Guest post: Once you see it
Originally a comment by Patrick on Junior engineers say it won’t collapse.
One of the classic argumentative styles of the era goes like this. I’m going to number it out because I’m a nerd.
1. Your opponent says X. But you believe Y.
2. State, or at least imply, that these options exist in binary opposition such that either one or the other must be the case.
3. Restate X such that it is very specific. Keep Y vague for now.
4. Offer a variety of undercutting defeaters for X. “It’s more complicated than that,” is an evergreen attack because most things are more complicated than the short, specific statements to which you have reduced your opponents position.
5. After a while at this, declare X to be refuted.
6. State, or at least imply, that Y has therefore been proven.
7. Now that Y has allegedly been proven, get more specific.
I first noticed this from Christian apologists back in the 00s. They’d argue something like this: “Materialists think that the only things that exist are matter and energy, but, patterns exists, and they’re neither. Ideas exist and they’re neither. It’s more complicated than that. Now that we’ve established that materialism is false, let me tell you about a mystical spiritual dimension that our eternal souls inhabit after our deaths. I trust you’ll have no reason to doubt it since the only alternative has fallen.”
Once you start seeing this argumentative pattern you can’t stop seeing it.
I saw this sort of thing in the debates around teaching evolution in American schools. Once “cdesignpropentists”* had “refuted” Darwin, that meant, in their “argument”, Creationism, or Intelligent Design, was the only option left. It’s hilarious that they always seem to think that “Not Darwin, Therefore God” is exactly the same as “Not Darwin, Therefore my exact particular version of Biblical-literal, Protestant Christianity”, breezily bypassing the arguments showing why it’s their exact God, rather than the Ancient Greek, or Modern Hindu Pantheons (to name but two other options), to whom we should be praying.
*cdesignpropentists, if I remember correctly, was the poorly-done-cut-and-paste-job smoking gun in some “Intelligent Design” document used in the Dover Trial, that showed that ID was indeed just a rehash of Creationism, which had already been thrown out in a previous on the grounds of violating the Establishment Clause.
IIRC “cdesignpropentists” was from the ID textbook Of Pandas and People that the Dover Board of Education had recommended to the students “for balance”. The defendants tried to argue that this was “Intelligent Design” which was totally different than “creationism”, but the plaintiffs were able to show that the same book had previously been released as a textbook on creationism, and after “Creation Science” had been struck down in court, the authors had hastily and clumsily changed the wording (by means of Search and Replace) and re-released the book without changing any of the substance. I seem to remember the definition of “Intelligent Design” being verbatim identical to the definition of “Creationism”. So, yeah. Totally different….
Except that, of course ‘God’ was replaced by ‘designer’. Same body, same face (except for a lot of people god is spirit, which has neither body nor face), just a euphemistic phrase stuck in there.
In short, designer is like trans woman – desperately trying to conceal what you really mean.
Years ago I wrote a review of this >1K page book (in two volumes):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3037853-galileo-was-wrong
The principal argument the author used was something similar to this – the fact that there are still questions that ‘conventional’ astronomy, cosmology and physics are unable to answer means that geocentrism is true – ‘not astronomy (or at least not astronomy 100% with no unanswered questions) therefore geocentrism.’