by Paul Braterman
Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is now interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, and was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He blogs at Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where Braterman is a regular contributor. You can find the full article here. And we are grateful to the editors for their permission to republish.
December 20, 2025 was the 20th anniversary of the day on which Judge John Jones III handed down his decisive ruling, in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, that Intelligent Design was a version of creationism, which is religion and not science, and as such violated the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution and could not be taught within the publicly funded school system. Given changes in the US legal landscape, we need to ask whether this ruling is still secure. And given everything else that is happening in the US at the moment, we may wonder whether this even matters. Here I lay out why I think that the ruling is not necessarily secure, review what is at stake, and argue that it matters very much indeed.
What we now call Christian Nationalism has its roots in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, when creationists such as Tim LaHaye fused together political conservatism, the newly adopted abortion issue, literalist Bible-based religion, and the rejection of evolution science as Humanist, un-American, and as we would now say Woke. We can see the influence of these ideas today in Trump’s administration, where at least three cabinet ministers (Pete Hegseth, Scott Turner at HUD, and Doug Collins at the VA) are creationists, as are Speaker Mike Johnson, Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel, and Russell Vought who at the Office of Management and Budget has enormous day-to-day influence. To these we might add Vice President Vance, and Health [sic] Secretary RF Kennedy Jr. These are not creationists, but share their disdain for the scientific and academic establishments; Vance rose to stardom by telling the US Religious Right that “the Professors are the enemy,” while Kennedy’s onslaught on established science is all too well-known. Thus creationism is closely coupled to the rest of the Regime’s war on reality.
As for the claim, pervasive in the creationist literature, that evolution acceptance involves religion denial, I should mention here that Judge Jones himself is a committed Lutheran, and has offered himself as an example of the compatibility of Christian belief and evolution acceptance, while Ken Miller, a crucial witness at the trial and indefatigable campaigner against creationism, is a devout Catholic, author of Finding Darwin’s God, and co-author of a widely used high school textbook, Miller and Levine Biology.
In 2004, creationists on the board of the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania attracted press attention by objecting to the adoption of Miller and Levine, on the grounds that it was “laced with Darwinism,” to the exclusion of creationism. This led to correspondence with the Discovery Institute and with the Thomas More Law Center, who told them about the alternative textbook (alternative as in alternative facts) Of Pandas and People, which the Center were eager to promote in order to introduce Intelligent Design into the public school system.
According to its website, the mission of the Thomas More Law Center is to
Preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage; Defend the religious freedom of Christians; Restore time-honored moral and family values; Protect the sanctity of human life; Promote a strong national defense and a free and sovereign United States of America. The Law Center accomplishes its mission through litigation, education, and related activities.
This places it firmly within the Christian Nationalist movement, as I described it earlier. As for Intelligent Design, it is the view that nature in general, and the appearance of new groups of living things in particular, is controlled by an unspecified designer (or Designer). This view is clearly incompatible with evolution science. To quote Pandas,
Most significantly, all design proponents hold that the major groups of organisms had their own origins.
The identity of this designer is not specified, although the Discovery Institute, which is a major promoter of Intelligent Design, seems more recently to be abandoning the pretence that the designer is anything other than God.
The board accepted copies of Pandas for the school, and also ordered the biology teachers to read to their classes a statement declaring among other things that
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.
Very courageously, teachers refused to present such nonsense to their classes, since that would violate their professional ethic, and the statement was then read out by the school superintendent.
A group of outraged parents, among them Tammy Kitzmiller, promptly took the School District to court, invoking the Establishment Clause, and their cause was embraced by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Science Education, who assembled a formidable coalition of expert witnesses. The ensuing trial has been the subject of several books, and a PBS documentary, Judgement Day, still available on YouTube, in which some of the participants play themselves. There is also a moving compilation here of short statements by some of those involved.
