That's the 139-page opinion in which the learned judge - a churchgoing appointee of President George W. Bush - dissects the intelligent design movement and convincingly shows it to be an obvious attempt to use public education to promote a particular form of religious belief.

One Utah lawmaker - Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan - says he will still pursue an ID mandate in the coming legislative session. But that would be a waste of precious time.

As the judge ruled, for public schools to suggest that intelligent design is a serious alternative to scientifically accepted principles of Darwinian evolution is not only unconstitutional, it is intellectually dishonest. And no one is in a better position to see that than Judge Jones.

He heard testimony for and against intelligent design during a six-week trial of the suit brought by a group of parents against the Dover, Pa., school board after its majority (since ousted in an election) required an anti-evolution, pro-ID statement to be read in its ninth-grade science classes. And, in the end, it was the testimony of ID's leading "experts" that proved the most damning.

As Jones details in his ruling (http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/educate/ktzmllrdvr122005 opn.pdf), those experts basically admitted that ID is not science. It is an alternative to science, developed and promoted by people who are made uncomfortable, to the point of dread, by the concept of a universe that is not ordered by the hand of God.

Or, as the ID movement refuses to grasp, a universe that, so far as science is concerned, may or may not be ordered by the hand of God.

Evolution is science because it limits itself to natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for observed phenomena. ID is not science because it holds that life is too complex to have arisen in any way other than to have been put here by an intelligent hand.

That's not only religion, that's a particular fundamentalist Christian form of religion, one that excludes not only true science but limitless other faiths and belief systems.

That's why ID is out of the public schools in Pennsylvania, and why it should stay out in Utah and everywhere else.