and intelligibility of the whole cosmos, including its lawful regularities. Their case does not depend on finding a place where natural causes fail. John Haught warned the Dover court about the opposite move. He testified that, from a theological point of view, the ID proposal is an attempt to bring "the ultimate and the infinite down in a belittling way into the continuum of natural causes as one finite cause among others," and spoke of a God who could make a universe "resourceful enough to unfold from within itself in a natural way" its diversity.⁴³ An Orthodox Christian, who confesses in the Creed the Father as "Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible," can share that worry without accepting all of Haught's theology. God is not one cause competing with others inside the world. He is the reason there is a world, and its laws, at all, and He remains free to act within it, as the Incarnation itself shows.

That does not make every design argument a mistake. The site discusses arguments from fine-tuning and biological information as inferences to the best explanation, not proofs (see Design as an Inference, Not a Science-Stopper and Science Recognizes Design Inferences). It does mean that the faith does not rise or fall with Dover or with any gap in present biology. Our article Has Science Disproved Christianity? makes the wider case, and Genesis and the Age of the Earth sets out Christian readings of creation (see also Can a Christian Accept Evolution?).

The strongest objections

From ID supporters: you concede too much

Objection: Laudan, Monton and Nagel show that "not science" is a rhetorical label, and a Christian site should not repeat it.

Response: The label settles less than critics claim, but the court's findings about evidence and history do not depend on it. Behe's sworn agreement that no peer-reviewed article gave a detailed account of how any biological system was designed, and the Pandas drafts, are facts the movement has to own. Accuracy comes before apologetic convenience.

From skeptics: ID is creationism, so why entertain it?

Objection: The court, the National Academy of Sciences and the Stanford Encyclopedia all reject ID's claim to be science. Treating the question as open is false balance.

Response: On Pandas and Dover's policy we agree (Strong and Very Strong). But where an argument came from does not decide whether it is sound. Laudan, no friend of creationism, held that a bad theory should be shown false, not defined out of existence. Pennock disagrees; the debate is live.

From Christians: isn't evolution itself the threat?

Objection: If a court says design is not science, schools will teach that life is purposeless.

Response: The ruling explicitly denied that evolution is "antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being," and the best-known scientific witnesses on both sides were Catholics. Purposelessness is a philosophical claim, not a biological finding; Haught told the court that materialism "has absolutely no place in the classroom" either.⁴⁴ Our concern should be that neither materialism nor a God-of-the-gaps is passed off as science (see also Can Naturalism Account for Reason?).

What we can say confidently

• On 20 December 2005 a federal court held the Dover ID policy unconstitutional, finding a religious purpose and effect.
• The court found that ID is not science, on three stated grounds, while expressly taking "no position" on whether ID's arguments are true.
• Drafts of Of Pandas and People show creationist terms systematically replaced with design terms after Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), including the hybrid "cdesign proponentsists."
• At trial Behe conceded that no peer-reviewed articles then gave "detailed rigorous accounts" of how design of any biological system occurred.
• The Discovery Institute disagreed with the Dover mandate, though it strongly criticized the ruling.

What remains disputed

• Whether a principled line between science and non-science exists, and whether methodological naturalism is a definition of science or only a very successful working rule (Laudan, Monton and others versus Pennock and others).
• Whether any design argument in biology could ever be scientifically testable, and whether ID's arguments are better described as unscientific or as scientific but mistaken.
• How much ID's research record has changed since 2005 (not assessed here).

Conclusion

Dover was a sad local story before it was a national one. A divided town and a board whose members the judge found untruthful do not honor the God whom Christians confess as Truth. The ruling showed that one school policy and one textbook were creationism under a new name. It did not show that the heavens have stopped declaring the glory of God.

The Orthodox Christian can hold both of those conclusions with a quiet mind. We do not need a court to certify that creation reveals its Maker, and we do not need to defend every argument made in the name of design. The Fathers read the cosmos as a book written by the Word through whom all things were made. Our part is to read it with the honesty we ask of others, to give up an argument when the evidence goes against it, and to keep confessing the one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

