Heckler's Veto Over Evolution

One of the religious purposes behind putting "disclaimer" stickers in biology text books is to assuage the hurt feelings of parents who don't believe evolution and don't like the fact that schools are teaching something that their religion rejects. There are good reasons to dismiss such goals as unacceptable.

Timothy Sandefur writes:

[T]he mere fact that a school teaches something that is “incompatible with” a religion does not mean that that thing may not be taught in the classroom. The government is certainly forbidden from teaching children that God does not exist; but it is not forbidden from teaching children that the earth orbits the sun, or that Israel exists, or that black people are not genetically inferior to white people. These facts may indeed be “incompatible” with the views of certain religious groups, but that does not mean the state may not teach them.

Any contrary rule would mean that religious people would have a heckler’s veto over the classroom, or as I’ve put it earlier, a “get out of evolution free” card. Any time a fact challenged their preconceived religious notions, such people would be able not to silence the teacher and say “that is out of bounds, because we do not want to hear it.”

[A]ll facts can have “implications” to any number of people, based on their misunderstandings, their corrupt motives, or what have you. The mere fact that evolution can “have implications” (to whom?) which are “detrimental” (to what degree?) to “theistic beliefs” (why do these beliefs alone count in the consideration of this issue?) does not prove that teaching evolution is the same as propagating a religious viewpoint. One might easily construct any number of hypotheses along the same line to show the weakness of this “implications” argument: the fact that good, innocent people suffer from awful catastrophes is a fact that “has implications” that are “detrimental to theistic beliefs”: many people turn away from religion because they think a just God would not allow the innocent to suffer. Ought we then to avoid telling students about the Christmas tsunami? Again, it is not a violation of the Constitution for a public school to teach children things that they find difficult to reconcile with their religious predispositions.

Sandefur is making a very strong, very important point here: the public education of everyone cannot be limited to just those ideas that are completely inoffensive to everyone's religion. If anything can be eliminated, watered-down, or misrepresented in order to avoid hurting people's feelings and avoid creating a religious confrontation, then it wouldn't be possible to teach much of anything at all.

Read More:

• Evolution vs. Creationism
• Science vs. Religion
• Evolution & Religion
• What is Intelligent Design?
• What is Science?