Parents are fighting back, after local religious extremists in Dover, Pennsylvania, forced schools to begin teaching "intelligent design" instead of scientific theories in biology classes.

Highlighting the growing national debate over the role of religion in public life, 11 Pennsylvania parents Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging a local school district's order to teach "intelligent design" to public high school students.

The requirement, they said, violates the religious liberty of parents, students and faculty and the constitutional separation of church and state.

On Oct. 18, the Dover Area School District Board voted 6-3 to make biology students at Dover Area High School "aware of gaps/problems" in the theory of evolution and include in ninth grade curriculum the theory of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is so complex it must have been created by some higher power.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg on behalf of the parents, say intelligent design is a disguised, more secular form of creationism -- a Bible-based view that God, not evolution, created all species. Parents sue schools over 'intelligent design:' Teaching about 'gaps' in evolution theory violates church-state separation, they claim

If this is what you have to do, people, then this is what you have to do. Take it to court.

"There is a small group of people trying to push a particular religion on everybody," said Joel Leib, a parent who participated in the lawsuit. "It is basically a way of teaching creationism. ... It doesn't belong in science class, just the same as evolution doesn't belong in comparative religion class. "

And listen to what the school district's argument is:

[attorney] Thompson acknowledged that intelligent design "has religious implications" because its proponents can't identify the "transcendent being that created species. But there are religious implications to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as well. If man was an accident and not a directed thing, then you do away with God. The implication of the theory of evolution is, there is no God; it's all forces of nature," he said.

Sad to think that some people feel that God can't exist in the same world with the facts of science. To them, if there's evolution, there can be no God. Can it possibly be that simple?