Notes

1. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005), Memorandum Opinion, 20 December 2005, Case 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ, Doc. 342, pp. 1-2 (the statement, P-124). Page numbers refer to the slip opinion as filed (139 pp.). Back
2. Ibid., p. 1. Back
3. Ibid., pp. 2 (filing 14 December 2004), 63 ("a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days"); on the Thomas More Law Center as defense counsel, p. 52; on the teachers' refusal to read the statement, p. 45. Back
4. Trial transcript, Day 2 (27 September 2005), morning session, testimony of Kenneth R. Miller (who confirms he teaches at Brown University), as transcribed by the TalkOrigins Archive. Back
5. Trial transcript, Day 10, morning session, testimony of Michael J. Behe (tenured professor at Lehigh University), TalkOrigins Archive. On Haught: Day 5 (30 September 2005), afternoon session, where he confirms his doctorate in theology from Catholic University and that he taught at Georgetown. Back
6. Kitzmiller, slip op., pp. 63-64. Back
7. Ibid., p. 64. Back
8. Ibid., pp. 64-65. Back
9. Ibid., pp. 69-70, quoting National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2nd ed. (1999), trial exhibit P-192 at 25 (p. 25 begins the booklet's Conclusion). The NAS text itself could not be read online (page images only); the wording is checked as quoted by the court. Back
10. Ibid., p. 68 (citing Behe, Trial Tr. 21:37-42). Back
11. Ibid., pp. 76-78. Back
12. Ibid., p. 88 (citing Trial Tr. 22:22-23); the question and answer are in the trial transcript, Day 12, morning session, cross-examination of Michael J. Behe, TalkOrigins Archive, where Behe first explains that "by these publications, I mean detailed rigorous accounts for complex molecular machines." Back
13. Ibid., p. 89. Back
14. Ibid., p. 64. Back
15. Ibid., pp. 136-37. Back
16. Ibid., pp. 137-38. Back
17. Ibid., pp. 31-32. Back
18. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), as summarized in Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 32. Back
19. Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 32. Back
20. Nick Matzke, "Missing link: 'cdesign proponentsists'," The Panda's Thumb, 7 November 2005, quoting Of Pandas and People (1987 creationist draft, p. 3-40; 1987 "intelligent design" draft, p. 3-41); and National Center for Science Education, "'Cdesign Proponentsists'" (2008), which reproduces the draft pages and notes that Forrest found "a transitional form." Matzke and the NCSE were on the plaintiffs' side; the drafts themselves were trial exhibits. Back
21. Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 33. Back
22. Ibid., p. 32. The reply: DeWolf, West and Luskin, "Intelligent Design Will Survive" (see note 37), 21-22, quoting Charles Thaxton's introduction in the 1987 Biology and Origins manuscript, p. 13. Back
23. Ibid., p. 29 (the Wedge Document's "Governing Goals"). Back
24. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (E.D. Ark. 1982), section IV(C), as transcribed by the TalkOrigins Archive. Back
25. Larry Laudan, "Commentary: Science at the Bar: Causes for Concern," Science, Technology, & Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982): 16-19. The article itself was not opened; its argument and the quoted phrase are checked against two independent reproductions (a summary by Jed Lea-Henry, 2023, and Casey Luskin, "Will Robert Pennock Become the Next Michael Ruse?", Discovery Institute blog (now Science and Culture Today), 9 October 2005, citing the reprint in Michael Ruse, ed., But Is It Science?, p. 355). See the ledger. Back
26. Larry Laudan, "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem," in R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan, eds., Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 111-27, at 112 and 125. Quoted from a teaching handout by Nic Fillion (2020), hosted on a University of Pittsburgh course page, that reproduces the passages with page numbers; the book was not opened. Back
27. Robert T. Pennock, "Can't Philosophers Tell the Difference Between Science and Religion?: Demarcation Revisited," Synthese 178, no. 2 (2011): 177-206, abstract. Back
28. Sahotra Sarkar, review of Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2011.03.23. Monton's book was not opened; his argument is described as his reviewer summarizes it. Thomas Nagel, "Public Education and Intelligent Design," Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 2 (2008): 187-205, at 192, quoted from the extract reproduced in Reginald Williams, "Nagel and Intelligent Design," Think 9, no. 26 (2010): 37-42 (Nagel's article itself was not opened). Back
29. Pennock, "Can't Philosophers Tell the Difference," abstract. Back
30. Sven Ove Hansson, "Science and Pseudo-Science," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2008; substantive revision 28 July 2025), sections on multi-criterial demarcation and on science denial. Back
31. Ibid., closing section, citing M. Boudry, S. Blancke and J. Braeckman, "How Not to Attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical Misconceptions About Methodological Naturalism," Foundations of Science 15 (2010): 227-44 (not opened). Back
32. Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 76. Back
33. Gene Johnson, Associated Press, "Intelligent design ruling dismays group," The Spokesman-Review, 21 December 2005. Back
34. Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 137. Back
35. Robert Crowther, "Study Shows Federal Judge Copied ACLU Text in Dover Intelligent Design Ruling," Discovery Institute blog (now Science and Culture Today), 12 December 2006, announcing John G. West and David K. DeWolf, "A Comparison of Judge Jones' Opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover with Plaintiffs' Proposed 'Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law'" (Discovery Institute, 2006). Back
36. Timothy Sandefur, "DI's Plagiarism Allegations Against Jones Get Even Lamer," The Panda's Thumb, 19 December 2006; and John G. West, "Media Round-Up on Judge Jones," Discovery Institute blog (now Science and Culture Today), 12 December 2006 ("we are faulting Judge Jones for 'plagiarism,' which we aren't"). Back
37. David K. DeWolf, John G. West and Casey Luskin, "Intelligent Design Will Survive: Kitzmiller v. Dover," Montana Law Review 68, no. 1 (2007): 7-57; Peter Irons, "Disaster in Dover: The Trials (and Tribulations) of Intelligent Design," same issue; DeWolf, West and Luskin, "Rebuttal to Irons," same issue. Quotations from the first article: pp. 14 ("cannot, and should not presume"), 8 ("no precedential value"), 38-39 ("flatly wrong"; Meyer and Behe-Snoke articles; the society's statement, n. 182), PDF at scholarworks.umt.edu. On the Behe-Snoke article, Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 88 n. 17. Irons's article and the rebuttal were not opened. Back
38. Kitzmiller, slip op., p. 63. David K. DeWolf, John G. West, Casey Luskin and Jonathan Witt, Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision (Discovery Institute Press, 2006), as cited in the Montana Law Review article, n. 65 (the book was not opened). Back
39. Trial transcript, Day 11, afternoon session, cross-examination of Michael J. Behe, TalkOrigins Archive. Back
40. Wisdom of Solomon 13:5, trans. L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (1851), ebible.org; Romans 1:20, New King James Version. Back
41. Athanasius, Against the Heathen (Contra Gentes) 34.4 and 35.1, trans. Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 vol. 4 (1892), newadvent.org. Back
42. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 1.6, trans. Blomfield Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8 (1895), newadvent.org. Back
43. Trial transcript, Day 5 (30 September 2005), afternoon session, testimony of John F. Haught, TalkOrigins Archive. The Creed is quoted from the Orthodox Church in America translation, "The Symbol of Faith," oca.org. Back
44. Ibid. Back

