NOVA Documentary: “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial”

When: Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Louisiana Public Broadcasting, 7-9 p.m.

WYES, New Orleans, 7:30-9:30 p.m.

View online on Wednesday, November 14, 2007.

The story of the first legal case involving intelligent design creationism, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005), will be told in a two-hour documentary, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” that will air on PBS’s NOVA on Tuesday, November 13. Barbara Forrest, Professor of Philosophy in the Dept. of History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University, served as one of the expert witnesses for the plaintiffs and will be featured in the documentary along with other participants in the case.

In December 2004, eleven parents of public school students in Dover, PA, filed the first lawsuit in a United States federal court against the teaching of intelligent design creationism in public school science classes. The following year, on December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III, Middle District of Pennsylvania, saying that “ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” ruled that the teaching of intelligent design violates the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution.

A short interview clip with Forrest and other participants in the case is available on the NOVA website. Forrest recounts her experiences in the trial in the 2007 edition of the book she co-authored with Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (see Creationism’s Trojan Horse). Forrest also wrote an article about the trial that is available online: “The ‘Vise Strategy’ Undone: Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District.