The Tuesday court decision puts an exclamation mark on a courtroom battle widely hailed as the successor to the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, when proponents of modern scientific methods first battled creationists in court over the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution, according to The Post.

"State and local school boards from Kansas to Georgia and Florida have begun challenges to evolution, and these officials watched Dover closely in hopes of divining how much leeway they might get in federal court."

Upon his return to London from a science expedition around the world in 1836, Charles Darwin, a British naturalist, conducted thorough research of his notes and specimens.

Out of this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called "specialization."

Darwin's work had a tremendous impact on religious thought. Many people strongly opposed the idea of evolution because it conflicted with their religious convictions.

John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, a leading intelligent design think tank in Seattle, took a dim view of the judge, telling the Post he evinced a "grandiosity" and "egregious" judicial activism. But he agreed that the decision comes as a heavy blow.

"There's no doubt that people will trumpet this and that now they can say a federal judge agrees and that doesn't help," West said. "His angry tone was not helpful."

"The court has held that it's not a scientific theory," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the trial lawyers for parents who sued the school board.

"At a time when this country is lagging behind other countries, we can ill afford to shackle our children's minds with 15th-century science."

Steve Fuller, a philosopher of science at the University of Warwick in England who testified at the trial for the defense, acknowledged that the school board members undercut the case for a new theory, the paper said.

"Intelligent design has to be de-theologized," Fuller was quoted as saying. "But it will be a shame if a result of this decision is that we can't question Darwinism, which is not just a theory but an entire secular world view that flattens the distinction between humans and other life."

When the trial ended in early November, Jones faced two choices. He could have construed the case narrowly and ruled on whether the school board had a religious motive. That, in Jones's view, was an easy call. He found that school board members had committed "outright lies under oath" and displayed a "striking ignorance" of intelligent design.

But Jones went further. "Intelligent Design is not science," he wrote. "Proponents … occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist [but] no serious alternative to God as designer has been proposed."

Most polls show that 40 to 55 percent of Americans favor a strict biblical creationist view of evolution, reported the Post.

Bush has voiced support to teaching the "intelligent design," a God-centered alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, to US students.

In August, Bush told reporters from several US newspapers that science instructors should teach intelligence design alongside the traditional views about the origin of life.