Evolution is about "descent with modification" - it covers how life diversified into current forms. It does not address how life started, that would be abiogenesis which is a substantially harder question. (And isn't helped by the fact that we're trying to figure out molecular interactions that happened billions of years ago and didn't exactly fossilize very well.)

What the judge ruled is exactly correct. Evolution is clearly science fact. And has been accepted as such within science for close to a century with no major challenges.

The theory of intelligent design is the attempt to reintroduce God into evolution. Fine. It is not a testable theory, and hence is not an appropriate subject matter for scientific investigation. That is not a statement that it is necessarily wrong - just a statement that it makes no predictions or claims that can be tested and hence cannot be addressed by science.

However I'll say that the history of science suggests that the gaps that intelligent design folks point to have a tendancy to shrink and shrink. In fact a lot of the ones that they think require explanation don't - but to see that you need to understand what happens on timescales which are so vast that our intuition of what is likely to happen leads us astray.

Incidentally the best comment that I know of against Intelligent design comes from Mark Twain:

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.


(Note that when Twain wrote we had not yet discovered radioactive dating, and so had no accurate way of figuring out the true age of man or of the Earth.)

Cheers,
Ben