That a federal lawsuit had to be filed in Harrisburg this week to prevent "intelligent design" from being offered as an alternative to the theory of evolution in a York County school district is a sad commentary on a certain sort of blind faith -- the fearful sort of faith that is blind to reason, blind to observable natural phenomenon, blind even to God's unfolding creation.

This is the renewal of an old battle, of course, one that the closed-minded won initially in the infamous 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" but lost in subsequent years when the weight of scientific evidence buried the contention that evolution was "just" a theory. The question seemed settled legally in 1987 when the Supreme Court ruled that creationism -- the belief that a supernatural being created the world -- was a religious viewpoint that could not be taught alongside evolution in public school science courses.

Enter "intelligent design," which is the same old creationist wine in new bottles. Made to appear scientific, it suggests that the diversity and complexity of life can be explained only by the existence of a grand designer.

Whether God exists is perhaps the most fundamental question facing humankind, but science, which trades in observable facts, can make only so many contributions to the debate this side of the Second Coming. Fundamentally, it is a religious and philosophical question, not one for a high school biology class.

The Dover Area school board thought otherwise. In the spirit of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, the board voted 6-3 in October to tell students about intelligent design as well as the theory of evolution. No other public school in the nation is believed to have taken this step before.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State sued the district this week on behalf of 11 parents. As ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak correctly observed, "Intelligent design is a Trojan horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes."

The sadness abides not just in taxpayer dollars going to defend a sly, anti-scientific religious crusade but that the whole thing is based on a misunderstanding.

Those who resist evolution do not understand that a theory in science is not just a figure of speech denoting conjecture. More importantly, they do not understand that theirs is a minority position even among other Christians who believe that science and faith can co-exist without contradiction. For example, the Roman Catholic Church, more than a billion strong, does not have much of a problem with evolution, a view that Pope John Paul II reasserted with a formal statement in 1996. Many mainline Protestants also see no contradiction.

A wise man once observed: "God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform." It's a shame that a federal case is needed to make that point anew when the subject is evolution, which can be more sensibly and more reverently viewed as the Creator's way of proceeding.