People have been told that if they believe in evolution, they are on the road to hell. Their immortal soul is on the line. We might show them overwhelming evidence for evolution and make it clear there is a 99% probability that evolution is true. They then have the following decision: I could believe in evolution which gives me no benefit but which has a small probability of condemning me to eternal torment, or I could reject evolution which gives me no harm and just might save my soul. Even if the odds of evolution being false are small, the benefits are so great that you should bet against evolution.
Of course, this is a variation of Pascal's wager. Pascal argued that you should believe in God, because if you believe and you are wrong, you lose nothing, but if you don't believe and you are wrong, you lose eternal life, so it's safer to believe. This is one of the worst arguments for God, and for the same reason it is a terrible argument against evolution. It is easy to show its faults, although many people never consider it.
There are two ways to approach it. The first is to show that belief in evolution does in fact have real benefits and rejecting it does have harm, in this life. We should always point out the real world benefits of evolution. Geologists use fossils and evolution to predict where we will find oil. Rejecting evolution would lead to less oil. Evolution helps us understand the evolution of disease and of crop pests, and how to overcome those. Evolutionary ideas are the basis for the programs that we use to study genomes. We can look for signs of positive selection in genomes to know which genes have been important in human evolution and involved in the evolution of disease resistance or of the human brain. If we reject evolution, we will miss out on all of these benefits (and if the US rejects evolution but other countries embrace it, then those countries will be the ones with the benefits).
People think of evolution as a purely academic question that doesn't have technological implications, but it does. If we show that, then part of the Pascal equation is missing: we can no longer say that rejecting evolution has no consequences.
Still, the immortal soul is more important than short term benefits. The reason Pascal's Wager fails so miserably for religion is because it assumes there are only two possibilities. Once we realize that believing in the Christian God damns us if the Muslims are right, and even many Christian versions of God will damn believers in other versions, or God might be a God that prefers we follow our reason, etc, it is a much riskier terrain. No matter what choice we make, we might be condemning ourself to hell. It is no longer a gamble with no risks. There might be many reasons to believe in God, but "just in case" really doesn't hold up.
The same thing can be shown for evolution, although this one is trickier if you are in a classroom, where we do not want to preach. It is fine for one on one, and if done carefully it can be done in a classroom. Maybe God would be angry if you reject the gift of reason he gave you. If God used evolution as his means of creating, why would God want you to believe otherwise and why would he save you for rejecting his creation method?
Maybe the wager is the other way around. Maybe it is more damning to faith to reject evolution, in the sense that Augustine argued 1600 years ago. We have Augustine's warning about the dire consequences of those who spout nonsense in the name of religion:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions... Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.
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