Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• The Legal Strategy: Repackaging Religion for the Science Classroom
• Michael Behe: The Star Witness for a Sinking Ship
• Redefining “Science” Until It Includes Astrology
• What This Testimony Meant for the Case
• Conclusion and What Comes Next
• Works Cited

Executive Summary

The Dover trial wasn’t just a legal showdown—it was a public dissection of intelligent design’s scientific credibility. In this first essay, we dive into how the ID movement tried to pass itself off as science in court, only to be undone by its star witness and a stack of books he insisted didn’t exist.

Kitzmiller v. Dover remains the clearest legal and scientific line ever drawn between evidence-based biology and religious apologetics rebranded as theory.

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The Legal Strategy: Repackaging Religion for the Science Classroom

By 2004, the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania had decided to walk a well-worn path: challenging the dominance of evolution in public education. The school board required teachers to present intelligent design (ID) as an alternative to Darwinian evolution and directed students to the book Of Pandas and People—a now-infamous pseudoscientific tract.

This was not a bold new idea. The U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that teaching creationism in public schools violated the Establishment Clause. But intelligent design, its proponents insisted, was different. They claimed it was not religious, not creationist, and certainly not theological. It was, they said, science.

So the Kitzmiller trial became a test case: could ID survive scrutiny as a scientific theory, or would it collapse under cross-examination? The courtroom would decide whether this “theory” had any legitimate standing in biology—or whether it was simply creationism with better marketing.

TIME framed the case as an “Evolution Wars” spectacle, but the real drama played out in the footnotes and cross-examinations.

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Michael Behe: The Star Witness for a Sinking Ship

Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University and leading ID advocate, took the stand as the defense’s star witness. A practicing scientist with an academic pedigree, Behe was the ID movement’s best chance to prove its credibility. He had coined the concept of “irreducible complexity,” arguing that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum or the immune system couldn’t evolve step by step because they’d stop working if even one part were missing.

On paper, Behe looked formidable. He spoke with the calm precision of someone used to lecturing undergrads and debating critics. But as the cross-examination began, it quickly became clear that rhetoric and credentials alone wouldn’t be enough to carry the day.

Attorney Eric Rothschild of the ACLU methodically dismantled Behe’s claims. When Behe insisted that there were no peer-reviewed studies explaining the evolutionary development of the immune system, Rothschild responded with an avalanche. He stacked book after book and study after study onto the witness stand—nearly fifty in total—each addressing the very mechanisms Behe claimed science could not explain.

The moment was cinematic. A tower of published biology stood beside a man who insisted it didn’t exist.

Behe did not retreat. He dismissed the entire stack by claiming none of it “satisfactorily” answered the question. To an outside observer, this wasn’t rigorous skepticism; it was denial in real time. It underscored what critics had long argued: intelligent design was not a research program, but a belief system draped in scientific language.

Judge John E. Jones III later summarized the exchange bluntly, noting that Behe was presented with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and textbook chapters, yet “simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution” (Jones 89).

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Redefining “Science” Until It Includes Astrology

If your definition of science is loose enough, astrology walks in wearing a lab coat.

Behe’s most revealing moment came when he was asked to define “scientific theory.” He described it as “a proposed explanation which focuses or points to physical, observable data and logical inferences.” Rothschild pressed the implication: under that definition, wouldn’t astrology count as science?

Behe answered yes.

It was not a slip. It was an honest admission—and a fatal one.

Judge Jones captured the problem succinctly in his ruling: under Behe’s definition, both intelligent design and astrology would qualify as science, rendering the term effectively meaningless (Jones 71). If everything is science, then nothing is.

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What This Testimony Meant for the Case

Behe’s refusal to accept mainstream research, his elastic definition of science, and his reliance on rhetorical rather than evidential claims led the court to a stark conclusion: intelligent design is not science.

More importantly, his testimony exposed the weakness at the heart of the ID movement. It claimed openness to evidence while dismissing mountains of it. It claimed scientific legitimacy while redefining science until it lost all boundaries.

In the end, the trial told a human story—a story of belief held so tightly that it cracked under pressure.

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Conclusion and What Comes Next

Next time, we’ll turn to the book that sparked the controversy—Of Pandas and People—and the infamous find-and-replace error that turned “creationists” into “cdesign proponentsists,” the most revealing typo in legal history.

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Works Cited

Behe, Michael. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Free Press, 1996.

Humes, Edward. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul. Ecco, 2007.

Jones, John E. III. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005).

National Center for Science Education. Kitzmiller v. Dover Trial Transcript. https://ncse.ngo.

Pennock, Robert T. Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism. MIT Press, 1999.