Joy now reigns among some -- but fortunately not all -- citizens of Dover, Pa., where the Dover Area School District board has leaped ahead in the hot competition to be the next school system taken to court for teaching creationism.

Competition is fierce: Back in 1999, the Kansas Board of Education seized the initiative by stripping evolution from its science standards.

Unfortunately for creationists, that decision was reversed in the next election. But Kansas isn't giving up! The anti-evolution players are back in the majority on the Kansas board after yet another election.

And until Dover's current coup, it looked as though this year's pennant would go to Ohio or to Cobb County, Ga., , where biology textbooks contain disclaimer-stickers asserting that evolution is only a "theory, not a fact."

But for now, Dover is the leading contender in the world series of scientific nonsense. What puts Dover ahead is that its board has become the first in the country to explicitly mandate the teaching of both "intelligent design" and evolution in its biology curriculum.

Intelligent design is the assertion, unsupported by any scientific evidence, that the complexity of life is the product of the intentional action of an "intelligent designer," i.e., a supernatural being -- in other words, a miraculous intervention.

Evolution, on the other hand, is at the center of all life science, much physical science (as in geology), and applied fields such as medicine and agriculture.

The school board's "procedural statement" asserts that "Darwin's Theory is a theory." Precisely so. Evolution is a theory. Another such theory is that a force we call "gravity" exists that causes masses to attract one another.

In science, "theory" means an explanation, and not just any explanation, but a testable one that is consistently supported by scientific data.

Evolutionary theory is as factual an explanation of the history of life on Earth (including human life), no more and no less so, as gravitational theory is of the fact that objects fall down instead of up, although the basic principles of evolution are somewhat better understood than those of gravity.

There is no controversy in the scientific community about this. Evolutionary biology is science, period.

Now let's look at intelligent design's promoters, whose "explanation of the origin of life" the Dover board thinks students must be "made aware of" in order to "provide a balanced view."

The intelligent design team, led by a small but well-funded, conservative-Christian cabal, includes the authors of Dover's new reference book, "Of Pandas and People," and a number of practicing scientists.

What's their score on original scientific data supporting intelligent design? Zero. How are they doing on testable intelligent design hypotheses? Zero again.

But in professions of religious conviction, their stats are much higher. Former Berkeley law professor and team captain Phillip Johnson admits, "This isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy."

He even identifies the designer when he explains the "defining concept of our movement" as "theistic realism," meaning that "God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology."

Johnson is still waiting for someone to knock that last one home. But so far, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, the intelligent design team's scientific all-star, hasn't even made the starting lineup.

And mathematician/philosopher William Dembski, the team's intellectual ace, declares intelligent design to be "just the Logos of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

There's no disagreement in the dugout about this. Intelligent design is a religious belief, period.

There seems to be no point in trying to convince Dover board members, or the good people who pressure them politically to adopt such misguided positions, that evolution, accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientifically literate persons worldwide, is the mechanism of diversifying life on this planet.

But attempts to use intelligent design as a scientific explanation have been dead as a doornail for almost 150 years. The arguments of its proponents are virtually indistinguishable from those for intelligent design by William Paley in 1802. They were wrong then (as Darwin and many others have since shown), and they are not only wrong today but irrelevant to science and good science education.

They are also unnecessary to any reasonable form of religious belief, Christian or otherwise. The only positive result of the board's decision is that two members have shown themselves to be principled enough to resign rather than go along with it.

They recognize this game as a contest in which adults entrusted with the education of children shouldn't compete.

Winning this one might mean joy in Dover, but it won't win the school board a place in any hall of fame.

* Paul R. Gross, emeritus university professor of life sciences at the University of Virginia, and Barbara Forrest, professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, are authors of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design.