DOVER, Pa., Dec. 20 - In family-owned shops and along the streets near the town's only traffic light, where Christmas trees stood at all four corners, the talk of Dover turned again Tuesday to the fundamental question of how humans got here.

To be sure, a federal judge's decision barring Dover's public schools from teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution seemed to do little to change entrenched opinions. But locals hoped that with the case resolved, stereotypes of this town as a place of nonstop cultural warfare between liberal atheists and Bible-thumping fundamentalists would at last be dispelled.

"I hope it is a time for healing now," said one mother of four children, Saundra Roldan, a preschool teacher at the Y.M.C.A.

Mrs. Roldan maintains that the teaching of intelligent design is the teaching of religion, which, she says, belongs in the home or place of worship, not the public school classroom.

"I hope people will see it's not that we're a bunch of atheists and liberals," she said, "but that we're just trying to protect what America's about, really."

Glenda Lentz differed. As "Silent Night" played softly in her gift shop on Main Street, she said schools should be required to teach an alternative to evolution. "Children should not be taught that we came from monkeys when that's flat-out not true," said Mrs. Lentz, the mother of two children in public elementary school.

But Mrs. Lentz, too, said she hoped that this was the end of national attention focused on Dover.

"I'm so tired f it, it's not even funny," she said.

Like others, Carol Thomas, an assistant at the Dover library and the mother of four grown children, took offense at a warning by the televangelist Pat Robertson that voters here had rejected God by ousting a pro-intelligent-design school board in November.

"He would have people believe that not to support intelligent design would mean you're not a Christian, and that's just plain silly," Mrs. Thomas said. "Most of us are looking at it from the aspect of whether it's constitutional to teach intelligent design in the schools."

Of the attention the case has brought to the town, Mrs. Thomas said, "Many people elsewhere look at us either as a bunch of hicks or non-Christians, but that's not the case."

Nor are residents harboring anger at those with opposing views, she said. "We're not walking around glaring at each other. We just have different political views on this."

The Rev. Raymond Mummert, an evangelical minister and father of five children, two of them at Dover Area High School, said the court's decision reflected a movement toward "indoctrinating" children into believing that evolution was the only possible origin of humans.

But at the high school, the decision created hardly a stir, said Mr. Mummert's son Tim, a 10th grader. "It wasn't like anybody made a big thing about it," the youth said.

Tim has friends who oppose the teaching of intelligent design, he said. "But," he added, "we said to one another, 'Let's not let this divide our friendship.' "