Perhaps the most anticipated witness at the trial was William Buckingham, who as the chairman of the Dover district curriculum committee last fall, had spearheaded the adoption of the intelligent design statement. It was Buckingham, a former prison supervisor and member of an independent fundamentalist church, who cried out at a board meeting: "Two thousand years ago somebody died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Under cross-examination, Buckingham acknowledged there were times his testimony contradicted statements he had made earlier in sworn depositions, but said his memory was faulty because he was "addicted to OxyContin," a prescription opiate, and had twice been in rehabilitation.

Both Buckingham and the former school board president, Alan Bonsell, who were the leading advocates for the change, acknowledged in testimony that they believe the book of Genesis is literally true.

This week, Bonsell acknowledged that he had earlier testified untruthfully when he claimed not to know where money was raised to donate 60 copies of "Of Pandas and People" to the school library. The money had been raised in Buckingham's church and funneled through Bonsell's father, so the books could be donated anonymously. Hearing that, the usually affable Judge Jones lost patience.

Red-faced and visibly angry, he took over examining Bonsell himself, peppering him with questions for 10 minutes. "You tell me why you didn't say Mr. Buckingham was involved," he demanded. Then, later in the week, he snapped at one of the board's lawyers: "Don't insult my intelligence."

The chief scientific witness for the plaintiffs, Kenneth Miller, said that he, too, was "a person of faith. ... I'm a Roman Catholic." He is also a Brown University biologist and co-author of one of the most widely used high school textbooks -- "Biology," which is the primary text employed in Dover Senior High School. Miller testified that, "If you invoke a non-natural cause, a spirit force or something like that in your research, I have no way to test it. So even if you are correct ... that really wouldn't be a part of science."

"The statement by the Dover board of education falsely undermines the scientific status of the theory of evolution," he said, "and does a great disservice to science education in Dover."

The "Intelligent Design" movement is the most pernicious pseudoscience of our time. It seeks to undermine the teaching of evolution, at a minimum, but at its root is a broad attack on the nature of science itself - science's insistence on evidence, its unrelenting testing of hypotheses, its tradition of first airing new propositions before knowledgeable colleagues, its requirement of peer-reviewed scientific publication, its skeptical scrutiny of all new ideas, its error-correcting mechanisms and welcome acceptance of new ideas that better fit better evidence, its wonderful and imaginative creativity. In its place, ID advocates would give equal time to an ancient and long-discredited faith-based idea with zero scientific evidence. They would bypass all of sciences institutional mechanisms that painstakingly sift unsupported ideas from well-supported ones and that are at the core of what science is all about.(my emphasis)