NOVA Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
Tuesday, November 13, 8 pm ET
on WKAR-HD and WKAR-23
After the Trial: A Second Look
Tuesday, November 13, 10 pm ET
on WKAR-TV
Wednesday, November 14, 10 pm ET
on WKAR Life (23.3)
WKAR Offers “NOVA” and Companion Follow-up Program
Focusing on Intelligent Design
With Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania, in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Immediately following the two-hour special, WKAR offers After the Trial: A Second Look, a look at how the issues presented in the program affect Michigan.
Veteran journalist Dr. Susan Carter interviews Dr. Robert Pennock, a witness for the plaintiffs who were against the teaching of Intelligent Design in the 2004 trial; Michigan Rep. Brian Palmer (R-Romeo), who encourages discussion in schools of the controversy surrounding the concept of Intelligent Design, and Lisa Swem, an attorney representing many Michigan schools districts. (Guests are scheduled to appear and subject to change.)
Following the broadcast, After the Trial: A Second Look will be available for online viewing at WKAR.org.
The NOVA Documentary
Featuring trial re-enactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers and town officials, the program follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District.
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; 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 laced with Darwinism,” in his words.
Judgment Day 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 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 confirmed theories in the history of science, and that its unresolved questions are normal research problems--the type that arise in any flourishing scientific field.
U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III ultimately decided for the plaintiffs, writing in his decision that intelligent design “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”
As part of his decision, Judge Jones ordered the Dover school board to pay legal fees and damages, which were eventually set at $1 million.
“Judgment Day captures on film a landmark court case with a powerful scientific message at its core,” said Paula S. Apsell, NOVA senior executive producer. “Evolution is one of the most essential and least understood of all scientific theories, the foundation of biological science. We felt it was important for NOVA to do this program to heighten the public understanding of what constitutes science and what does not, and therefore, what is acceptable for inclusion in the science curriculum in our public schools.”
published: November 5, 2007
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