This is disturbing. The New York times is reporting that Michael Dini, the Texas Tech professor who refuses to write recommendations for creationists, is under investigation by the Federal Justice department for religious discrimination. I dont think I would take the position Dini does, although my preferred solution of writing relatively tepid letters of support for people who did not take scientific investigation seriously, and in this day and age this definitely include creationists, would probably be less helpful to creationist students than his position. But I think Dini has every right to this position, and it doesnt even raise serious questions of religious discrimination, so it is rather disturbing to see the Ashcroft Justice department so intervening.
One reason I dont think this raises questions of religious discrimination is that it is perfectly possible to be a Christian and believe in evolution. Indeed, I suspect the vast majority of Christians around the world do believe in evolution, and believe that evolution is the means by which God created humans. Now one may or may not like that view, but by the standards normally applicable to religious views it is perfectly coherent. (Which is just to say it is not provably incoherent, though there are enough unresolved problems to do with the problem of evil, if not the paradoxes of omnipotence, that we cannot safely declare it is coherent. In this respect it is like every other religion, and indeed most scientific theories.)
If this is religious discrimination, would it also be discrimination to mark as false a student who gave a creationist answer to an exam question about how humans arose? Would it be still further discrimination if the student failed in part because they got that question wrong? What could make this discriminatory? It had better not be just that some religion rejects the claim, or we will be in trouble. Some religions reject Leibnizs Law. Indeed, I am not sure whether or not modern-day Catholicism accepts it. But I am certainly going to require students accept it, and draw inferences using it, to pass intro predicate logic. Is that religious discrimination? (More loaded question: why would no one sue me for this practice?)
There is an important point here, one that was behind my citing Lewis in my earlier post. We do discriminate on the basis of what people believe, and rightly so. In selection for many many tasks, it is right to discriminate on the basis of what a person believes two plus two equals. Given a choice between a candidate who believes that two plus two equals four, and one who believes two plus two equals five, we should choose the former candidate. Tolerance for religious views should not take us so far as to preclude this kind of discrimination just because it becomes part of a religious doctrine that two plus two equals five. Just how imperfect, I wonder, is the analogy between this case and what Dini is doing?
UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias points out that I was wrong about at least one thing here – it turns out more American Christians reject evolution than accept it, and it looks rather unlikely that the vast majority of Christians worldwide are creationists. I shouldnt have made the point I was trying to make rest on a dubious empirical claim I suppose. Because I dont think my little empirical fubar undercuts the two serious points I was making.
First, since evolution is so widely believed to be consistent with Christianity, it looks hard to spin an argument with creationists as an argument with Christianity per se as opposed to an argument with some Christians. (Well, many Christians I suppose.)
Secondly, if one has a particular religious doctrine that does literally entail creationism, then it is not ever so clear that one deserves to be treated on an equal footing within biological sciences. I certainly dont think this is limited to creationist doctrines. If you are a Lysenkoist because your Marxist teacher once told you to be a Lysenkoist, well the biology professor is just as justified in denying you a recommendation. That would be no more political discrimination than Dinis position is religious discrimination.
I think there are moderately interesting questions about whether belief in creationism (or Lysenkoism) is sufficient grounds for discrimination in other academic fields, or even part of a reason for such discrimination. We do and should discriminate in all sorts of areas on the basis of analytic abilities, and belief in creationism, particularly belief in creationism after taking a biology class, is prima facie evidence that one is not the best in the world at drawing conclusions on the basis of evidence. More generally, it is evidence that one is not suitably willing to change preconceived views on the basis of evidence, which matters no matter what field you go into. There are all sorts of things that might defeat this conclusion in contemporary America there are plenty of reasons why this might be a particular blind spot rather than a general analytic failing but it is at least worrying. Of course, all of us have such blind spots of one kind or another, so one must be careful to not place too much emphasis on this failing on pain of hypocracy, but lets not forget that it is an intellectual failing. And one of the things we are paid to do in universities is make discriminations on the basis of intellectual ability and performance. And the only reason that recommendation letters matter is that the person making the recommendation is presumed to have some ability to make just this kind of discrimination.