Federal District Court in Harrisburg, Pa., is not a coffee shop, so Judge John E. Jones III could not get to the point of a case recently concerning the teaching of Intelligent Design in just a few minutes of talk. His decision is 139 pages long, but it answers succinctly the question of whether schools in that region ought to offer the possibility in science classes that life was created by an intelligent force.

“To be sure,” he wrote in a decision Dec. 20, “Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.”

Judge Jones goes into considerably more detail about science and Intelligent Design (ID), but the above is the crux of it: Science depends on experiments that have the possibility of showing ideas to be wrong. There is no such possibility with ID because, as Judge Jones observes, “Although proponents of the [Intelligent Design Movement] occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including defendants’ expert witnesses.”

ID is not a new theory, but an old one dressed in new clothes. Testimony for the plaintiffs in the case of Kitzmiller v. the Dover Area School District traced it back 800 years to Thomas Aquinas, who Judge Jones said, framed this syllogism: “Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer.” Recently in the United States this basic idea has been cloaked in “scientific creationism” and ID, but the centrality of God remains apparent.

The decision is in no way an attempt to refute the presence of God. It is only to conclude what counts as science in a public-school science class. Devout Christians such as Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist who testified for the plaintiffs, say there is no reason for the conflict between faith and science. In his book, “Finding Darwin’s God,” he writes, “Evolution answers the question of chance and purpose exactly the same way that history answers the questions about the course of human events.”

The Dover case is not the end of this debate, no matter how well Judge Jones framed the issue. But by offering such a thoughtful decision, he has set the terms of the debate more clearly than ever before.