Turning High School Biology into a Battleground Over the Existence of God

I love PZ, but I really can’t imagine a less effective way of trying to teach evolution than declaring to high school juniors that religion is evil and there is no God, and then trying to debate them on that point. No, there isn’t “a dark evil gnawing at the heart of the American public”; to the extent that religion can be characterized as a dark evil (and I would take exception with that), it dominates, rather than gnaws at, the heart of the American public. A science teacher who demands that his or her students reject religion in the course of a high school biology class is doing those students (and science) a disservice, and shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom. To be sure, the biology teacher who went out of her way to undermine the teaching of evolution also doesn’t belong in the classroom, but the latter doesn’t excuse the former, and (more importantly) the former is no antidote to the latter. It isn’t appeasement to recognize that a high school biology class is hardly the place to start a war between science and religion.

Let me now give the normal caveats; while I find evangelical atheists annoying, I also find their position more compelling than that of evangelical Christians. Moreover, it’s obvious that religious extremists pose a greater danger to freedom, tolerance, secular democracy, etc. than evangelical atheists (although I’m less sure that’s because of the content of belief than because the former outnumber the latter by a 10-to-1 margin), and that the that inroads religious extremists make into public institutions should be challenged whenever it is productive to do so. Finally, in the interests of disclosure I should also note that I think PZ (and Dawkins) are dead wrong about the roles science and religion play in human civilization, but I don’t want this comment thread to degenerate (as some in the past have) into competitive screeching on that point.