Is it constitutional to teach Schönborn in biology class?

Digging for something else, I encounter Kathryn Jean Lopez arguing with an emailer about curriculum. The emailer objects to an earlier comment, where Ms. Lopez allowed that she's "the Discovery Institute's patsy" at NRO, but "I don't want public schools reading Cardinal Shönborn's tract on creation and evolution." In response, K-Lo:

if Baton Rouge wants freshman reading his book as part of some class or activity, that would be ridiculous to consider unconstitutional.

Ridiculous? The book is Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution and a Rational Faith, a work of Catholic theology. In what 9th grade class is that conceivably appropriate? Surely not biology since it isn't, and doesn't purport to be, a biology text.

Among the gross errors in the book, it claims:

If it is true that everything developed from one first seed, then there ought to be innumerable transitional stages, but noone has yet discovered any of them.

The Cardinal has apparently never heard of fossils. I mean, the usual creationist plaint is that there should be more transitional fossils than we have, but to claim that none exist at all is simply absurd. Tiktaalik is a famous recent find, but Australopithecus finds are pretty well known, and it's trivial to show transitional fossils in the evolution of the features of modern horses. This is the sort of claim that actually makes students dumber, by giving them false information, and closing their eyes to the possibility of new information.

Even if there were ongoing questions about how many transitional fossils there ought to be versus how many we know of (and there aren't), it's a question that doesn't make sense for a 9th grade class. To understand the question, a student has to know what evolution is, what fossils are, what makes something a transitional fossil (most creationists get this totally wrong), and what we actually know about the fossil record (this argument is one about what we don't know). In 9th grade biology, students are just learning (based on the newly approved Florida science standards) about the components of a cell, how genetic, environmental and pathogenic factors all contribute to disease, how muscles work and what the major muscles are in humans, how reflexes work, how nerves work, how the brain is organized, how blood is pumped through the body and what it's made of, how digestion and excretion work, how the immune system works, the classification of plants, animals, fungi, archaea, eubacteria and protists, how mutations and recombination increase genetic variability, how natural selection operates, how gene flow and genetic drift operate, how deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium allow one to test for various evolutionary mechanisms, how reproductive isolation leads to speciation, how fossil hominids tell us about human evolution, how scientists investigate the origins of life, how scientists classify life based on evolutionary relationships, how speciation and extinction influence biological diversity, how Mendelian genetics works, how to apply that knowledge in forensic investigations, how cells divide, how the genetic code is shared across the tree of life, how genes are regulated within the cell, how DNA replicates, how meiosis differs from mitosis, how a population can be characterized in terms of size, rates of growth and age structure, how individuals and groups of individuals interact in ecological communities, how abiotic resources in the environment influence living things, how biodiversity impacts the environment, how nutrients and energy cycle through the environment, how the major biomolecules differ, how ATP is produced in the cell and used as an energy source, how enzymes work, how photosynthesis works, how aerobic respiration differs from anaerobic respiration, how human actions influence the environment, and of course, how evolution is supported by the fossil record, comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, biogeography, molecular biology, and observed evolutionary change. There's simply not time in the schedule to squander on scientifically inaccurate religious polemics.

The fact that the book is a religious polemic means that it is inappropriate for a science class, even if it were scientifically accurate. A public school biology class is not the place for this discussion, which is in the paragraph leading up to Schönborn's woefully misleading discussion of transitional fossils.

When we say with the Bible that God created man in his own image and likeness, then we are also saying that he made something essentially new that differs from the plant and animal realms, even though all three are profoundly related to each other. Yet how can we give an account of our faith such that God's creative will is shown to be expressed in this ordering of things? Is Saint Francis of Assisi's "Canticle of the Sun" just a pious exaggeration, or is it addressing some kind of reality? Is it merely a play on words to please pious souls, or is creation, with all its realms, its orders and its species a "progetto intelligente che è il cosmo," a "rational project" or an "intelligent plan that is the cosmos," as Pope Benedict the XVI stated in his general audience on November 9, 2005?

Does anyone think that a 9th grade biology class is really the place to address such questions? To teach Catholic dogma and then (perhaps) to critique it? Imagine the firestorm surrounding some student who dared to suggest that Catholic theology is all wrong, or if one insisted that only Catholic theology could be correct, and the rest of the class was wrong, wrong, wrong.

That's not what biology class is for. If kids want to debate theology, they can start their own blogs, or chat about it with their friends and family. It isn't the place of teachers, as representatives of the government, to take sides. And debating Schönborn's creationist ideas would inevitably privilege them over creationist ideas from the Jehovah's Witness tradition or from Baptist sources, not to mention Islamic creationism, Hindu creationism, Native American creationism, and the odd instance of Jewish creationism, and never mind the many Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Native Americans and members of other traditions which have no problem with evolution.

And since the Constitution prohibits the state from endorsing one religion over another, or endorsing religion over non-religion, it's pretty easy to see how it would be unconstitutional to teach Schönborn's book in a 9th grade public school biology class. For instance, a teacher presenting that book must address, favorably or unfavorably, this theological point:

Attempts like that [arguing for a six day creation six thousand years ago], as if it were making scientific statements at this point, are what is called "fundamentalism." To be more exact, in American Protestantism this view of the Christian faith has called itself "fundamentalism" from the start. …

The Catholic position on "creationism" is clear. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that one should "not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that make it ridiculous, because they are in obvious contradiction with reason. It is nonsense to maintain that the world is only six thousand years old. Any attempt to prove such a thing scientifically means provoking what Saint Thomas calls the irrisio infidelium, the mockery of unbelievers. Exposing the faith to mockery with false arguments of this kind is not right; indeed, it is explicitly to be rejected. Let that be enough on the subject of "creationism" and "fundamentalism."

Heck, teaching that would even violate the letter of the new Louisiana law, which states that the bill "shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion." A teacher who presented only a subset of the sectarian theological views on the matter would be in big trouble.

Note that Schönborn's argument here is not that the claims are scientifically wrong (he basically assumes that), but that they are religiously unhelpful. (That the Cardinal himself proceeds to make claims which bring ridicule to him and his religious claims is an added irony, but irrelevant here.) This is a work of apologetics, not a science book. It does not belong in science class. Including it there would produce religious conflict, and undermine science education.

Regardless of whether that book is introduced in Louisiana schools, some egregiously bad book will inevitably be taught there, and it will have the same damaging effects. It could be Of Pandas and People, a book proven in court to be a retread of a creation science textbook, or the Disco. Inst.'s new Explore Evolution, which was co-authored by young earth creationist Paul Nelson and rips its arguments straight from that same young earth literature which Schönborn describes as ridiculous. Either way, the courts will react as they always have, striking down attempts to drive religion into biology classes on the basis that "there can be no legitimate state interest in protecting particular religions from scientific views "distasteful to them," and "that the First Amendment does not permit the State to require that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma" (Edwards v. Aguillard and Epperson v. Arkansas, respectively).