According to a three-judge panel of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals, teachers may be allowed to make disparaging remarks about creationism. A history teacher at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo described creationism as "superstitious nonsense," which is entirely accurate, but a religious student took offense and sued. Unsuccessfully.
The San Francisco-based appeals court said the teacher was entitled to immunity because it was not clearly established in the law that a teacher's expression of hostility to certain religious beliefs in a public school classroom would violate the First Amendment's establishment clause. ...
"We are aware of no prior case holding that a teacher violated the establishment clause by appearing critical of religion during class lectures, nor any case with sufficiently similar facts to give a teacher 'fair warning' that such conduct was unlawful," Judge Raymond Fisher wrote for the court. ...
"In broaching controversial issues like religion, teachers must be sensitive to students' personal beliefs and take care not to abuse their positions of authority," Judge Fisher wrote.
"But teachers must also be given leeway to challenge students to foster critical thinking skills and develop their analytical abilities," he said. "This balance is hard to achieve, and we must be careful not to curb intellectual freedom by imposing dogmatic restrictions."
Source: Christian Science Monitor
It was also alleged that the teacher made disparaging remarks about religion. It would be more accurate to say that he made disparaging remarks about certain theological arguments -- and that's a long way from religion:
"Aristotle ... argued, you know, there sort of has to be a God. Of course that's nonsense," Corbett said according to a transcript of his lecture. "I mean, that's what you call deductive reasoning, you know. And you hear it all the time with people who say, 'Well, if all this stuff that makes up the universe is here, something must have created it.' Faulty logic. Very faulty logic."
He continued: "The other possibility is, it's always been there.... Your call as to which one of those notions is scientific and which one is magic."
"All I'm saying is that, you know, the people who want to make the argument that God did it, there is as much evidence that God did it as there is that there is a giant spaghetti monster living behind the moon who did it," the transcript says.
Corbett told his students that "real" scientists try to disprove the theory of evolution. "Contrast that with creationists," he told his students. "They never try to disprove creationism. They're all running around trying to prove it. That's deduction. It's not science. Scientifically, it's nonsense."
It would surely be inappropriate for a teacher to make disparaging remarks about a specific religion or about a specific religious doctrine. It would thus be wrong for a teacher to say that Christianity is nonsense or that the idea of Jesus' resurrection is nonsense -- even if he sincerely believes that they are nonsense. This is the other side of the coin from disallowing teachers to promote those doctrines.
But that's not what Dr. James Corbett did. In fact, he didn't even say that belief in God is nonsense, though one might argue that he's coming close in a couple of places. Instead, what Corbett did is disparage a couple of superficial arguments people use for the existence of God. This is not an inherently atheistic position -- you can be a devout Christian and still think that one or another theological argument is completely absurd. You can be an atheist and think that one or another argument against the existence of gods is absurd.
What's more, Corbett did this in the context of explaining why creationism can't be accepted from a scientific perspective -- which means that the validity of the theological arguments he mentioned was entirely appropriate to mention. The validity of other theological arguments, like Pascal's Wager for example, wouldn't be relevant in this context and so mentioning that wouldn't have been appropriate.
So while Corbett is coming close to a line he shouldn't cross, and might even be arguably walking along it at times, I don't think he actually crossed it. He probably would have been on safer ground had he kept his comments to creationism alone, though.
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