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Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial

In this two-hour special, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers, and town officials, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. This program was coproduced with Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Productions, Inc. In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design–the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state. "There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism." NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as "What is evolution?" and "Is intelligent design a scientifically valid alternative?" Kitzmiller v. Dover was the first legal test of intelligent design as a scientific theory, with the plaintiffs arguing that it is a thinly veiled form of creationism, the view that a literal interpretation of the Bible accounts for all observed facts about nature. During the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs showed that evolution is one of the best-tested and most thoroughly con

English
  • Originally Aired November 13, 2007
  • Runtime 114 minutes
  • Content Rating United States of America TV-PG
  • Network PBS
  • Created September 12, 2017 by
    Administrator admin
  • Modified March 20, 2022 by
    jhspyhard
Name Type Role
Jay O. Sanders Guest Star
Antony Edridge Guest Star
Glenn Wragg Guest Star
Debora Weston Guest Star
Nigel Whitmey Guest Star
Paul Venables Guest Star
Jeff Harding Guest Star
Jay Benedict Guest Star
Eric Loren Guest Star
Lewis Hancock Guest Star
Paul Haley Guest Star
Jamie Lennox Guest Star
Ryan McCluskey Guest Star
James Carroll Jordan Guest Star
Richard Laing Guest Star
Michael Fitzpatrick Guest Star
Gary Johnstone Director
Joseph McMaster Director