Of Pandas and People had its own interesting evolutionary history. The academic editor, Charles Thaxton, was an Old Earth creationist, who had testified in Kansas State hearings to his rejection of common descent, while the co-authors, Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis, were Young Earth creationists. The original title was Biology and Creation, and its target was the creationist market that appeared to be opening up when, in 1981, the State of Louisiana passed a law saying that if evolutionary science is to be taught, creation science should be taught as well. This law was challenged by a group of parents, teachers, and ministers, on First Amendment grounds, with support from numerous scientists, including 77 Nobel Prize winners, and in the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court upheld their challenge 7-2. In doing so they invoked the Lemon test, which requires a secular purpose for government activity, and opposes government activity which advances (or indeed impedes) religion.
Undaunted, the authors simply changed the original title to Of Pandas and People, and partly rewrote the text, replacing “creation science” and “creationism” with “intelligent design”. During the discovery phase of the Kitzmiller trial, the plaintiffs obtained copies of the intermediate drafts, one even containing the expression “design proponentsists”. The Missing Link!
It is also noteworthy that the Pandas (1989) was the first book to refer repeatedly to “intelligent design,” predating the work of Phillip Johnson and the Discovery Institute in the 1990s. Thaxton and Kenyon are currently listed as Fellows of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which exists to promote Intelligent Design, while simultaneously maintaining that this is a different thing from creationism.
The Discovery Institute has repeatedly defended Pandas, and several Discovery Institute Fellows, including Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, provided expert witness statements in preparation for the Kitzmiller trial although, with the honourable exception of Michael Behe, they withdrew without giving evidence after a complicated dispute with the Thomas More Law Center.
Judge Jones now has understandable concerns about the direction of the US legal system itself. In his 2005 judgement, he also used the Lemon test, but this is no longer in effect. As he noted in 2022,
While applying the Lemon test is hardly perfect, I found it to be a sound and logical way to evaluate the case that came before me.
As a result of the recent Kennedy decision [which permitted prayer by a high school coach after games], federal judges are now directed to utilize a history-based approach in place of the more structured Lemon test when deciding cases. I would respectfully submit, as one who used the Lemon test and found it to be soundly crafted, that this new approach will lead to increasingly disparate decisions by lower court judges that will be based on ad hoc analysis and excessively subjective findings.
The result will necessarily be that the line of separation between church and state will become increasingly blurred. I am quite sure that this is precisely what the majority intended, but I would submit that we are about to enter an era where, like it or not, we will see the Supreme Court allow much more religion in the public square. Not an earthquake to be sure, but at least an aftershock of major proportions.
Remember that the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard had also been decided on the basis of the Lemon test.
Very recently, Judge Jones has told us that the case was so clear that he would rule the same today. I note however that other judges might feel differently, and that the case was made much easier to decide by what he referred to as the School District board’s “breathtaking inanity” (the existing board members were soundly defeated in an election that took place while the judgement was being written). Moreover, the increasing use by Republican-dominated States, which is where creationism tends to be strongest, of school vouchers which parents can use at their discretion, could provide a pathway whereby public money, and pupils who would otherwise be publicly educated, are funnelled towards private schools not bound by the Establishment Clause. In Alabama, this is already leading to the use in these schools of textbooks from Bob Jones University and Abeka, whose offerings explicitly describe evolution as scientifically incorrect, satanically inspired, and motivated by the wish to justify immorality. Unsurprisingly, the Abeka texts also play down the evils of slavery, and explain the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as an understandable reaction to the incompetence of State governments dominated by freedmen.
I had forgotten how bad Pandas actually is. Its title is a reference to the fact that the term “panda” is applied to two very different animals, the giant panda which is a bear, and the red panda, which is more closely related to raccoons. Although they are only distantly related, both these species have separately evolved a false thumb, a striking example of convergent evolution. All this has been known for over a century, with recent confirmation by DNA phylogenies, but for some strange reason the book chooses to present this as evidence of the inadequacy of evolution science, in favour of Intelligent Design.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Contrary to [the claims in Pandas,] the data overwhelmingly support a picture of the organic world completely consistent with what they insist on calling “Darwinian” evolution, and difficult to explain in any other way. What they do not support is the authors’ flawed reasoning, understandable in first-year undergraduates, but inexcusable in textbook writers.