What kind of science needs a lawyer?

Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O' Leary demonstrates the "lean into it" response to her cognitive dissonance. In this post, she lays out her case for why the Intelligent Design movement is winning. Such is her grasp of matters under discussion in the quote she provides, that she offers retorts like this:

Not only should spontaneous generation be true if they are right, but so should magic, Magic, after all, is simply another name for sudden self-organization.

That’s right folks - just toss the bedclothes into the air and they’ll come down in a perfect mitred-corner bed. Just toss whatever into the stew pot, sans cookbook, and you’ll evolve a gourmet dinner. How generations could have come and gone, and no one ever noticed that before is beyond me.

Ahem. Beyond her.... yes, indeed.

Anyway, commenter "Tom Riddle", lavishing in being as yet undetected by the high-trigger banninator over by the esteemed moderators at UD, points to this story as a counterfactual in the first comment of the thread:

Report: Judge Says University Can Deny Course Credit to Christian Graduates Taught With Creationism Texts

That story probably merits a post of it's own, come to think of it. Here's O'Leary's reponse to having this pointed out:

Actually, Darwinism is the only supposedly scientific theory I have ever heard of that always seems to need a legal defense fund - and thrives simply by expelling opposition. That is a reliable mark of falsehood.

Skipping over the rich opportunities presented by the irony in her remarks (ever wonder why UD only has the "choir" in the comment stream?), it's maybe worth pointing out that Galileo would have done well to have high-powered counsel and fantastically deep pockets, and his offense was heliocentric astronomy (er, maybe we should say "impertinence" and "arrogance" about having the facts and observations right over the Emperor's courtiers, in anticipation of the kinds of quibbles D'Souza is wont to offer as apologetics on this). And Galileo's discovery was only a scrape on the elbow of Christian theology.

The ideas of Charles Darwin are no disproof for Christianity. Christianity survives on its unfalsifiability, and as a long time theistic evolutionist, I say that evolution has a lot to recommend it beyond just avoiding the head-in-the-sand obstinance of creationism. If Christianity has a nominally respectable theodicy, it is one that includes the "open theology" elements implied by an embrace of evolution. Even so, Darwin's ideas are arrows aimed at all the crucial organs of Christianity, and is the threat of this "dangerous idea" that puts evolution in the front lines of the culture wars. Whereas Galileo simply bumped man off his exalted pedestal at the "center" of the cosmos, Darwin didn't disprove God, but instead made him largely superfluous in terms of creation and the development of life on Earth. For an ideology that is perfectly immune to falsification, superfluity is as about as threatening a prospect as Christianity can expect to face.

Darwin thus becomes the enemy of theism, as it provides a framework that holds out the promise of reducing theism to a remote kind of deism. Evolution does not, and cannot provide account for the provenance of the physical law, and the universe itself, but given the laws and emergent properties of the developing universe that spring forth from them, "formed from the dust" just gets the nod of parsimony over the hand of God, as God as sculptor, tinkerer, biological hobbyist isn't needed to explain the diversity and dynamics of all the life we see around us.

That puts science, science that embraces the core of Darwin's dangerous idea, in danger itself. In providing the framework that eliminates a major "gap" where God was historically posited, atheistic and deistic paradigms achieved a level of robust coherence they had not before.

And the Church is not amused.

Gone are the days when the pope could have Darwin placed under house arrest. Indeed, to its credit, Rome has managed to reform its thinking on science and biology since the days of Bellarmine. Problems abound still, but you will not find the foolish dogmatism and dishonest wholesale dismissals of the evidence for evolution coming from the Vatican. Nashville is the new Rome. And while the Christian Right has nothing like the temporal power enjoyed by the great inquisitors, as a bloc they remain enormously powerful in America, waning now, but still wielding tremendous power in political and relgious vectors of American culture.

This calls for talented and intrepid lawyers.

Indeed, the rule of law is the triumph of secular principles over religious ones in the public sphere. If science is to remain science, loyal to its methodology and heuristics, it needs protection. When you follow the evidence for evidence's sake, it will eventually lead you across heavily guarded religious boundaries, and inquiry will be stifled and thwarted if its not supported by the law. Moreover it's the very best and most powerful scientific theories that will need the best legal counsel, the deepest pockets for its legal defense fund. For it is these theories that reach the deepest, and provide the most profound explanations and insights into the most compelling questions man has, and which religion has always jealously guarded as it's "God given turf". Darwin's simple idea, that all living things are connected by heredity into a unified "tree of life" is the most profound answer science has ever provided to mankind. It's not even an anti-religious idea, but one that sends much established dogma, much received wisdom teetering on the edge of irrelevancy.

Darwin understood this. He agonized over the dislocating implications of his simple conclusion. More than 150 years later, with the compelling confirmation of genetics for the hypothesis he drew from fossils and keen, careful observations in his journeys, his "dangerous idea" is much more dangerous to principalities of long standing than it has ever been. The church universal, or at least that part that sides with dogma over against the interlocking array of mutually supporting lines of evidence that is modern biology (and physics), will not concede to the facts without a fight. Happily, a "fight" in our society usually means a war of words, funds, votes and legal maneuvers. Better than bullets and flaming stakes, I say. But it is still a pitched battle, and the front lines are places where lawyers and lawmakers make a big difference.

Darwin's ideas are big, profound, sweeping ideas. They don't disprove God, but they do tend to marginalize him, and for much of the established religous culture, that's just as bad, and possibly worse. The better Darwin's ideas prove to be, the more lawyers and active defending they will need by the friends of science, a circumstance exactly opposite of what O'Leary supposes to be the case.

-Touchstone