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005). Memorandum Opinion of Judge John E. Jones III, 20 December 2005, Doc. 342. PDF hosted by the National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo.
• Kitzmiller v. Dover trial transcripts: Day 2 AM (Miller), Day 5 PM (Haught), Day 10 AM, Day 11 PM and Day 12 AM (Behe). TalkOrigins Archive, talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/.
• McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255 (E.D. Ark. 1982). TalkOrigins Archive.
• Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).
• Scripture: The Holy Bible, New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982); L. C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1851), ebible.org.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Athanasius of Alexandria. Against the Heathen. Translated by Archibald Robertson. NPNF2 vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1892.
• Orthodox Church in America. "The Symbol of Faith" (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). oca.org.
• Basil the Great. Hexaemeron. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. NPNF2 vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1895.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Hansson, Sven Ove. "Science and Pseudo-Science." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published 2008; revised 2025.
• Laudan, Larry. "Commentary: Science at the Bar: Causes for Concern." Science, Technology, & Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982): 16-19. doi:10.1177/016224398200700402.
• Laudan, Larry. "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem." In Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, edited by R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan, 111-27. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983.
• Pennock, Robert T. "Can't Philosophers Tell the Difference Between Science and Religion?: Demarcation Revisited." Synthese 178, no. 2 (2011): 177-206. doi:10.1007/s11229-009-9547-3.
• Nagel, Thomas. "Public Education and Intelligent Design." Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 2 (2008): 187-205. (Quoted from the extract in Williams, below.)
• Williams, Reginald. "Nagel and Intelligent Design." Think 9, no. 26 (2010): 37-42.
• Sarkar, Sahotra. Review of Seeking God in Science, by Bradley Monton. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2011.03.23.
• Matzke, Nick. "Missing link: 'cdesign proponentsists'." The Panda's Thumb, 7 November 2005.
• National Center for Science Education. "'Cdesign Proponentsists'." ncse.ngo, 2008.
• Sandefur, Timothy. "DI's Plagiarism Allegations Against Jones Get Even Lamer." The Panda's Thumb, 19 December 2006.
• Johnson, Gene. "Intelligent design ruling dismays group." Associated Press, in The Spokesman-Review, 21 December 2005.

Sources from the intelligent design movement

• DeWolf, David K., John G. West and Casey Luskin. "Intelligent Design Will Survive: Kitzmiller v. Dover." Montana Law Review 68, no. 1 (2007): 7-57.
• West, John G., and David K. DeWolf. "A Comparison of Judge Jones' Opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover with Plaintiffs' Proposed 'Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law'." Discovery Institute, December 2006. As announced by Robert Crowther, Discovery Institute blog (now Science and Culture Today), 12 December 2006.
• DeWolf, David K., John G. West, Casey Luskin and Jonathan Witt. Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision. Discovery Institute Press, 2006. (Not opened.)
• West, John G. "Media Round-Up on Judge Jones." Discovery Institute blog (now Science and Culture Today), 12 December 2006.
• Monton, Bradley. Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009. (Not opened; described from Sarkar's review.)