In recent posts, I’ve argued that it is not only ineffective but undesirable for the state to compel all children to be taught evolution. [Standard disclaimer: my personal views on human origins are essentially those of Richard Dawkins.]

This opposition to government-mandated instruction in evolution does not sit well with many of my fellow evolutionists, and there have been several lengthy and thoughtful dissents. I’d been planning to dedicate this current post to a point-by-point response to evolutionary biology grad student Joshua Rosenau, but after thinking about it a little more, and looking at some of the other responses to my earlier essay, I think there may be a way to short-circuit the debate and get right to the nub of the issue.

The arguments for imposing evolution instruction by government fiat often boil down to an idea presented here by Rosenau:

Teaching [read “imposing”] empirical results of our shared reality is different from imposing untestable beliefs on others. Teaching [imposing] empirical results of the scientific method does not prevent anyone from having beliefs in the supernatural, and the only liberty it takes away is the liberty to believe things that are false, or to treat nonscience as science. In short, to lie.

Note that I had to correct Rosenau’s language. We’re not debating the merits of teaching evolution, we’re debating the merits of using the government’s monopoly on the use of force to compel its teaching.

You have to pay taxes to support the public schools. If you don’t, you go to jail. The public schools, because they are constitutionally prohibited from proselytizing students, cannot teach anything but a naturalistic view of evolution. Hence, all American taxpayers are compelled to fund the teaching of a non-theistic account of human origins, at least to the extent human origins are taught at all.

So Rosenau is arguing that it’s okay to impose instruction in the scientific consensus view of evolution, because science is true.

In other words, Rosenau is saying that the government is in possession of absolute truth, acquired through science, and that it is the proper role of government to spread the Good Word. This is a government establishment of rational empiricist epistemology.

There are a host of problems with this view of the role of government, but the one that many of my fellow evolutionists have the greatest difficulty grasping is that not everyone shares our epistemology, and that establishing an official government epistemology is every bit as harmful as establishing an official government religion.

When parents teach their children the Biblical creation story as literal truth, they are not “lying” to them as Rosenau imagines. They are passing along the “truth,” as they think it should be acquired, on the subject of human origins. Their epistemology, when it comes to this particular issue, is an epistemology of religious faith. As a result, they do not want their children taught an account of human origins based purely on science because they think science is the wrong epistemological tool for that job — any more than Richard Dawkins would want his children taught creationism.

Ramming an official epistemology down the public’s throat has the same effect as establishing an official religion. It leads to never-ending conflict. Even if this kind of indoctrination were consistent with America’s political ideals (which it most certainly is not), and even if it actually resulted in the widespread understanding of evolution (which it does not), there is no justification for doing it that could outweigh the costs in social Balkanization and animosity.

A related point that many rational empiricists seem unable to internalize is that their official epistemology can be hijacked by people with differing views on what the evidence shows. Proponents of “Intelligent Design” maintain that their views are more scientific than those of the consensus of biologists.

The mandate-evolution crowd thinks that their ideas are safe because they are in the majority among scientists. But we live in a democracy, not a scientocracy. Any government-mandated epistemology, and its fleshing out in the form of government curricula, will likely reflect the views of the majority of the people, not the majority of scientists. And, as the polling data I’ve previously cited show, the majority of the people do not see eye-to-eye with the scientific consensus on the subject of evolution. That is why evolution is taught so sporadically, and poorly, in so many public schools around this country.