What does "have their knuckles rapped for it“ mean？

Does it mean "have them fight against it"?

Context:

If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. Mclnerney [Gould's third-grade teacher] and have their knuckles rapped for it... Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example). Forget philosophy for a moment; the simple empirics of the past hundred years should suffice. Darwin himself was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), but the great American botanist Asa Gray, who favored natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian. Move forward 50 years: Charles D. Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess Shale Fossils, was a convicned Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct the history of life according to His plans and purposes. Move on another 50 years to the two greatest evolutionists of our generation: G.G.Simpson was a humanistic agnostic, Theodosius Dobzhansky, a believing Russian Orthodox. Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs-and equally compatible with atheism.