|
Why not the impossible?
In a speech she gave eleven years ago at the Union League Club in New York City, Midge Decter talked about how the cultural revolutionaries of the Sixties would intimidate and sweep aside all opposition to their plans and desires by use of the rhetorical question, “Why not”? The effectiveness of the phrase is seen in the way it shifts the burden of proof to the other side. Instead of the speaker’s having to defend his own, highly questionable, position, he makes it seem as if his own position is simply the taken-for-granted truth, and that there is something presumptively wrong with anyone who opposes it. A defender of Darwinism recently used a similar rhetorical tactic with me. Here is the exchange.
In the same thread, I tell of a theistic Darwinian whom I got to admit that my statement about the incompatibility of Darwinian randomness with God is correct, at least as far as orthodox Darwinism is concerned. Email entry |