Who or what that force is, no one is saying, but some people are wondering whether Dover could become the catalyst for a modern-day Scopes "monkey trial."

"I don't know anybody who has been quite bold enough to go this far," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union, said last week. "We view intelligent design as the latest attempt to teach religion instead of science."

The school board voted, 6-3, last month to change its ninth-grade biology curriculum, making it the latest municipality to tussle over the issue of religion in schools. Two board members quit in protest, and the administration is bracing itself for the inevitable court challenges.

To the faithful, the new curriculum has nothing to do with religion but represents a more balanced way of teaching about the origin of life. However, critics say it's a back door into creationism, a biblical theory that credits the origin of mankind to God.

"It's a crusade," said Carol Brown, who, along with her husband, Jeff, quit the school board after it approved the teaching of intelligent design, which will be part of the biology curriculum for the first time when students take up evolution in January. "What we're asking teachers to do is illegal. The Supreme Court said you cannot mix church and state."

That was a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it was unconstitutional for Louisiana to include creationism in school curriculums. The issue has come up again in Cobb County, Ga., where the school district has been sued for putting stickers in biology textbooks saying that evolution was "a theory, not a fact," and should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically." A court decision is pending.

Top Dover district administrators issued a statement Friday on implementation of the new biology curriculum "to make sure no one is promoting but also not inhibiting religion."

The district, the statement said, "wants to support and not discriminate against students and parents that do have competing beliefs, especially in the area of the origin-of-life debate."

In Dover, a small farming community whose main street is lined with modest Victorian houses once belonging to clothing- and cigar-factory workers, many people consider themselves evangelical or born-again Christians.

"And they're very vocal about it," Brown said. "I even had one ask me if I was born again."

Proponents of the new curriculum say the district does not plan to teach religion, but rather would take a critical look at Darwin's theory of natural selection and present an alternate view of how life began.

"The only thing we want to do is provide a balanced playing field for the students, as opposed to just hearing about the theory of evolution," said school board member William Buckingham, a self-described creationist.

As head of the board's curriculum committee, the retired police officer and former Marine lobbied for the district to purchase Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, an intelligent-design textbook. It would have been used along with the standard biology text. That plan was shelved, but 50 copies of Pandas later mysteriously turned up at the school.

"Teachers are instructed not to play one side over the other, but to play both sides," Buckingham said. The intelligent-design text will be available in the classrooms.

Now that the issues of prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in schools have been settled by the courts, at least for now, intelligent design is emerging as the newest faith-based battleground. There is growing pressure nationwide for Dover-style policies, said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Association for Science Education.

"These don't come from teachers and scientists," she said. "They come from politicians."

Intelligent design, she said, is "creationism in a lab coat."

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that supports scientists who are doing research in intelligent design, says schools should not teach it, but should stick with evolution because that is the predominant theory.

Jim Miller of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said there has "not been any successful competing theory" to evolution, and "intelligent design has not been substantiated in any scientific manner."

But supporters of intelligent design say that Darwin's theory of natural selection cannot account for the complexity of life-forms on Earth and that nature shows tangible signs of design by a preexisting intelligence. Unstated is the nature of that intelligence.

"That could be Mother Earth, Buddha, or whoever the Muslims believe in," said Buckingham, who belongs to a fundamentalist Christian church.

The high school's three biology teachers, meanwhile, are wondering just what they are supposed to teach. They say they had no input into the new curriculum and worry that they could be sued.

Intelligent design is "against what we think is right for the classroom," said Jennifer Miller, a teacher of 12 years. The book "wants to say evolution can't be proven. I also think you can't prove intelligent design."

"One of the problems is people don't have a good understanding of what evolution is," she said. "I tell the students from day one that I'm not trying to push them one way or another."

Superintendent Richard Nilsen declined to comment.

Buckingham said many people have expressed support and that most of the opposition has come from teachers and their relatives. But one parent who spoke out at a board meeting, Andrea Heilman, said she thinks the board is "taking us a step back."

Not so at Jim & Nina's Pizza shop, where employees were firmly behind the board.

"The school district is giving them both sides so they can make their own choice what to believe," manager Regina Rhoe said.

"I don't see where it hurts," owner Danny Ness said.

At the high school, though, students seemed divided. Senior Rachel Cashman, 17, said many of her classmates were religious and adhered to creationism, as she did. Cale Latchow, 17, a junior, believes so strongly in the Bible that he put a sticker on his guitar that states, "Darwin lies."

But his classmate, Jeremy Naylor, 18, said he "supports evolution 100 percent. It's backed by scientific fact rather than just someone's beliefs."

How It All Began - the Theories

Darwinism - A theory of biological evolution that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations, increasing the individual's ability to compete, survive and reproduce.

Creationism - The literal belief in the account of creation in the Book of Genesis, thus denying the theory of evolution of species.

Intelligent design - The belief that certain features of the universe and of living things cannot be explained by an undirected process such as natural selection, but only by purposeful power.