Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
Encyclopedia
Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is an award-winning NOVA
NOVA (TV series)
Nova is a popular science television series from the U.S. produced by WGBH Boston. It can be seen on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries...

 documentary on the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school district policy that required the teaching of intelligent design...

, which concentrated on the question of whether or not intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition 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." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...

 could be viewed as science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

 and taught in school science class. It first aired on PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 on November 13, 2007 and features interviews with the judge, witnesses, and lawyers as well as re-enacted scenes using the official transcript of the trial.

Judgment Day was produced by NOVA and Vulcan Productions
Vulcan Inc.
Vulcan Inc. is an investment and project management company founded in 1986 by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, to manage his investments...

 in association with the Big Table Film Company. The senior executive producer was Paula S. Apsell
Paula S. Apsell
Paula Schwartz Apsell Paula Apsell, is the WGBH television executive producer of NOVA and director of the WGBH Science Unit. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, she grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Her grandfather was a cobbler and an immigrant from Kiev...

, the executive producer was Richard Hutton, and the producers were Joseph McMaster, Gary Johnstone, and Vanessa Tovell. The senior producer was Susanne Simpson. Johnstone and McMaster served as directors, and McMaster was the writer.

In April 2008 the documentary won a Peabody Award
Peabody Award
The George Foster Peabody Awards recognize distinguished and meritorious public service by radio and television stations, networks, producing organizations and individuals. In 1939, the National Association of Broadcasters formed a committee to recognize outstanding achievement in radio broadcasting...

. It won the 2008 Science Journalism Award presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...

 to honor excellence in science reporting.

Summary

The documentary combines real-life interviews with those involved in the controversy with reenactments of events in the trial. The school board of Dover, a small rural town in Pennsylvania, passed a policy in which biology teachers in Dover Area High School must read a disclaimer regarding evolution, stating that it is not fact and contains gaps in evidence. It then pointed them to a set of books advocating intelligent design, called Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics...

. Several biology teachers, including featured interviewees Brian and Christy Rehm, refused to read the statement and a lawsuit, Kitzmiller v Dover, was eventually filed to stop the school district from mandating the teaching of intelligent design. The documentary presents the resulting trial as revolving around the validity of Intelligent Design as a scientific theory. The defendants, members of the Dover County school board, argued that ID was a scientific theory and thus deserved to be taught in schools alongside evolution. The plaintiffs argued that Intelligent Design was a religious doctrine. Also at issue in the trial was whether the board members who had pushed the teaching of Intelligent Design had knowingly done so in order to inject creationism into the public schools. Previous court rulings had explicitly ruled the teaching of creationism unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of church and state. After hearing testimony from scientists in favor of and opposed to Intelligent Design, Judge John E Jones III rules that Intelligent Design is an inherently religious theory and therefore the teaching of it is not permitted as part of a science curriculum.

Response

The documentary was received positively by many scientific organizations. It was praised by Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

, and described as accurate by the National Center for Science Education
National Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, California affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is the United States' leading anti-creationist organization, and defends the teaching of evolutionary biology and opposes...

. Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

 magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

 also gave the documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 a positive review, and said it was one of the year's most important television projects, that "should be shown not just in every U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....

 but in houses of worship as well."

In contrast, creationists
Creationism
Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...

 and intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition 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." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...

 supporters have criticized the documentary. The Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...

 produced a website critical of the broadcast, while Answers in Genesis
Answers in Genesis
Answers in Genesis is a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry with a particular focus on supporting Young Earth creationism and a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. The organization has offices in the United Kingdom and the United States...

 argued the evidence for evolution presented by scientists in Judgment Day was fallacious. The Institute for Creation Research
Institute for Creation Research
The Institute for Creation Research is a Christian institution in Dallas, Texas that specializes in education, research, and media promotion of Creation Science and Biblical creationism. The ICR adopts the Bible as an inerrant and literal documentary of scientific and historical fact as well as...

 (ICR) also claimed the film was not balanced.

WKNO-TV, the local PBS affiliate in Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Tennessee, and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the 4th Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers....

, initially decided not to air the documentary because of the "controversial nature" of the subject, but later reversed its decision.

External links

  • Judgment Day from PBS
    Public Broadcasting Service
    The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

  • Watch Online


Teacher resources for the documentary
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